Sunday, May 29, 2005

• Begin Here

• Open Source Courseware: Mosse and MIT

• USER SUGGESTIONS

• My Fiction Works

• Cool Places

 Roberta Pournelle's Reading Program: The Literacy Connection If you have children or grandchildren age four to forty who don't yet read English, this will teach them. It never fails. Go see.

There is also:

Subject: Open Course Ware HOME SCHOOLERS TAKE NOTE

Dr. Pournelle, This link is from a list server I belong to, and I thought you might find it interesting and usefull. Not directly related to the Linux theme of the list, but there's a few engineers and science-buffs on that list.

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Global/
all-courses.htm#Special%20Programs 

George Laiacona III

Because it was not instantly apparent what this was, I elicited the following:

Dr. Pournelle, It's all free. According to the website: "MIT OCW is a large-scale, Web-based electronic publishing initiative funded jointly by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and MIT.

MIT OCW's goals are to: Provide free, searchable, access to MIT's course materials for educators, students, and self-learners around the world. Extend the reach and impact of MIT OCW and the "opencourseware" concept. MIT OCW would not be possible without the support and generosity of the MIT faculty who choose to share their research, pedagogy, and knowledge to benefit others. We expect MIT OCW to reach a steady - though never static - state by 2008. Between now and then, we will publish the materials from virtually all of MIT's undergraduate and graduate courses.

We will be continually evaluating the Access, Use, and Impact of MIT OCW over the course of the next five years. With 900 courses published as of September 2004, we are still in a learning stage of this MIT initiative and we will benefit enormously from your feedback, as we strive to make MIT OCW as rich and useful as possible for our users."

George Laiacona.

This should be of great interest to home schoolers, but also to the general readership. The wealth of material available here is astonishing.

The George Mosse Lectures in history are very much worth your attention.

In case you missed it, do not overlook the MIT Course Materials available free on line. There are also McGill course lectures, and the  George Mosse Lectures. This is a lot of good material available for home schoolers and others.

The rest of this page is somewhat out of date, but there are still places referred to here that are worth looking at.

http://www.vanderwoning.com/living/blog.shtml  is a remarkable account of a young woman's long journey into day and eventually to the night. 

THIS turns out to have been a work of fiction: I put it that way rather than "hoax" because it was well done, and even as a work of fiction was interesting. It also inspired considerable passion among people not usually given to such, both when it was thought real -- chivalric defenses abounded -- and anger when it turned out to be untrue. A remarkable experience.

BYTE Magazine :The NEW AND REVISED BYTE, which is a webzine only; but there are also links back to the archives. This is where you will have to go if you want to read my columns after January 1999

Global cooling: the Ice Ages and something of their onset. http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/nerc130k.html 

Robert Tinney, who did the early BYTE covers, can be found at

http://www.tinney.net/ 

where he's still available for illustrations and such.

John Carr and information on the late H. Beam Piper at www.hostigos.com 

Science fiction: http://home.earthlink.net/~wwjames/Hour25_Home.html 

GNU and the Free Software Foundation at www.fsf.org

MY FICTION WORKS:

http://www.fortunecity.com/tattooine/heinlein/326/ is a web site devoted to my CoDominium series, and has some serious bibliographic scholarship. Great graphics, good bibliographical material and all around NEAT! A lot of work went into this, as well as into:

http://www.chronology.org/noframes/pournelle/ and http://www.chronology.org/pournelle/ are a heavy duty chronology of my works, and again a place well worth looking at. There are some wonderful maps and such like. 

COOL PLACES TO GO

http://global.org/jphogan/index.html Is James P. Hogan's web page. Jimmy Hogan is one of the writers whose work I like a lot; he's also a serious thinker.

The Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society LASFS   Larry Niven and I go maybe half the time to Thursday night meetings. On Burbank Blvd in the Valley.

http://www.userfriendly.org has some hilarious cartoons; a bit like Alan Cooper's book in visual format...

http://www.cit.gu.edu.au/images/Images.html

That is a wonderful place, and if you do web work you should know about it.

http://www.halfhill.com Tom Halfhill's home page. The man's a genius, but if you read BYTE you know.

http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Lair/9913/ Dog woman from another planet. I am not making this up; in fact she's a close friend who came with Roberta and me on the Baja Eclipse Expedition. You will also find Alex's trip report, and some of Eric's work. (This review is WAY out of date.)

http://www.poorrichard.com/ is Peter Kent's web site, and VERY MUCH WORTH looking at if you are trying to build a web site or find things to understand.

http://www.ppn.org/clue/  Dana Blankenhorn's Clued in Page: a commentary on our screwy business, who's clued, who needs to buy a clue, and who couldn't use one if they found it in the street.

http://www.sfwa.org/bulletin/articles/thor.htm A discussion of the Thor Power Tools decision, which I think had a more profound effect on publishing practices than is argued here, but still good background. Publishing is an odd game, most writers don't understand it, but then many publishers don't either.

http://www.howstuffworks.com/index.htm   is way cool. The name says it all.

USER SUGGESTED SITES

In September 2000 I solicited user suggestions for cool sites. Here are some:

• Jerry:

  For your programs list, every Windows computer should be running TClockEx, freeware at http://users.iafrica.com/d/da/dalen/tclockex.htm  by a young South African programmer, Dale Nurden.

