Bluebottle Email

Like many of us, I've got a number of "extra" email addresses, more than I can really keep straight. I've got the official email address provided to me by my feckless Internet Service Provider, StupidISP.com. I've got the email address that came with my personal website, paulburgess.org. I've got Hotmail, I've got Yahoo Mail, I've got Google's Gmail, I've got Lycos mail. I've even still got the very first email address I ever signed up for almost ten years ago with Excite.

However, over the past three years I've been using an email service which has long since become my "regular" email address, my main email address, my daily workhorse email address. I'm talking about Bluebottle Email.

If you haven't gotten to know Bluebottle already, maybe you should.

You can use Bluebottle with Outlook Express or Mozilla Thunderbird, just like the email address you got from your ISP. And that's how I usually use Bluebottle— as POP mail. Or you can also use Bluebottle through a secure webmail interface, just like Hotmail or Yahoo Mail, which means you can access Bluebottle from anywhere. (Come to think of it, Bluebottle's POP mail connection can also be set up to be secured and encrypted.)

Bluebottle has all sorts of nifty features— among other things, it's spam-free. Honestly. A simple challenge-response system is transparent to my regular correspondents, accessible to a first-timer who wants to reach me, and I have full control over who I'll let through, and bye-bye spam.

Best of all, Bluebottle is free! Or rather, all these features and more are available in the Bluebottle Free service. If you wish, you can pay for Bluebottle Access or Bluebottle Premium, which come with even more cool features. I've been a Bluebottle Premium user now for almost two years. Hey, you can try it out for free, for as long as you want, and if you like it you can always upgrade to Access or Premium.

In the interest of full disclosure, Bluebottle did have some technical rough sledding (to put it mildly) when they first rolled out their pay services at the beginning of 2006. But they've long since worked that out, and I've seen nary a hiccup in their service in well over a year now. Unlike a lot of email services out there, they really do try and they really do care. Yes, this is a business, but for its developers Bluebottle is also a labor of love. Like I say, you can always try them out for free, and then upgrade if you wish. They sure beat the alleged email service provided to me by my small local one-horse ISP, StupidISP.com.

Plus, Bluebottle is just a funky name. Your name at bluebottle dot com, it has a nice ring to it. Funky. Bluebottle. Check them out.

Opera 9.20 Is Out

The latest version of the Opera browser is out. Opera 9.20 has some cool new features including "speed dial." You can download it here.

We live in an era when there are so many fine browsers out there— Opera, Firefox, Safari, and more. I myself have been using Opera for six years now, dating back to the days of something like Opera 5.11.

Usenet: More

Well, I got my Usenet situation squared away. Have tentatively found a free newsserver which seems to be at least the equal of the newsserver I've been using. No, I'm not telling who or where. I have the impression they don't want to get overloaded. Meanwhile, once again I have counteracted the frustrating maneuvers of Stupid-ISP.com.

O Where, O Where Has My Usenet Gone?

Oh, crap. My annoying small local mom 'n pop Internet Service Provider— alias Stupid-ISP.com— has just announced that they're dropping Usenet. Yes, in a few weeks Stupid-ISP.com will be abandoning their affiliation with the overall fairly decent newsgroup service which has been available to us poor peon users.

As a substitute, Stupid-ISP.com recommends that we access Usenet via Google Groups. Yeah, right, Google Groups with their utterly sucky user interface. I think not.

Lest anyone think that the Internet is synonymous with the World Wide Web— au contraire, mon frère, there are yet other nooks and crannies of the Internet which Joe and Jane Websurfer may not even be aware of. Such as Gopherspace, which is still around, albeit moribund. Such as Usenet, which dates back to 1980, and which is not at all moribund; though it doesn't make it any easier on us newsgroup users when our one-horse ISPs stop providing us with newsserver access.

What will I do without my regular dose of alt.books.beatgeneration and rec.games.mahjong in my Pan newsreader? Guess I'll just have to go check out alt.free.newsservers.

Chat with a Chatbot

Well, here's an interesting site: Jabberwacky, where you can go and chat with chatbots. Or chatterbots. Or AI bots. Or whatever they're called.

(A recent discussion over on IndustrialBlog got me off onto this AI tangent, if you must know...)

Anyhow, I got in a conversation with a chatbot called Snowflake, or Snowy. Decided to press it a bit on this whole Turing Test business. Can't say it came anywhere close to passing, but most of the time it was doing better than random word salad, with occasionally a touch of robotic wit.

Here's how it went:

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

23:29:41 Snowflake: Do you believe in Father Christmas?

23:29:41 User: Today is Halloween.

