EARLY CONCERNS:
JANUARY-MAY 2004
Texts
Terry Eagleton reviews Robert O. Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism. Devon Largio's "Uncovering the Rationales for the War on Iraq:
The Words of the Bush Administration, Congress, and the Media from September 12, 2001 to October 11, 2002" (Senior Honors Thesis, Political Science, University of Illinois, 2004). Readprint.com: a library of texts. Introductory Statistics: Concepts, Models, and Applications, by David Stockburger. Structured Procrastination, by John Perry. David Rey's Darwinian Poetry Project. A collection of eyewitness accounts.
Editing
The newsgroup comp.publish.prepress on Google Groups. A plaintive page about curly-quote character encoding confusion. Jack Lynch's Guide to Grammar and Style and his Resources for Writers and Writing Instructors. On the long history of they/their/them as ungendered singular pronouns. The copyediting_l style FAQ, including some interesting prevailing wage data for freelance copyeditors (how obsolete is it?). Ben Yagoda on adjectives.
Databases
A FAQ on linking databases to Openoffice.org, another FAQ with answers about specific databases, and links to external resources addressing these issues, all at dba.openoffice.org. OpenOffice, ODBC, and MySQL HowTo (PDF). Using Microsoft Access databases in OpenOffice.org. Rick Morris asks "are there any good reasons to choose PostgreSQL over MySQL?" and answers "yes." Buy Database Design for Mere Mortals by Michael J. Hernandez. MySQL Gotchas and Why Not MySQL? Yet another PostgreSQL vs. MySQL review. How to relate tables and databases with MySQL using phpMyAdmin. phpMyEdit -- a phpMyAdmin alternative? The MySQL Manual.
Computer
"Exploring the Java Archive (JAR) Format" by Kulvir Bhogal. A terse Samba tutorial. Debian's Apt How-To. Extant Gopher servers at Floodgap.com and Quux.org. Bash programming guides at arachnoid.com and Rutgers University. Furl, an online "filing cabinet" for saved webpages. Ad-blocking host files and advice about curbing ads and spyware under Windows. A big collection of links to online computer books at Ju Rao's homepage.
Soldering
Alan Winstanley's Basic Electronics
Soldering and Desoldering Guide. Movies from NASA demonstrate how to solder electronics. EPE Online Soldering FAQ, with soldering and desoldering picture galleries. How to solder, including different metals and flat pieces of metal. Soldering copper pipes: Tim Carter, Chris Tabone, and acmehowto.com explain how. Soldering stained glass. Carl Brannen on soldering very tiny things. How not to solder.
The Moon
A moon phases calculator. Moon phases for every day from 3999 B.C. to 3999 C.E. View the earth and the moon from the earth, the moon, the sun, and other perspectives. Images of the moon.
Web
The Text Encoding Initiative: "TEI is an international and interdisciplinary standard that helps libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars represent all kinds of literary and linguistic texts for online research and teaching, using an encoding scheme that is maximally expressive and minimally obsolescent." Jeffrey Veen on accessible design, with links to examples. Position Is Everything: a CSS site with an emphasis on designing around browser quirks (good links, too). CSS column layouts compatible with Netscape 4.x (and more here, too). How to use CSS to make line spacing consistent when using superscript and subscript characters. Design Detector pulls an extreme CSS stunt.
Texts
The US Constitution, heavily annotated, at the University of Chicago Press. A collection of historical anarchist texts. Patrick O'Brian sites: The Gunroom and Maturin's Medicine. A lace of hyperlinked words at Blather. Bluebook, a legal citation stylesheet. Worldofquotes.com. Garret Hardin's "Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor" (1974). "With his blue ox, Emily Dickenson, Walt Whitman traveled across young America and helped the nation grow into the angry powerhouse it is today." Wikipedia.
