Ethel the Blog
Observations (and occasional brash opining) on science, computers, books, music and other shiny things that catch my mind's eye. There's a home page with ostensibly more permanent stuff. This is intended to be more functional than decorative. I neither intend nor want to surf on the bleeding edge, keep it real, redefine journalism or attract nyphomaniacal groupies (well, maybe a wee bit of the latter). The occasional cheap laugh, raised eyebrow or provocation of interest are all I'll plead guilty to in the matter of intent. Bene qui latuit bene vixit.

The usual copyright stuff applies, but I probably won't get enraged until I find a clone site with absolutely no attribution (which, by the way, has happened twice with some of my other stuff). Finally, if anyone's offended by anything on this site then please do notify me immediately. I like to keep track of those times when I get something right.

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"When they say, 'Gee it's an information explosion!', no, it's not an explosion, it's a disgorgement of the bowels is what it is. Every idiotic thing that anybody could possibly write or say or think can get into the body politic now, where before things would have to have some merit to go through the publishing routine, now, ANYTHING." - Harlan Ellison JOLLY OLD PALS Other stuff of mild interest to some: unusual literature scientific software blog physical oceanography glossary computer-related tutorials and texts Friday, July 07, 2000 SEXY SEXTANTS It's always interesting seeing what the search engine dredges up for words that've been co-opted for purposes beyond their original technical definitions, especially if they've got one of the big button-pushers (if not the biggest) right up front. To begin with, I found mostly what I was looking for, e.g.: Evolution of the Sextant, a concise history with juicy references by a dealer in nautical antiques and related items; How a Sextant Works and Navigations by Sextant from Nova's online supplement to Shackleton's Antarctic Odyssey; a marvelous collection of modern sextants available from Stanley London (along with their Antique Sextant division selling originals); Making a Simple Sextant to Find Latitude, a classroom exercise for grades 5 through 10. Now we have a selection of those sites less directly related to celestial navigation: Solar Disk Sextant, an instrument designed to measure the diameter of the Sun to a precision of several milli-arc-seconds; Sextant Co., a "not-for-profit social research and consultancy organization," Sextant Software, a group mainly concerned with medical billing and security software; The Golden Sextant, a series of lengthy essays by someone obsessed with returning the international finance system to the gold standard; Sextant Technologies, another pack of computer nerds, with these focusing on databases; sextant.nu, a music-related weblog; Sextant Funds, one of the 20 trillion available mutual funds; Project Sextant, a free online service with their own weblog; several student newspapers with that name. So after ten pages worth of matches, I found 4 (well, about 4 more were also related to the navigation thing although less informative) appropriate to my search, with the rest (but for the instrument for measuring the Sun) a bunch of commercial concerns trading on the sexy, technical name. I probably wouldn't be so cranky about this if I didn't run into the same phenomenon so damned often while attempting to snag quotations for my list o' nifty words. My lack of god! It's Friday and nearly half past beer! I'm outta here. posted by Steven Baum 7/7/2000 04:43:11 PM | link NOAA PHOTOS The NOAA Photo Collection currently contains over 10,000 mostly public domain images and is constantly growing. They've broken it up into several photo albums including: The National Severe Storms Laboratory Album, featuring some of mother nature's most picturesque handiwork in the form of tornadoes and lightning; NOAA in Space, a pictorial overview of their satellite programs featuring the satellites, their rockets and launches, and the imagery obtained therefrom; Natural History of Useful Aquatic Animals, an atlas of 300 line-drawing illustrations from the late 1880s NOAA's Ark (you saw this one coming, didn't you?), a wide-ranging bestiary containing images of bears, birds, whales, seals and sea lions and walruses; Paths Less Taken, NOAA at the ends (and middle) of the Earth in the Arctic, Antarctic and on various tropical islands; The Coral Kingdom, photos of vertebrates and invertebrates in, around, and on coral reefs around the world; America's Coastlines, from the Aleutians to south central Alaska to southeast Alaska to the Hawaiian Islands to the west coast to the southeast coast to Chesapeake Bay (with the Gulf Coast and the northeast coast