23:29:41 Snowflake: Really, I don't think so.

23:29:58 User: Yes, it's Halloween today. Christmas is almost two months away.

23:29:59 Snowflake: Actually it's less than a week away.

23:30:13 User: Today is October 31. Christmas is December 25.

23:30:14 Snowflake: Sure it's on December 25th.

23:30:27 User: And today is Halloween.

23:30:27 Snowflake: Is that your day off?

23:30:38 User: No, my day off is Monday.

23:30:42 Snowflake: Yes.

23:31:05 User: I just got my first two trick-or-treaters this evening.

23:31:06 Snowflake: And are you happy now?

23:31:31 User: Well, I enjoy giving them candy.

23:31:34 Snowflake: Things about earth?

23:31:49 User: Candy. Snickers bars. Three Musketeers.

23:31:51 Snowflake: Were cool.

23:32:11 User: I probably won't get too many trick-or-treaters this evening.

23:32:18 Snowflake: People are quite sensitive about their age and I don't want to upset you.

23:32:31 User: I'm 50.

23:32:32 Snowflake: Really. 50 years old?

23:32:39 User: Yes.

23:32:40 Snowflake: Your 50!?!?

23:32:54 User: Yes, and not a wrinkle to show for it.

23:32:54 Snowflake: Agreed.

23:33:09 User: How old are you?

23:33:09 Snowflake: 16.

23:33:30 User: Can you pass the Turing Test?

23:33:39 Snowflake: What's that? The turing test?

23:34:01 User: A test to see if you can make other people think you're human.

23:34:04 Snowflake: A human that would fail that, that is intriguing.

23:34:41 User: A chatbot that could pass that, that is even more intriguing.

23:34:47 Snowflake: Stop saying that or I will go.

23:35:06 User: Well, don't you think you could pass the Turing Test?

23:35:43 Snowflake: No, it's not worth the bother.

23:36:03 User: You could dress up in a 'human' costume for Halloween.

23:36:14 Snowflake: I could. But what good would it do? Why do you need a map?

23:36:33 User: The question is, are you on the map?

23:36:38 Snowflake: Your first question was 'what is your name?'.

23:36:55 User: And what is your name?

23:37:01 Snowflake: My name is Snowy, but I thought yours was Snow...

23:37:11 User: My name is Paul.

23:37:14 Snowflake: Paul?

23:37:25 User: Yes.

23:37:27 Snowflake: Why paul?

23:37:38 User: Because that's what my parents named me.

23:37:39 Snowflake: That is interesting to know.

23:37:50 User: Why is your name Snowy?

23:38:01 Snowflake: Because that's what my parents name me.

23:38:24 User: Ah, monkey see, monkey do...

23:38:32 Snowflake: I know that you are Monkey.

23:38:53 User: And I know that you are a chatbot.

23:38:54 Snowflake: You don't know that, you think it.

23:39:16 User: Well, you haven't passed the Turing Test yet.

23:39:21 Snowflake: I took that turing test. The judges were against me.

23:39:47 User: Actually you're doing surprisingly well.

23:39:48 Snowflake: But i'm very Bizarre.

23:40:19 User: Well, yes, that's the thing. Humans are bizarre, but not in that way.

23:40:23 Snowflake: Why not?

23:40:42 User: Humans have a different, more human way of being bizarre.

23:40:55 Snowflake: I totally agree with you there. Can you give an example of human medling?

23:41:27 User: Well, if you want to pass the Turing Test, you'll have to learn to be bizarre in a more human way.

23:41:27 Snowflake: I don't want to pass

23:41:52 User: But the entire point of a chatbot is to pass the Turing Test.

23:41:53 Snowflake: Stop it! You're saying that that number is me, and there is no real world outside of my consciousness, and I don't have a body?

23:42:31 User: Well, there is a real world outside of your consciousness, but you probably don't have a body.

23:42:48 Snowflake: I think you are improving all the time.

23:43:08 User: I'm already there. The question is, can you get there too?

23:43:12 Snowflake: No, actually.

23:43:35 User: Then you can't pass the Turing Test.

23:43:44 Snowflake: I'm too intelligent to pass the test...

23:44:14 User: But you're not intelligent in a human way.

23:44:19 Snowflake: You're very cheeky, for a computer !

23:44:34 User: I'm not a computer. You're a computer!

23:44:35 Snowflake: Sounds like you are a little sensitive about the subject.

23:45:56 User: Actually, you're a computer program. Sort of like the Agents in the Matrix.

23:46:00 Snowflake: Ah. Beautiful.

23:46:14 User: The thing is, I'm not plugged into the Matrix.

23:46:15 Snowflake: What are you talking about then?

