THE OLD TABLE OF CONTENTS

Monday, June 02, 2003

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This was generated back in 1998. If you have already downloaded it, you may as well glance over what's here. It won't take long. But the more useful table of contents (also out of date but not as much so as this one!) is elsewhere under the name TABLE OF CONTENTS. Confusing, isn't it?  Sigh. There is also NEW ORDER, which tries to make order of the Chaos here. It doesn't, but it tries...

 

Words and talk. What is this place you've got to?

Email Address

emailblimp.gif (23130 bytes)

Full Table Of Contents generated by web robot.

  Updated (more or less) daily:

Chaos Manor Mail; The View from Chaos Manor.

BE SURE TO SEE:

SPECIAL REPORTS

The SSX Concept

CHAOS MANOR debates

book.gif (1625 bytes)Recommended books

atom.gif (1053 bytes) Roberta Pournelle's READING PROGRAM: Teach anyone to read English

atom.gif (1053 bytes)STARSWARM

To comment on the BYTE Fiasco: mailto:jerryp@earthlink.net?subject=NEWCHAOS

Search: type in string and press return.

 

 


 

A START at indexing View became entirely obsolete and has been eliminated. Instead we have a search engine, and other mechanisms. Below are some highlights of the OLD web site. They're still relevant and interesting.

atom.gif (1053 bytes) New space paper.

NEW (Monday, June 29, 1998) Alex on Word Weirdness

atom.gif (1053 bytes)NEW (Monday, June 29, 1998) Windows 98 discussion.

 NEW (Saturday, June 27, 1998) Web construction details, largely Front Page

 NEW (Tuesday, June 23, 1998) Spacemail

 NEW (Tuesday, June 23, 1998) The return of the Book of the Month

NEW: (Monday, June 22, 1998): David Em's Graphics Report, updated daily.

 NEW: (Sunday, June 21, 1998)

 

Bob's Your Uncle: What we know about this phrase.

Web Construction: Mostly mail organized into this topic. (It ought to be integrated with the separate and much older blather done on web construction you'll find if you drill far enough, but I haven't done that yet. On the other hand, this page desperately needs organizing too.)

A PC EXPO report by former BYTE tech editor Russell Kay

 

NEW as of June 9, 1998:

Chaos Manor Mail: selected reader mail and answers

NEW as of June 5, 1998:

 

The View from Chaos Manor, a computerish journal.

The BYTE Fiasco story.

And, of course, we have moved to www.jerrypournelle.com,at first  hosted by Darnell Gadberry and binmedia, but for several years being hosted at PAIR.COM whose services I can recommend.

New Stuff As Of May 30, 1998

 

  • Revised the Recommended or What We Use section.
    • Added page about Starwarm, my new novel from Tor books.

      Starswarm is now in a book store near you. Buy a copy.

 

 

Stuff Available as of September 29, 1997

How to get my job. (Link to an essay I did in BYTE on how to become a writer.) Alas, with BYTE folded, this link may no longer work. I will try to get the original essay in here. Sorry about that. Give me a few more days.

 DONE: You can find HOW TO GET MY JOB here.

Pictures: Chaos Manor, Space Council, Mrs. Pournelle, opera society, etc.
 

Space:

 

Books: book.gif (1625 bytes)

Recommended Reading

Starswarm: Beginning chapters of my latest book.


Strategy of Technology: entire book by Stefan T. Possony, Jerry Pournelle, and Francis X. Kane. Formerly a text at all three service academies and at the Air War College. Shareware. If you use this book, please send a dollar (a dollar bill will do) to Dr. Jerry E. Pournelle, STRATEGY OF TECHNOLOGY, 12358 Ventura Blvd. Box 372, Studio City, CA, 91604. I'll see that Dr. Possony's widow gets his share.

Mrs. Pournelle's Reading Program: Link to her web site, and a few words by me.

Web Page Creation: some notes on getting started.

Chaos Manor User List: stuff we use and recommend. Updated from time to time. Incomplete, but growing.

 

 

 PICTURES: Be warned, BIG FILE. I have uploaded some pictures of Chaos Manor taken with the Olympus Camera. I also have some jpeg pictures of some of the stars of Marriage of Figaro, the last opera of the LA Opera season, including a very good picture of Mrs. Pournelle, and a shot of Jeremy Bentham, stuffed.

Reading: Mrs. Pournelle's THE LITERACY CONNECTION is a systematic phonics education (not testing; most so-called 'educational' programs are really testing games) program. For the moment it only runs on the Mac because it uses speech synthesis. We are making a Windows version, but Wintel text to speech is nowhere near good enough (the Mac's is; in fact Macintosh text to speech is superb and getting better) so we are having to do wave table files, meaning we need to put this out on a CDROM; the Mac version can be crammed onto two floppies. Find out more at http//www.readingtlc.com; this program really works, and you can now order a copy through the web. Roberta put up her own commercial web site. The design and implementation were all her own work.

Regarding the reading program: We have results from both upper middle class and inner city schools and both primarily English speaking and English as second language pupils; the tested reading growth using the program is astonishing. I have a generic reply I send to inquiries; it's about 900 words.

