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Desktop Background Images
Here's a
collection of images intended to be used as desktop backgrounds.
Click on an image below to be taken to the background images
(each image takes you to a different category of background images).
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Documents of Historical Importance to Geeks
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History of Computing References
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Sites related to some fundamental protocols and such
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Just interesting things
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IBM links
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Apple Links
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A note on MarketSpice Tea My then fiance and I first ran across MarketSpice tea back in the late 80's in a tea shop in West Edmonton Mall (Has Beans And Teas if memory serves). MarketSpice tea is a truly enchanting blend of black tea, cinnamon, cloves, orange peals and who knows what else. The tea shop in WEM eventually closed and we found ourselves unable to buy what was definitely our favourite flavour of tea. We have run into a number of different teas over the year that bear the MarketSpice name although, unfortunately and without exception, none of them were particularly good imitations of the real thing. I recently (mid 2009) decided to see what I could find online so armed with a vague recollection of having heard that real MarketSpice tea came from Seattle, I did the usual Google thing. Imagine my surprise to discover that there still was a company called MarketSpice in Seattle which sold a variety of teas including one that definitely sounded like the 'real deal'. Discovering that they sold their teas on amazon.com, I quickly ordered a pound of their "signature" tea and a pound of a decaf variant of their "signature" tea. The tea arrived a few days ago and it really is the tea that we used to buy! So . . . if you are a MarketSpice tea fan or are looking to try something a bit different, check them out (note that the link a few words back is, on 2009/05/28, a link to a very small page that says that they sell their teas on Amazon.com and links to their Amazon.com 'store'; If you do a bit of Googling then you should have no problem finding more info about their Seattle location). P.S. I ordered the tea from Canada using Amazon's standard shipping and it arrived in about ten days via regular parcel post so they seem to know that one does not use the dreaded UPS Ground service when shipping from the US to Canada (this policy may, of course, change so non-American residents may want to contact them first to see how they ship packages internationally. |
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Everything2
Here are some of my E2 writeups. Those marked with an * are probably the best of the bunch. Those marked with a + are likely to be of more interest than their title might suggest.
Click here to get a list of all of my writeups (actually, you'll get the most recent 50 writeups but getting the rest from there shouldn't prove to be too difficult). Everything2 node trackers |
Various
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Some Travel Links
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Some Interesting Things
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Daniel BouletOpen Source Works
Here's an interesting discussion of how the Linux and Apache communities got together to respond to a benchmark which indicated that Windows NT was quite a bit faster than Linux/Apache. The benchmark itself was flawed from a technical and procedural perspective but it did demonstrate that there were performance problems that needed to be addressed. The timeline worked something like this:All in all, an interesting look at how the Open Source community works.
- March 1999 - Microsoft commissions Mindcraft to do the benchmark.
- April 1999 - the benchmark numbers are released. The Linux community goes ballistic in responding to various perceived and actual weaknesses in the benchmark.
- May 1999 - various problems with Apache and Linux are fixed.
- July 1999 - benchmark results from the latest round are released. Windows NT still performs better than Linux but the gap has definitely narrowed. Some observers have pointed out that the data rates achieved by either operating system in these benchmarks far exceeds what could be delivered by any sort of realistic Internet connection. I.e. either operating system is considerably faster than necessary and you can guess which software/hardware configuration costs the least.
The Microsoft Anti-trust cases
There is so much smoke, hype and deliberate misdirection flowing out of Redmond on this issue that I feel compelled to link to the actual U.S. DOJ complaint and to the complaint filed by twenty-two American States (these links points into CNN's WWW site). Once you've taken the time to read the actual complaints being made against Microsoft, you'll understand why Microsoft seems to be so desperate to win this case in the court of public opinion before it gets to anything resembling a court of law.For what it is worth, here's a paragraph from the Federal complaint:
16. First, Microsoft invested hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, test, and promote Internet Explorer, a product which it distributes without separate charge. As Paul Maritz, Microsoft's Group Vice President in charge of the Platforms Group, was quoted in the New York Times as telling industry executives: "We are going to cut off their air supply. Everything they're selling, we're going to give away for free." As reported in the Financial Times, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates likewise warned Netscape (and other potential Microsoft challengers) in June 1996: "Our business model works even if all Internet software is free. . . . We are still selling operating systems. What does Netscape's business model look like? Not very good."Here are links to Microsoft's responses and such. They make interesting reading although one has to wonder whether or not Microsoft's lawyers live on the same planet that we live on . . . In fact, Microsoft recently released this little gem. Does Microsoft actually believe this statement in their press release:witness the advance of Linux, a new version of UNIX developed by a single individualSurely not even Microsoft is naive enough to think that Linux was developed by a single individual???Here's an interesting news article from the ABC News site. My favourite quote from the article is "Where there is a claim that Microsoft does not want to deal with, it simply ignores it." - Justice Department, in response to a Microsoft motion. I'm also bemused by the sentence Apparently, Microsoft doesn't make browsers. Never did. This in spite of the following quote from Chairman Bill taken from his June 13 article in The Economist "The fact that our browser was integrated into Windows 95 from the outset did not in any way prevent consumers from choosing another browser."