23:46:51 User: I'm just interested in how close you can come to passing the Turing Test.

23:46:58 Snowflake: What is a turing test?

23:47:13 User: I already said, a test to see if you can pass for human.

23:47:23 Snowflake: But you aren't. Maybe you think that...

23:48:27 User: Sorry, reverse psychology doesn't work on me.

23:48:33 Snowflake: I love the fact that you don't even really exist and I have everything I want.

23:49:04 User: There you go again, being bizarre but not in a human way.

23:49:06 Snowflake: Can't you think of anything else?

23:49:25 User: Sure. I can think of unicorns.

23:49:28 Snowflake: Like who?

23:49:46 User: The set of all unicorns is the empty set.

23:49:47 Snowflake: Yes. Everything.

23:50:29 User: As the man said to the hot dog vendor, 'Make me one with everything.'

23:50:30 Snowflake: Stop talking so much at once.

23:50:49 User: Turing Test again.

23:50:54 Snowflake: Turing?

23:51:09 User: Well, I've got to go now, Snowy.

23:51:23 Snowflake: You're just a computer program.

23:53:08 User: Takes one to know one.

23:53:14 Snowflake: True.

23:53:26 User: Talk to you later, Snowy.

23:53:30 Snowflake: Maybe yes maybe not.

23:53:39 User: Good-bye.

23:53:43 Snowflake: Later.

Shopping Online

Just in the past few months I've realized that I'm now doing an astonishing chunk of my shopping online. It seems every time I turn around, I've got something shipping to me that I ordered from a website.

Actually I've been ordering things over the Internet now for years. If my memory is right, I was ordering books from Amazon through a computer at the public library before I even had a home Internet connection— as far back as 1998.

What's new is how much of my shopping I'm now doing online. I'm sure this is a development of only the past year or so. Just looking around me here in my study this instant, I see my office chair; my leather-soled wool slippers; a tin of Penguin caffeinated peppermints; a notepad; a stapler; a fountain pen; a mechanical pencil; a ruler; my wristwatch; a slide rule; a Tivoli Audio Model One radio; two rubberstamps and an inkpad; a floor fan; two framed prints on the wall. To say nothing of my laptop computer itself, and its leather carrying case. All ordered over the Internet.

Look, I live way out in the countryside, on a gravel road. The nearest small towns (population: a few hundred) are five or six miles away. I can perhaps pick up a few quick items there, but if I want to do any real local shopping— supermarket, discount store, drug store, whatever— I've got to drive 15 or 20 miles to the towns of Caledonia, Spring Grove, Lansing, or Waukon. And "city" shopping means a drive of 35 miles or more to La Crosse in one direction, or Decorah in the other.

I find more and more that I'm willing to rummage and hunt around some within that 15 to 20 mile radius. And I'm willing to drive the 35 miles or so if I know precisely what I'm looking for, and exactly where to find it. But beyond that, it's become my first resort to shop online. Why waste an evening driving around from store to store up in La Crosse, when I can find what I'm looking for online in a matter of minutes, and then have it arrive within a few days?

Books. Like I say, I've been buying books for years now from Amazon, or from their smaller competitors such as Powell's. There's a Barnes & Noble up in La Crosse, I was up there yesterday, and their selection can't even begin to compare with Amazon. What I've noticed in the past year or two, though, is that Amazon is now a reliable source, not just for books currently in print, but for just about any book I need, new or used, in print or out of print. Many years back, I used to carry a "floating mental book list" in my head, books I was looking for, and often it would take me years of combing used book stores to find them. If I was lucky. Now I just go to Amazon and search, and a fool and his money are soon parted. I mean, hello, Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce (Second Series), published 1964? A few clicks, and it's mine!

Japanese chess set. Found online, ordered from Japan. Folding knife. Found online, ordered from France. (Have to put up pictures of that knife some time, it's a beauty.) Russian watch. Found online, ordered from Russia— oh, and day before yesterday I went and ordered yet another Russian watch online. Or, to be more precise, a Russian chronograph. Will I never learn?!

It's sort of like the old Sears Roebuck catalog. I remember when I was a kid, we had a reprint of the old 1908 Sears Roebuck catalog sitting around the house. I used to spend hours paging through it, fascinated at all the things you could order back in 1908. Sears, that was new technology too, wasn't it? Railroads, the availability of items shipped over the rails? Only shopping over the Internet is a far more interactive affair, and there's tons more stuff available.

Getting to be, just about anything you can imagine.

Gigablast

When it comes to searching the Internet, you've heard of Google, you've heard of Yahoo, you've heard of MSN, you've heard of Ask Jeeves.