Tools
WordNet: "an online lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current psycholinguistic theories of human lexical memory. English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into synonym sets, each representing one underlying lexical concept. Different relations link the synonym sets." An inflation calculator for US currency, and links to other inflation calculators. Briefing.com calendar of upcoming US economic reports. Freepint.com, a big collection of links for online research.
Politics
An animation of US congressional polarization. Billionaires for Bush. A map of hate groups in the United States. What $87 billion looks like. "So welcome fellow patriot to USA Patriotism!" Dean for America begets Democracy for America. Browse presidential campaign donors by name and location at fundrace.org. The Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression's Jefferson Muzzles Awards.
Obsessive-Compulsive Hoarding Disorder and Variants
"Behind Closed Doors": Garbage houses in the Twin Cities. A garbage house in Folsom, California. Residential hoarding in Fairfax County, Virginia. Understanding hoarding. "Saving the World" by Fred Penzel. The Usenet group alt.recovery.clutter at Google.
Computing
Steve Litt on Windows-to-Linux conversion -- including good advice and assistance for transforming ugly Windows filenames (like Copy (3) of My Letter.DOC) so that they can more easily be manipulated at the command line. Also tips for batch-converting DOS text to Unix text. Archives of alt.msdos.batch.nt at Google Groups. SpinRite data recovery utility. The Ultimate Boot CD. Memtest86. Aida32 system information utility. BitTorrent. Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years. Establish a direct connection (parallel or serial cable) between two computers running Windows. An introduction to GNU Screen. Some shell scripting tricks (pushd, popd, etc.). GNU utilities for Win32. It's a DOS Life -- includes links to a lot of proprietary DOS software. DOSBox is an alternative to DOSEmu that was built with games in mind, but WordPerfect runs, too. Better than in DOSEmu? SDF Public Access Unix System. A Debian 2.6 Kernel HowTo.
IceWM
IceWM theme creation HowTo. Jeff Covey's "How to Create and Use Themes" page (cross-window-manager information -- more on implementing than creating).
Extensions for Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird
For Firefox: Mozedit text editor extension. Adblock and Flash Click to View to civilize commercial websites, and Linky and Magpie for chasing links and saving tabs. Spiderzilla for mirroring. Firesomething for rebranding. MiniT-drag enables tab rearrangement. Sort your bookmarks. Many more.
Knoppix Linux Tricks
A script that allows the Knoppix CD to achieve LAMP with a MySQL database stored on a USB stick. A package that allows the CD to access a bundled copy of phpMyAdmin and a test PHP website. A Knoppix Samba FAQ. Using update-rc.d to add services on boot (this is also useful). Use /etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh to start the odd hardware driver or other processes. A script and a package list that are both helpful for apt-get-removing clutter from a hard-disk installation of Knoppix. Three knoppix.net discussions (one, two, three) on sorting out problems with mounting removable media. Godot's Debian/Knoppix page. Klik installs key software to Persistent Home. Apt-get and dpkg tutorial and links. Configuring /etc/apt/sources.list using any number of mirror sites.
Miscellaneous Linux
The fundamental differences between the Winworld and the Nixworld. A page that explains, in a roundabout way, how to set up the appropriate relationships between /var/www/users and /home. Meanwhile, Apache virtual host documentation. comp.os.linux.misc on Google Groups. A serial laplink howto. IBM's Windows-to-Linux overview pages. A guide to Linux groups on Usenet.
The beginnings of wiki.linuxquestions.org.
SQL, Especially MySQL, Resources
Mike Dobson's Squeek Machine reference pages, including clips of SQL code for MySQL. FAQts.com's mySQL resources. Sanders Kaufman explains how to use MSAccess as a frontend for MySQL databases.
Coppermine
Coppermine is a package of PHP scripts that lets you serve galleries of images from a server. Coppermine has a FAQ, an online manual, and a forum full of help, as well as an online demo. There's also a stylesheet guide that helps with changing Coppermine themes.