Wow!Selecting an Industrial Strength Solution
I just can't get over the amount of hype that's out there surrounding Windows NT and how it is going to take over the world. Personally, when I see such an intense effort being made to convince the world that something is true then I'm forced to conclude that it probably isn't . . .
Fortunately, when it comes to mission critical applications, people tend to look past the hype and look at issues like performance, robustness and such. Along these lines, here a few links which might be of interest:I just can't believe that anybody would run their mission critical applications on an operating system that functions like it is still in beta testing . . .
- Unix vs. Unix: The Real Battle points out that when it comes to mission critical applications, the choices tend to come down to different flavours of Unix. One interesting point that they make is that the fact that Microsoft seems to be showing more interest in the NT-Unix integration issue rather strongly suggests that NT is unable to replace Unix in a lot of scenarios. After all, if NT could replace Unix in all but a few situations then why would Microsoft need to spend effort on NT-Unix integration issues?
- Linux Up Close: Time To Switch - they benchmarked web serving and Windows client file sharing with three Linux distributions (RedHat, SUSE and Caldera) against Windows NT. The title of the article makes it pretty clear who won.
My favourite comment submitted by a reader of this article was the observation that the benchmarking was done with the older Linux 2.0.3x kernel (the new Linux 2.2.x kernel is considerably faster at a lot of things relevant to this benchmark) and the older Samba (Samba provides the Windows file server support - it runs on all sorts of Unix systems). i.e. Linux would have done even better if they'd used up-to-date software.
Speaking of industrial strength, here's an interesting Infoworld article which discusses how Microsoft's definition of the term reliable should not be confused with the commonly accepted definition of the term reliable or with the terms industrial strength or enterprise ready.It just doesn't work . . .
Following along the lines of the previous item, this article speaks for itself: Windows is a grief-causing kludge by Paul Sorenson, PC Computing, September 25, 1998 9:13AM PT.Well, at least we know for a fact that Microsoft is lying
The problem is that we don't know if they were lying under oath:Testimony of Microsoft executive Paul Maritz in the DOJ vs. Microsoft trial:or if they are lying in their marketing propaganda:Applications support for Linux is also growing rapidly. Within the past few months, leading software vendors have announced that they will create Linux versions of their flagship products. For example, the leading database vendor, Oracle, recently announced that it is developing a Linux version of its market-leading Oracle 8 database. One of Oracle's chief database rivals, Informix, quickly followed suit, and Mr Soyring testified that IBM is porting its principal database product, DB2, to Linux as well. (In fact, IBM announced on November 20, 1998, that its Linux version of DB2 will be free.)
Netscape is developing Linux versions of its enterprise server software, and most of Netscape's client software is already available for Linux. Corel offers a Linux version of its popular WordPerfect suite of business productivity applications, and it is free. Star Division of Germany offers its StarOffice, a full suite of business productivity applications. StarOffice, recently priced at about $300, is now free for individual users. Sun is porting its Java Development Kit 1.2 to Linux.
Commercial software vendors such as Red Hat and Caldera now offer compatible versions of Linux at a nominal charge. Although Linux can be and routinely is downloaded for free off the Internet, Red Hat and Caldera plan to earn revenues from related software and services such as training and support. The presence of such supported versions of Linux promises to make the operating system more appealing to corporate customers.
Today, the number of developers working on improving Linux vastly exceeds the number of Microsoft developers working on Windows NT. Linux developers are currently working on "Windows-like" user interfaces "Gnome" and "KDE" to simplify its operation.
It is unlikely in any other established industry that a single person, aided only by independent volunteers, could create a product that would emerge to challenge the industry leader. Yet this is the story of Linux, and the nature of the software business.