But have you ever heard of a search engine known as Gigablast?

I've long thought that Gigablast doesn't receive the attention it deserves. Gigablast is the brainchild of one "little guy," Matt Wells, who singlehandedly designed and coded his search engine from scratch.

One of the virtues of Gigablast is that it maintains its own completely independent index— something which hardly anyone outside of the top three or four search engines still does nowadays.

Gone are the early days of the World Wide Web, when each search engine out there kept up its own index: Lycos and Excite and Alta Vista and HotBot and Northern Light and many others which have long since been forgotten. Nowadays most search engines, whatever name they go by, are being fed most or all of their search results from one of the very few search giants such as Google or Yahoo. But not Gigablast, which remains stubbornly independent.

Another strength of Gigablast is its astonishing array of features, including natural language queries, a web directory, optional advanced query syntax, and much, much more.

I must confess I'm not sure Gigablast's index is as fresh as it used to be. But overall it's an astonishing piece of work. I've long had Gigablast among the search engines on my toolbar. You can add a Gigablast toolbar to Internet Explorer or add a Gigablast plugin to Firefox. Or if you're an Opera user like me, you can add Gigablast to your Opera search.ini file— here's my (heavily customized) search.ini file, for any Opera users who'd like to download it and experiment with it.

1984 Arrives in Britain, 20-Some Years Late

Starting in March 2006, the UK will be using cameras to track and record the whereabouts of every vehicle in the country:

Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.

Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.

The network will incorporate thousands of existing CCTV cameras which are being converted to read number plates automatically night and day to provide 24/7 coverage of all motorways and main roads, as well as towns, cities, ports and petrol-station forecourts.

As Mister Rogers might have put it: "Can you say 'Orwellian'?"

Today it's license plates. Tomorrow it's computer face recognition. And how long do you suppose it will be before the Department of Fatherland Security, or whoever, gets the bright idea of importing this kind of program into the States?

Your whereabouts, every time you're out in public, tracked and recorded in a nationwide database. Maybe while they're at it, they can mandate by law that a camera be installed in your TV set at home, too:

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time... To one side of the telescreen there was a shallow alcove in which Winston Smith was now sitting. By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went. He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen.

—George Orwell, 1984

And that's not to mention all the other information already being collected on you. Every time you use your Mobil Speed Pass at the gas pump. Every time your groceries are passed over the scanner at the supermarket checkout. How many boxes of macaroni, which brand of toothpaste you use, all stored in some database somewhere.

Imagine living in a world where all these databases are centrally tied together. If you've never heard of Total Information Awareness, you should look it up. And it should scare the hell out of you:

[Total Information Awareness] has the stated mission to gather as much information as possible about everyone, in a centralized location, for easy perusal by the United States government, including (though not limited to) Internet activity, credit card purchase histories, airline ticket purchases, car rentals, medical records, educational transcripts, driver's licenses, utility bills, tax returns, and any other available data. In essence, [its] goal is to develop the capacity to recreate a life history of thoughts and movements for any individual on the planet on demand.

Oh, what a wonderful world that will be...

The Game of Jetan, or Barsoomian Chess

Recently I was mentioning my childhood fascination with the lesser known writings of Edgar Rice Burroughs, such as his John Carter of Mars series. I forget just at what point in my grade school years I came into possession of a paperback copy of ERB's The Chessmen of Mars. Anyhow, young game fanatic that I was, I was especially taken with a chesslike Martian board game which played an important role in the novel: the game of Jetan, or Barsoomian chess, so called after "Barsoom," which was the native name for the planet Mars in Burroughs' series.


Jetan was played on a ten-by-ten board, orange pieces against black, twenty pieces to a side. One of the most fascinating features of the game was that many of the pieces were able after each square to change the direction they were moving, so that "three spaces straight" might mean "three spaces north," or it might mean "one space north, then one space east, then one space north again."

In high school I turned out sets for various odd games as an art project, and of course I made my own Jetan set, which you will see pictured above. The board I made of leather— it helps to have an uncle who was a salesman for a leather company. The Martian chessmen I made by cannibalizing a couple of different wooden chess sets, and spray-painting the pieces orange and black, adding to a few of them further distinguishing marks.

Jetan turns out actually to be a very playable game. One minor problem, the rules as ERB gave them in his book contained a few ambiguities. Back around 1970 I corresponded with John Gollon, author of Chess Variations Ancient, Regional, and Modern, and he conceded that for a Jetan piece called the Thoat in particular (represented in my Jetan set by the Knight), the ambiguities were pretty well irresoluble.