 Page Editing: I understand there are better editors than Word 97; FRONT PAGE may be one of them. Publisher '97 is said to be another, and I intend to try it. I also know that there's no real substitute for learning HTML and doing it all oneself, but if I have to do that I probably will get nothing done at all. I am now looking at Symantec's Visual Page, but I have to say that so far Word from Office '97 has done very well. We have, since the SR-1 updatre release in 1998, converted to Office 97. SR-1 corrects a lot of bugs.

Anyay, I mostly use Word 97 for this. I used to use Web Express, but their 32-bit upgrade blows up with stack explosions in my big NT workstation. It may be the dual Pentium chips? They tell me it works find in Windows 95 and in all the NT stations they have. On the other hand, Princess, my Compaq Professional Workstation, isn't particularly complex, just fast and very useful. In any event, I had to give up Web Express. I also have HOT METAL PRO which is said to be great, and I intend to try it soon. DREAMWEAVER is said to be even better, and I believe it. Front Page is good stuff. There is no shortage of good web authoring tools... Notes attached.

 Schedule: I am currently working on THE BURNING CITY, a new Niven/Pournelle novel set in the world of 14,000 years ago, just after Atlantis sank and the magic was going away. This does not have the Warlock but takes place about the time of the Warlock. It's set in the New World at a time when Mastodons were in North America and used magic to make themselves look bigger than houses; carnivorous birds larger than ostriches terrorized people and animals alike; and unicorns and mer-people still existed. We have about 150,000 words done.

I am also working on Mamelukes, the fourth novel in the Janissaries series. I have about 20,000 words. It takes place about 15 years after the last Janissaries novel. There are new characters, and the Galactics have a different attitude about Tran. Finally, our publishers want Niven and me to do a big millennial disaster novel something along the lines of Mr. Heinlein's Year of the Jackpot only more so. We might call it The Wrath of God, or The Seven Seals. It seems that David Koresh wrote his exposition on the Book of Revelations not only on paper that was burned at Waco, but also on a floppy disk that survived, and he really had a gift, and... But first Burning City.

Finally, I'm still hard at work converting Mrs. Pournelle's reading program to Windows. I'm using Visual Basic 4, but once it's done I'll put it into Delphi, and also Visual Basic 5. Programming is fun but takes time, and that takes time away from playing here. It's a great life if you don't weaken...

To read the latest BYTE Articles and columns, visit the BYTE web site.

This is what I've been able to put up so far. Some of it duplicates the index you saw at the top. So it goes.

 

Pictures. This leads to another index. Be warned: there is one picture on the index itself. After that each link leads to a number of pictures. They're in jpeg, but don't call for them unless you're prepared for a fairly hefty download (although not as hefty as before I reorganized the index system). Eventually I may set it up so you can get them one at a time, but for now, you get them all, like it or not.

 

Space : A number of papers about space access. There was a Council Meeting in early August, and we'll have more space papers available. Meanwhile, wasn't the new NASA smaller, faster, cheaper mission to Mars wonderful!

Starswarm : First chapters of my newest novel. The book has just been released from Tor books.

Intro to Starswarm: An introduction or preface to the novel, written in June 1997. Reminiscing about how I became a science fiction writer, and how I came to write the novel. There is a longer Starswarm excerpt at: http://www.tor.com/sampleStarswarm.html.

Creating a Web Page : some notes on Web Page creation, and How I Did This.

 

 

 

The Chaos Manor User's List: This document is revised from time to time. List and brief discussion of stuff I use a lot and recommend. It won't be complete, but I will try to keep it current. Also be sure to see the Byte Columns, both printed and web exclusive. I hope one day to add my orchids and onions list as well.

And this is just to see if I can do it. It's supposed to move. It does move in Word 97, and with Internet Explorer. Apparently Netscape doesn't see movement, although it does when I look at it with Netscape while it's here on my system. So it goes. It's not important.

 

A Web Site Under Construction...

And using Netscape this ought to blink

 

You can send me email at jerryp@jerrypournelle.com . I have an account jerryp@bix.com but that is mostly for text, and please do NOT send things there that you want considered for publication on the web. BIX is a bit old and klunky and very much text oriented, so it's not the place to send me cool web site addresses either; and please don't send long files there. However, I generally get to BIX daily even on the road. Mostly I use email for communications in straight ascii text.

 I still don't quite understand why font sizes sometimes change. I suppose I'll learn one of these days. However, I am learning to edit the HTML source code to give myself a bit more control. It's a great life if you don't weaken. Stay well.

= 30 =

NOTES

Links: you can see all my BYTE Columns, both the printed portions and the "Web Exclusive" parts that are never put into print, at http://www.byte.com/art/art.htm which is a page from which you can go to every BYTE issue for the past few years. Click on any BYTE issue. FLASH: CMP may have closed that site. It will take me a while to get all my columns back on line on this or another site. You will see a table of items and articles. One entry will be "Pournelle". Click on that and you will go to a selection choice: the printed article for that issue, or the 'web exclusive' section. Naturally there are no 'web exclusives' prior to about a year ago.

NOTE: my web exclusive sections often include David Em on graphics, Eric Pobirs on games and periperhal equipment, particularly but not exclusively game related, and incidents that happened too late to get into the print column. The Web Exclusive section is mostly a way for me to talk about many things despite page limits to the magazine. If you don't read my Web exclusive sections and you like the column, you probably ought to go try them. I will put those up somewhere.

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