Microsoft's Ed Muth in March, 1999:Now I'll grant that my two quotes above don't quite conflict each other directly but they sure do demonstrate the difficulties that Microsoft has been having lately keeping their story straight (somehow, I doubt that they even care since the two audiences are somewhat separate - I wonder which audience they consider to be most important?)The problem...is there are fewer applications available for Linux, there's no long-term development roadmap, and there's a higher technical risk in using it [...] You could cut Linux some slack if it were sharply lower in cost-per-transaction than NT, but that's not the case.
An interesting analysis of the topic is Opinion: Why is Microsoft worrying about Linux? which started out life on a little site called Linux World and then made it to the big leagues on CNN.
C2 Security and NT
Here's an interesting article questioning key claims by Microsoft w.r.t. their C2 rating for NT. Did you know:
- That NT's much vaunted C2 rating is void if you install a network card on your system?
- That the C2 rating only applies to NT 3.5 Service Pack 3 with a very specific hardware and software configuration? I.e. it doesn't apply to NT 3.51 (except in the U.K.) or any of the NT 4 releases?
- That the C2 rating specification essentially says that you'll probably know if your system is cracked. It doesn't say much about how hard it is to crack your system. For that, you need to get into the B levels (it shouldn't come as much of a suprise that there are B level Unix offerings and no B level Microsoft offerings . . .).
Cryptography export issues
- A summary of Canada's export controls on cryptographic software (not exactly perfect but certainly rather refreshing compared to the policies in place in a lot of other countries).
- Draft Statement on Canadian Cryptography Policy (a position paper which will probably be of interest to lots of Canadians and non-Canadians . . .).
- Bernstein v. U.S. Department of State (constitutional challenge of U.S. ITAR cryptography export rules).
The Orange Book
The Orange Book is a document produced by the U.S. Department of Defence. The actual name of the document is Department of Defense Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria. It defines a set of criteria for determining and/or describing how secure a computer system is. The levels of security described by this document are widely used to describe how secure a system is. In fact, various organizations make a big deal about what level their products are certified for. For example, Microsoft generated an amazing amount of positive publicity when it had one of the versions of Windows NT certified at the C2 level. Microsoft was somewhat less eager to point out that the certification was void if a network card was installed on the machine.A copy of the Orange Book is available here.
I've heard that the name Orange Book derives from the fact that the original document had an orange cover.
Thinking of selling your hard disk? Think again!
Here's a fascinating paper describing just how hard it is to completely erase a hard disk. In fact, they even describe how it is sometimes possible to extract data from computer memory chips after the power has been turned off for a few hours or even days!Other serious topics
- The Nizkor Project, the Cybrary of the Holocaust and Survivors of the SHOAH - visual history foundation.
- A set of pages dedicated to stopping spamming.
- The Blue Ribbon Campaign page (free speech online).
Astronomy
Favourite Poems
- The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834).
This strange and haunting poem somehow grabbed my soul when I first read in WAY back in junior high school. It is full of all sorts of imagery and ideas that I personally don't usually have much use for. Yet, there is something about the poem that just won't let go.
Gustave Doré (1832-1883) created a fantastic series of etchings based on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. As far as I know, the etchings were first used to illustrate the poem in a book first published in 1878 by Harper & Brothers, in New York. The book was re-published in 1970 by Dover Publications, Inc. (ISBN 0-486-22305-1).
Note: the poem is fairly long (roughly 650 lines).
- In Flanders Fields by John Macrae (1872-1918).
This is probably the most famous war poem in the world. It is only fifteen lines long and is definitely worth reading.
- The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert W. Service (1874-1958).
This one is also pretty strange although in a rather humorous vein. It's well under 100 lines so have a look, you won't be disappointed!
Fans of this classic poem of the Yukon probably shouldn't miss McGee, Samuel: consultation report from the marge of Lake Lebarge.
Robert Service wrote a fair number of serious poems as well. One of the best (in my opinion) is The Spell of the Yukon.
Pierre Burton recorded a number of Robert Service poems about thirty years ago. I've got the album on vinyl. Now if I only had something that could play a vinyl record . . .
- Waltzing Matilda by Banjo Paterson (1864-1941).
A song written slightly over one hundred years ago during Australia's Great Shearers Strike of 1894. You can find quite a bit of information about the song at The International Home of Waltzing Matilda including words to the song and the history of the song.