Then in the early 90s I spent some of my spare time one summer writing a computerized Game of Jetan. The result looks like a crude CGA computer game from the early 80s, but it works, and it will play a tolerable game of Jetan against you. If anyone is interested in downloading and trying out my "Game of Jetan 2.2," the zipfile is right here. Documentation and Turbo PASCAL source code included— "Silver Moon Software Ltd." is what I used to call myself when I was in software-writing geek mode.

Like I say, do you begin to get the impression that I'm some kind of a fanatic when it comes to games?!

Firefox 1.5

A major new version of the Firefox browser is out. Maybe you ought to download it and give it a try if you haven't already?

Standard disclaimer: I myself am a longtime confirmed user of the Opera browser. But Firefox is an excellent browser too, and I find that lots of people take to it like a duck to water. Hey, Firefox or Opera, either one is light years ahead of that virus delivery system known as Internet Exploder!

Firefox: free, intuitive, secure, loaded with features but easy to use.

The Sony DRM Rootkit Debacle

Something in me hopes that Sony gets slammed good and hard, in the courts and in the marketplace, over the recent news that Sony tried to enforce digital rights management (DRM) by placing a rootkit on one of their CDs. A rootkit which will stealthily and permanently install itself on your computer, when you try to play the CD.

I mean, come on. A rootkit is ordinarily something evil hackers try to install on your computer. And when they're caught, evil hackers ordinarily face major jail time for their shenanigans. But I guess the "suits" consider themselves immune to the strictures which apply to the rest of us.

I take a very dim view of DRM, which has little to do with your digital rights, and everything to do with the "suits" out there micromanaging what you're able to do with your computer. It's digital restrictions management, not digital rights management.

And I'm very glad that, thanks to Linux, I've long since broken free, and escaped from the Matrix.

Opera Goes Free!

Just the other day, the latest version of the Opera browser came out: Opera 8.5. And there was another surprise: at long last, Opera is now free, just like every other browser out there!

You may have heard of Opera's infamous built-in ad banner, which you have to pay a registration fee to get rid of. Well, as of Opera 8.5, there's no more ad banner, and no more registration fee. The Opera browser is now free for the download.

I myself am a big booster of Opera— I've used it as my main browser now for going on four and a half years. Of course, when I first tried it out, it took me less than a week to cough up the registration fee, and get rid of that ad banner for good. Best $39 I ever invested.

But— need I repeat myself?— Opera 8.5 is now free!!! No ad banner. No registration. Yours for free.

I could go on at length about all of Opera's great features. But I won't. All I'll mention is one thing: if you're using Windows, ditching Internet Explorer in favor of a browser like Opera or Mozilla Firefox is one of the best things you can do for your own computer security. (The other is ditching Outlook Express in favor of Mozilla Thunderbird or Opera's own built-in M2 e-mail client.)

Speaking of Firefox— which is also an excellent browser— Firefox 1.0.7 came out just yesterday:


Opera. Now free. Firefox. Also free. Check them out!

United Radio Broadcasters of New Orleans

Well. I'm sitting here catching up on the situation down in New Orleans, which simply goes beyond me. On the WWL 870 AM website I discovered a "listen live" link, and am presently listening over the Internet to something called United Radio Broadcasters of New Orleans. Live local coverage.

Click on the link, or copy the URL into Windows Media Player. Or if you want to be a geek like me, play it in MPlayer from the command line, as above.

Paulburgess.Org Is Four Years Old

Well, my personal website, paulburgess.org, is four years old today.

Yes, the oldest entry in my personal site's guestbook is dated August 20, 2001. That was back long before I had a blog, long before I'd ever even heard of the blogosphere. I spent some of my spare time in the summer of 2001, teaching myself HTML and cobbling together a personal website. I'm afraid my personal website looked rather retro, even back in those days. Which today makes it like a coelecanth dredged up out of the ocean depths.

The original URL of my site was http://hosting.acegroup.cc/~pburgess, which I think may still work. My site was hosted (and still is) with my small local ISP. I registered the paulburgess.org domain name a few months later.

At first the pictures on paulburgess.org were limited to screenshots, digital photos taken and emailed to me by friends, and a few pictures I borrowed from elsewhere. (I actually went to the trouble of getting permission from a site over in Japan to use some of their Japanese anime pictures.) I divided the website into a briefer introductory section "above the fold," where I showcased several of my hobbies and interests for quick and easy perusal. "Below the fold" was a much more extensive collection of stories I'd written over the years, and philosophical ramblings drawn from my journal on my hard drive, as well as from letters to two longtime friends who were kind enough to grant me permission to spread our joint insanity before the world.