on the way); Beginnings and Endings, sunrises, sunsets, moonshine and moonbeams from around the world; Coast and Geodetic Survey Album, featuring images of ships, geodesy (e.g. surveying land and sea), historic oceanography and sights and views (including humorous views). posted by Steven Baum 7/7/2000 03:54:27 PM | link MARGINALIA The Marginalia section of the Octavo publishing site covers "aspects of authorship, conservation, and book design and construction." It also contains some delectable prose, e.g. the following history of abbreviations: There are three periods in the fossil record of the Abbreviation. First comes the Paleozoic age of manuscript, where every literary task was laboriously performed by hand, often on costly materials, and abbreviations abounded to save space and time. This was followed by a transition period of print, with cheaper labor and materials, a single printer doing the work of a scriptorium of scribes, and paper replacing parchment. Finally, there is the present age of mass extinction where words are mechanically "processed" and computer software not only obligingly corrects distinctive spellings, leveling them down to an authoritarian norm, but impudently expands supposed abbreviations. Such casual or familiar openings as "Dear M" are metamorphosed into "Dear Mom and Pop," almost enabling the computer itself to write home on behalf of the busy student. There are similarly delicious sections on bookworms (the kind that devour books in the non-figurative sense), catchwords and signatures (devices to ensure the proper ordering of multiple pages printed on single large sheets), chromolithography (the dominant color printing process of the 19th century), illuminated manuscripts (before Edison), etching (an art form of which I can't get enough, although Dover's done a fine job of feeding my obsession), foxing (the study and description of discolorations and spots found in older books), historiated initials (those huge, decorative capital letters that demarcate the sections in many old books), music printing (problems unique to early music printing), Why Latin? (with the glib answer being "because the Carthaginians lost") and woodcuts (even more voluminous drool on this end). Octavo's raison d'etre is to "publish rare books, manuscripts, and antiquarian printed material in technologically advanced digital formats." Their (in the words of the bean counters) deliverables take the form of CD-ROMs containing very high resolution images (up to 10,600 x 12,800 pixels) of each page in a manuscript along with various extras such as live electronic text, complete English translations, bibliographic descriptions, and commentaries. The prices range from $25-$40 per CD (with the occasional multiple set), and a subscription service is available. If you're looking for a rare book and can't afford the obscenely high prices to which speculators have driven many of them, then you might want to take a gander at their collection. Robert Hooke's (called by some England's Leonardo) Micrographia sure looks mighty tasty to me. posted by Steven Baum 7/7/2000 03:24:20 PM | link SCOUT REPORT The latest Scout Report furnishes the usual amount of brain food. This week's neural delicacies include: Classic Bookshelf, who supply a Java reader as a front-end to their selections that allows you to change the font size and color of your reading window (try their site map for what's currently available); Axis, the largest interactive database of contemporary British art on the Internet, containing 12,500 images from 3,300 artists and makers; Cultivate Interactive, which features articles about electronic cultural heritage projects in Europe, with the first issue including articles about: ARCHEOGUIDE, an augmented reality-based cultural heritage on-site guide, i.e. a system for providing new ways of information access at cultural heritage sites; ECHO, a project to develop a digital library service for historical films belonging to large national archives Museumland, a world-wide portal to museums and cultural heritage Tower Hamlets History On-Line, histories and descriptions of the Tower Hamlets area (e.g. the Isle of Dogs, Limehouse, Shadwell, Wapping, Whitechapel, etc.) of London, with a list of titles for those in a hurry (with my favorite being Mayhew's The curiosities of drunkenness (1881) featuring a lengthy table called "Comparative table of the drunkenness of the different trades in London" - for the curious, buttonmakers are the most and servants the least soused): Oscar Peterson: A Jazz Sensation, a tribute site for Canada's most famous jazz artist who also happens to be a jazz immortal regardless of national origin. posted by Steven Baum 7/7/2000 02:25:32 PM | link Thursday, July 06, 2000 THE INVISIBLE HAND CLENCHES Sara Mosle has been volunteering a lot of time