Flora
Help on growing ornamentals that are native to your (US) region. A weblog that is occasionally about gardening in Minnesota. Digitized rare botanical books from the Missouri Botanical Garden Library. Botanical illustrations from the University of Delaware Special Collections. Botanical illustrations by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women. The National Agricultural Library's collection of images from The Botanical Magazine, 1801-1807. The beginnings of the Smithsonian Catalog of Botanical Illustrations. Links and bibliography about botanical illustration at Western Washington University.
Fauna
Starlings stealing quarters from a car wash. A passenger pigeon page. N'kisi, the joking, telepathic parrot. More parrots with lots to say. Many pages of beautiful fish at the Australian National Oceans Office. Bones is a Redbone Coonhound who has accepted Jesus. Cicadamania.com tracks the emergence of the 2004 Brood X cicadas. Crows at Crows.net and For the Love of Crows.
Galleries
WPA posters at the Library of Congress. An aging family. Scott Blake's bar code art. An infrared pornographic movie. Tabloid photographs from The Los Angeles Herald Express, 1936-61. Stone Pages: "Stonehenge, stone circles, dolmens, ancient standing stones, cairns, barrows, hillforts and archaeology of megalithic Europe." The Chairman Smiles: Posters from the Former Soviet Union, Cuba, and China at the International Institute of Social History. Stefan Landsberger's Chinese propaganda poster pages. Nico van Hoorn's Trashlog. Not Fooling Anybody: Poorly executed commercial real estate conversions. Sacramento hijacker weaponry for sale at Goodwill Industries. Nineteenth-Century images of albinism. Anatomical drawings: The dream anatomy gallery at the National Institutes of Health. James Smolka photographs. Michael Kenna photographs. Jon Haddock's pages at whitelead.com, including senators voting for the Patriot Act and pornographic photographs without figures. Sublimate. Heiropenen.com. The Beinecke Library's photonegatives collection database.
Reference
Disinfopedia, "a collaborative project to produce a directory of public relations firms, think tanks, industry-funded organizations and industry-friendly experts that work to influence public opinion and public policy on behalf of corporations, governments and special interests." The Nonverbal Dictionary. Making Scott's Pepsi-G Stove and Roy Robinson's Cat Stove. What Can I Do with Tin Cans? At us-government-torture.com, learn about the government's directed-energy and neurophone attacks upon the citizenry. Facts on Farts.
CSS
Considerations (beyond the obvious) for choosing when to use id and class attributes, and Mark Newhouse's Environmental Style essay. Also Tantek Çelik on using only "a touch of class." Barry Pearson on the history of tables in HTML and deficiencies in CSS positioning. Links to about a thousand websites that get along without layout tables. David Dorward presents an IE hack to enable centering of block elements with CSS. Tableless layout links at allmyfaqs.com. A CSS positioning and box model tutorial at brainjar.com. Styling forms with CSS. Will the browser apply the rule? -- A nice chart at centricle.com.
Database Frontends
DBDesigner4. MySQL Control Center. phpMyAdmin (seems widely used). DbVisualizer (cross-platform, cross-database). The book on MySQL: Paul DuBois's MySQL Cookbook.
HTML
"The Semantic Web" -- Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila in Scientific American, May 2001. Some cogent skepticism about semantic markup. "XHTML 2.0 Considered Harmful" thread at lists.w3c.org. HTML table art. HTML preprocessors: The Dolt and PPWizard. The University of Minnesota-Duluth's web design reference page, including lots of PHP links.
Texts
Justin Kruger and David Dunning, "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments." Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software by Sam Williams. "The Social Life of Paper" by Malcolm Gladwell. Read Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe one word at a time. Herman Krieger's Churches ad Hoc: A Divine Comedy. The world produced half a million Libraries of Congress of print, film, and magnetically or optically stored data in 2002 (double the output in 1999), according to "How Much Information? 2003," a report by researchers at UC-Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems.