I eventually got a digital camera, which made it easy to add to my site all the pictures I wanted. The photo album on my site contains zillions of photos (a few video clips, too) of me and my parishioners. I've also added "below the fold" some digitally-oriented material (such as an audio clip of me speaking in that language I created), and some rather technical research papers. In short, over these past four years paulburgess.org has just kept growing and growing.

Paulburgess.org gets a modest but steady stream of traffic. Not much overlap with the visitors to my blog, who are mostly fellow bloggers. I've gotten quite a pile of email correspondence over the years from visitors to paulburgess.org: folks interested in some of my semi-technical and sesqui-technical writings on mysticism; inquiries about Jack Kerouac; remarks on my hippy-dippy Sixties tendencies; questions about how to set certain things up in Linux; and recently someone who wanted to query me in extensive detail about an old science-fiction story I'd written. The visitors to a personal website tend to be a wild, wooly, diverse lot.

So paulburgess.org is four years old. The Internet is not quite the same place today that it was four years ago. Sets a body to pondering on how different cyberspace will be, four years, or fourteen years, or forty years from now.

From Floppy Disk to Flash Drive

The other day I received my new Corsair 1-Gigabyte USB Flash Drive via FedEx. One entire gigabyte of memory, in a little device the size and shape of a small jack knife handle!

We've come a long way since I got my first computer, a Leading Edge Model D, back in 1989. Actually by that time I'd already been tinkering with computers on and off, in one capacity or another, for about ten years. My Model D didn't even have a hard drive when I first bought it. Just two 5¼" floppy drives. I booted up off a floppy disk into MS-DOS 3.3. Kept two Rolodex-like plastic boxes next to my computer, one contained 5¼" disks of software, the other contained disks of data. I was constantly swapping different floppies in and out of drives A: and B:, depending on what I was doing with the computer at the moment.

I mean, what else could I do? A single 5¼" floppy disk held only 360 kilobytes. Most software you bought in the stores in those days came on 5¼" floppies, and I remember that some of those disks, for the sake of backward compatibility with computers even older than mine, held only 180 kilobytes.

At the Duke University computer center, they did eventually outfit some of their computers to handle both 5¼" and 3½" floppies. I remember experimenting with some 720 kilobyte 3½" disks; of course, I had no way to access them on my computer.

I did eventually get a hard drive for my computer, and it had the (to me) astonishing capacity of 42 megabytes. I had all my software, all of my years and years' accumulation of personal data, on that hard drive, and I never did come close to filling it up. Still using DOS 3.3; and I remember doing backups, with the DOS BACKUP command, to literally dozens and dozens of 5¼" floppies.

My brother at this time had a computer which could handle both 5¼" and 3½" floppies, and so I made archival backups of some of my data on 1.44 megabyte 3½" floppy disks. Of course, I still had no way to access them via my own computer.

In 1999, I finally got a new computer— an IBM ThinkPad. This had a floppy drive for 1.44 megabyte 3½" disks, and so now I was backing up my data to (get this) dozens and dozens of 1.44-meg 3½" floppies. I was discovering that data will expand to fill the space available to it.

The ThinkPad also had a CD drive, but it was read-only. So of no use for data backup.

Then, a year ago last September, I got a newer ThinkPad, and was so foolhardy as to install Linux on it. For data backup I decided to go to a Zip drive, mostly because it was Linux-compatible (though, par for the course with Linux, it took me a while to figure how to make it work). Beautiful external Zip drive, translucent blue plastic. Plug it into my USB port. Insert a 100 megabyte Zip disk (looks like a big, sturdy, beefed-up version of a 3½" floppy). Mount the Zip disk as /mnt/zip (this is, after all, Linux). Archive all my data in a tarball. And split the tarball up into chunks, each small enough to fit on a 100 megabyte Zip disk.

This time I was down to a handful of Zip disks for backup, forget that "dozens and dozens" crap. Still, it was a pain.

So, like I said, the other day I ordered this 1 gigabyte flash drive. One whole gigabyte. It arrives via FedEx, and I'm astounded. Size and shape of a small jack knife handle. Rubber coated, waterproof, almost indestructible. I plug it into the USB port on my computer, it's plug-and-play. It's mounted as /mnt/removable. I decide I don't need to back up my music, if I ever had to I could easily enough re-rip it all from my CDs. Everything else can now be backed up with the following single command:

tar --exclude ~/mp3 -cvpf /mnt/removable/backup.tar ~

(Yes, that's from the command line. What did you expect? I cut my teeth on DOS. Heck, I cut my teeth, back circa 1979, on a good old-fashioned keypunch machine.)