  This little gem adds the date next to the time clock in the system tray using the same typeface as the clock, the way Microsoft should have done it in the first place. The display is not one of those tacky-looking date add-ons, this one expands the actual display of the clock to include the date.

  It's terrifically configurable and can also show various system status properties like System Resources Available or RAM Free. With one click on the clock, it gives a popup calendar; two clicks on the clock and the date is copied to the clipboard (in the format you specify) for immediate pasting into a text document.

  For another good performing program, I give credit to Dr. Keyboard for mentioning AboutTime, more freeware, this one by Paul Lutus at http://www.arachnoid.com/abouttime/index.html 

  It automatically sets the system clock to super-accurate time (Lutus claims to within 50 milliseconds) using one of several servers which are linked to atomic clocks.

  --Regards, Chuck Waggoner

   

• My favorite links (other than yours) are:

  http://www.arstechnica.com/  good general computer hardware/gamer site http://www1.anandtech.com specializes in hardware component reviews Both of these two sites have recommended "to build" systems" updated monthly. Anandtech includes SOHO and professional workstations, as well as 3D gaming machines. These two are what I wish I had when I put my machine together, as in where do you find reviews of motherboards.

  http://www.tomshardware.com/  directed towards gamers and overclockers, I have never ever overclocked a computer, but am seriously thinking about it, if only for the challenge.

  http://www.pcguide.com/topic.html  Best computer hardware explanations on the web I have found.

  http://grc.com/  Steve Gibson's site. Check your vulnerability on the web, and good privacy info. 

  http://computingcentral.msn.com/topics/bandwidth/speedtest.asp  check your bandwidth to the internet.

  http://www.pricewatch.com/  Find the lowest price on computer hardware.

  http://www.hatrack.com  Orson Scott Cards site. Has some of his unpublished fiction of which I recommend "Christmas in Hell" http://www.hatrack.com/osc/stories/homeless-in-hell.shtml   

  I enjoy you site immensely. Unfortunately I found it while unemployed and haven't caught up on the bills yet, and so haven't subscribed. Fortunately you didn't stop when Byte folded.

  Dennis Clay DennisClay@bigfoot.com

The perfect is the enemy of the good. http://members.home.net/dennisclay/ 

• I use CookiePal ( www.kburra.com  , $15) to manage cookies and SimpleCheck ( www.geocities.com/simplecheck , $12.99) to poll my email accounts without having to keep Outlook running.

  I've used both for over a year and they work perfectly. They work well with Windows 2000.

  Francis Gingras

   

• Obscure but neat:

ManRun V1.0 http://bewoner.antwerpen.be/guru/s9soft/manrun10.zip  freeware from 12-Mar-97.

Allows you to turn off autorun and/or autorun your CD ROM disk on demand. I use it from Start->Run.

sleigh

• The program is called "Pop Up Killer", the name is descriptive and adequate. It kills pop-ups. I have run this program on my 98 box and my ME box with success and limited resource drain (about 2% on the ME box and 1% on the 98 box). It is capable of learning which windows you wish to kill through an easy to use interface and thus far I have been unable to detect any packet transmissions coming from it, which indicates to me that I'm either not very good at detecting spyware or it just does not have any in it. The only problem I have had with it is a minor one where it will close some untitled pop-up windows that I wish to have open. For this I simply end task it prior to going to a site with pop-ups I wish to view and restart it afterward. This program gets a four out of five rating from me (nothing ever gets a five unless I'm offered some form of payola). The link to this program is http://software.xfx.net/mainindex.htm  . It can also be had from any number of download sites such as CNets download.com and tucows.com. 

 Warmest regards, Rev Chris Boatright. Tualitan, OR.

• I have a couple of suggestions about things that I use myself.

  Cookie Pal ( http://www.kburra.com  ) is a really usable cookie filter. When you first start using it, you get pestered a lot about whether you want to accept cookies from various places, but eventually it gets trained. I've been using it for over a year, and I see that there are six cookies that I've had to store permanently (three of them are from servers on our internal network). It is smart enough to recognize that some people use more than 1 browser. It's nagware but the registration is only $15.

  WebWasher ( http://www.webwasher.de ) is a proxy that you can run on your own machine or another. It filters HTTP for you, removing images that it thinks are banner ads, stopping most popup windows, removing "referer" from http requests, and so on. It can be configured to filter "web bug" images (actually I think the newer versions do that out of the box). This one is "free for educational or personal use" but you're supposed to license it if you use it in a commercial setting. WebWasher was a Siemans AG freeware project that got spun off into a separate company.

   

• Sites to add to your links page:

  Some interesting US Navy facts and stats: http://www.chinfo.navy.mil/navpalib/factfile/ffiletop.html 

  Very useful for developers and consultants:

  Microsoft file version information: http://support.microsoft.com/servicedesks/fileversion/dllinfo.asp 

  ANSI: http://web.ansi.org/default_js.htm 

  RFC: http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/information/rfc.html 

  Some good modem info: http://www.56k.com/ 

  Ken

   

This whole page is seriously in need of revision. There are a lot of places worth going, and this isn't very well organized anyway. I'm dancing as fast as I can...

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