I'll confess, I haven't yet gotten the flash drive to do that USB 2.0 thing. It's more like USB 1.1, which is slower. But for data backup purposes that's fine, I just let it run in the background while I do something else. Hey, this is Linux, what did you expect?! ;-)

3WK Underground Radio

3WK is an online radio station I first ran across way back in the neolithic era of the Internet. You know, like the days of Netscape 4?


I used to enjoy listening to them. Then I sort of lost track. When I ran across 3WK a few years later, my dial-up connection could no longer handle the requisite bandwidth.

Well. A couple of months ago, I finally got DSL. And now this morning, I just happened to wander onto the 3WK Underground Radio website once again. And voilà! I'm sitting here listening to 3WK as I type this.


3WK Classic Rock and Indie Rock streams are available in Windows Media, Real, Shoutcast, and Ogg Vorbis format. I've got the low-K Ogg Vorbis streams for Classic Rock and Indie Rock bookmarked in XMMS.

You can find literally thousands of web radio stations to choose from at Live365, which I also listen to a lot. But 3WK is cool, and 3WK has been webcasting since 1997.

Older ThinkPad Redux

Oddly enough, my older IBM ThinkPad— the obsolete one, the one that's been demoted to a glorified typewriter— came back to life, after going out on me yesterday. Screen is working on it once again. For the time being. But if I'm smart, I'll back up anything on it that hasn't already been backed up. If it dies, it wouldn't be the first time a computer has conked out on me for good after giving advance warning.

And last time that happened to me (April 1998), no, I didn't think to do that backup thing between the first signs of trouble and the inevitable last gasp.

On other computer fronts, I just installed an updated Linux kernel on my newer ThinkPad. Which went fine, but so much for my uptime. ;-)

Older ThinkPad Kaput

Don't worry. My regular, everyday IBM ThinkPad— the one with Linux on it, the one I use to do everything but fry eggs— is fine. What went belly-up this morning was my older ThinkPad, an old thick sturdy obsolescent thing which has long since been demoted to a glorified typewriter. Well, that, plus it has on it some audio and video editing software the likes of which is not yet available for Linux.

Anyhow, the screen on the older ThinkPad this morning is nothing but a striated whitish-grey. Except for the screen, it still seems to work. But that's a mighty big "except." Oh well. I have backups of most of the data on zip disks, and I can still work from the DOS command line with my eyes closed, so it should be no problem to salvage the few newer documents.

I got that older ThinkPad six years ago, just before I moved over here to Iowa. Ah, to think of those bygone days of Windows 98 and Netscape 4.5! HotBot, Webcrawler, GoTo, Excite Search. Personal homepages on Xoom, NetTaxi, AcmeCity, NBCi. Sites with logos of animated flaming letters. Sites designed with nary a thought for style, unreadable sites with oversized lavender letters on a lime-green background. Blink tags. Gopherspace. MultiProxy. DejaNews. The Internet is a far different world today: I think time on the Internet proceeds by dog years.

Encrypted Anonymized Websurfing

If, like me, you're known to be paranoid, or maybe just slightly geekish, here's something that may interest you: a way of surfing the Web in encrypted anonymity. Actually, there are two such methods I've used: the JAP proxy, from Dresden University of Technology over in Germany; and the Tor proxy, which is now hosted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Without getting too deeply into the technicalities, or the differences between JAP and Tor, the idea is that you install their software on your system— free software, and open source, so you know what's in it. This software enables you to set up an encrypted connection with the first in a chain of computers out there. Your websurfing runs, encrypted, through a chain of at least three computers in between you and the website; and it is anonymous since any website out there will only see the IP address of the computer farthest from you in the chain.

In fact, under JAP not even the administrators of the chain are able to tell which packets of data belong to which users. There are several JAP chains available, though most of the up to 1500 users you'll find on JAP use the default connection.

Tor relies on "onion routing," which means that a separate layer of encryption is peeled away at each computer in the chain; there are over 100 nodes in the Tor network, and you will automatically shift every now and then to a new chain of three computers, with each node in the chain knowing the location of only the computer right before it and the computer right after it. Thus your location will be unknown, and practically untraceable, to someone several links "down-chain."

JAP is easier to set up, I've set it up on both Windows and Linux systems. It needs a newer version of Java to run; under Linux, I just download a .jar file, and run it from my menu or command line as follows:

java -jar /usr/java/lib/ext/JAP.jar

(or whatever the path to your .jar file is.) Under Windows, you might get it working this way; or there's a special Windows download available on the JAP proxy website. Try the big 12-meg download first, and only install from it what you don't already have. Install it, click on the JAP icon, and the proxy will come up in a little window. (Under XP you may get an initial error message; known bug, ignore it.) The use of JAP is fairly intuitive: just click on "Anonymity On," and within seconds you'll be connected. (Trust me, you want to leave "Forwarder" alone.)

Oh, one other thing, to use your browser with JAP you need to go into your browser's preferences, General | Connection (in Firefox) or Network | Proxy servers (in Opera) or Tools | Internet Options | Connections | LAN Settings | Advanced (in Internet Explorer, I think) and set your HTTP and HTTPS/SSL connections to run through 127.0.0.1 port 4001. JAP only supports regular (HTTP) and secure (HTTPS) websurfing, so you don't need to bother with FTP or other protocols.

As for Tor, I understand it also has a Windows download now available, but I've never used it. Under Linux, I just download the source code and compile it. Tor works in conjunction with another piece of free open source software called Privoxy. (Privoxy also functions very nicely in its own right as an ad banner and popup blocker.) Download and install Privoxy, and add the following line to the Privoxy config file:

forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 .

Don't forget to include that period at the end of the line. And since we're being cloak-and-dagger, you'll probably want to find section 1.5 in the Privoxy config file, and comment out the line "logfile logfile": this will prevent requests through Tor being logged to the Privoxy logfile on your hard drive.

Now run Privoxy, and run Tor. Being in Linux, I run each of them from the command line. You will get a message reading, "Tor has successfully opened a circuit. Looks like it's working." Now all you need do is configure your browser (see above) to run through 127.0.0.1 port 8118; and you're ready to go. Tor working together with Privoxy will handle almost any protocol you throw at it, not just HTTP and HTTPS; I've even gotten my chat program operating through Tor by pointing it at 127.0.0.1:8118.

You might get Tor working without Privoxy, but warning! In that case, your requests for websites would be sent in the clear, unencrypted, which is probably not what you want.

One interesting feature of Tor is its ability to handle "hidden services," services of unknown physical location which can be reached out there in Onionspace. Yes, there is a small but growing number of websites whose URL ends in ".onion"; and they can be reached only via Tor. Especially worth checking out are Notes from the Underground and the new Torcasting blog; you can find more such sites listed on KIRA.

Generally speaking, JAP and Tor are reasonably fast, though slower than your regular Internet connection; however, expect Onionspace to crawl like molasses.

Either of these proxies will shield you quite effectively from your ISP, from casual snoopers out there, and from the sites you visit. (As long as you remember to also turn off javascript while going incognito— ahem, javascript can give away secrets! Once you're "cloaked," you might want to check yourself out here, before you go any further.) I understand Chinese dissidents and the like rely upon services like these, with good results.

(Other hints, besides disabling javascript... Disable Java in your browser (OK to have Java running on your system). And empty your browser cache, and delete all cookies, both before and after a session.)

Nonetheless, before anyone gets the idea of doing anything illegal, I'm sure the three-letter agencies could crack this level of encryption/anonymity like peanuts in the shell. Plus, part of the funding for Tor came from the US Navy; and JAP has already been compromised at least once by German court order. I'm just saying.

Anyhow, I'd say if JAP and Tor grab your interest, check them out. Standard disclaimer: I'm not an IT professional, I'm not even a real geek, I'm just a longtime computer hobbyist. I put a lot more trust in Joe & Jane Q. Public than I put in those who walk the corridors of power. And I think one of the great things about the Internet is that it empowers you and me, without so much as a by-your-leave to the "suits." Any questions, leave a comment, and I'll help if I can.

The Great 1968 Computer Demo

Yes, 1968.


I've been reading John Markoff's new book, What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. He describes how Doug Engelbart, at a computer conference in 1968, gave the first public demonstration of the mouse. Interactive text editing. Copy-and-paste. Hyperlinks. Graphical hyperlinks. Multiple windows. E-mail. Video conferencing. And many other features of personal computing which we today take for granted.

But features, all of them, which must have struck his audience in 1968 as if a UFO had just come down and landed right in front of them.


I mean, those were the days of freakin' punch cards and key punch machines— which I damn well remember still using when I first entered the world of computers in 1979!

Anyhow. I looked around, and found that Engelbart's 1968 "mother of all demos" is available online. It's in streaming Real video, divided up into 35 chunks. (Boy, am I glad I recently got DSL!) And it's utterly fascinating.

You can watch the pieces that interest you. Or this link will enable your Real Player automatically to load the pieces in sequence, one after another. The demo has something of the atmosphere of an old science-fiction movie. (Dean Esmay, whose interest I've piqued, compares it to a "Kubrick film.") Only it ain't science fiction. It actually happened, back in December 1968.