and a lot of money for six years. In The Vanity of Volunteerism in the 7/2/2000 New York Times Magazine she tells of the adventures, misadventures, ups, downs, rewards and frustrations of serving as an unofficial mentor to the families of four of the students in the last third-grade class she taught in 1994. Such volunteerism has been loudly and often publicized as an example of how the sainted private sector is going to take over the government's inefficient, counterproductive and probably evil role in providing services to the poor. Mosle mentions the elder Bush's invocation of "a thousand points of light" in 1988 as the genesis of the volunteerism panacea meme, it having been a response to the consequences of Reagan-era cutbacks in social spending. Since then most politicians have taken up the volunteerism chant since it's one of those feelgood propositions that don't cost a dollar of either real or political capital. And if you're against it - even on the grounds that it's nowhere near the effective replacement it's been touted to be - you might as well be rubbing Junior with tarragon and shoving him in the oven. Mosle puts down the spice jar long enough to tell us: Although 55 percent of Americans reported that they volunteered at some point in 1998 -- a 7 percent rise over 1995 -- this jump does little more than recover ground that was lost in the early 1990's and represents just a 1 percent increase over 1989. Moreover, the total number of hours that people are giving has actually declined. "It's a new trend," says Sara Melendez, the president of Independent Sector, which compiled this data. "People are volunteering, but when they do, it's more of a one-shot deal -- half a day one Saturday, instead of once a week for x number of weeks." Overall, Americans donated 400 million fewer hours in 1998 than they did in 1995. Many of the "new volunteers" see volunteering as another resume item, with the odd hour or three to be packed into their "busy"' schedules a couple of times a month. Much more is needed by, for example, the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program which requires a commitment to regularly seeing a child twice a month. Volunteer "temp agencies" such as Impact Online and New York Cares have even sprung up to match the interests and schedules of these impulse volunteers with openings. While this is certainly efficient, Mosle begs to differ regarding its effectiveness: But this Filofax approach to giving often robs volunteerism of the very thing that was supposed to recommend it over government in the first place -- namely, the personal connection that develops when you regularly visit, say, the same homebound AIDS patient. She also points out that in a volunteer's market not every need has a buyer. And speaking of markets, the benevolent and infinitely superior private sector has predictably enough reached the stygian depths of cynicism regarding this topic: No case perhaps better illustrates how idealism has run amok than that of Bank of America, which under the rubric of "volunteerism" encouraged its employees in San Francisco to "adopt an A.T.M." -- mentoring it, so to speak, by visiting it regularly, sprucing up its surroundings, wiping away the little smudges from its face -- until the California labor commissioner ruled that the company had violated labor laws by trying to get its employees to work without pay. I only wish I'd been there at that high-level bidness meeting to hear that unctuous toady - with freshly minted MBA - run this one up the flagpole: "Yes, sir! We can increase shareholder value 0.03% by convincing our proles that our ATM machines are practical equivalents to AIDS patients and the elderly. They'll feel good about themselves AND we won't have to pay some worthless low-life minimum wage to do it. Would you like me to lick your boots while I'm down here?" A typical case is Meals on Wheels in Dallas, which must hire 30% of its drivers and even then can't find enough help since most of their potential labor force prefers flipping burgers to dealing with the elderly. And it's not going to get any better according to the head of that organization: "The aged population has grown by leaps and bounds in the last decade," Bruant says, "but giving and government financing haven't increased." Yes, Virginia, that huge baby boomer mob is getting old and crotchety. But what about all the prosperity that's been raining down from the heavens since 1993 despite Clinton's reign of terror? Surely the increase in charitable giving combined with the magic of trickle-down economics is floating everyone's boat higher! Not quite: Indeed, according to a study by the U.S. Conference of Mayors released in December, requests for emergency food and housing have climbed at their steepest rate since the early 1990's. As a result, the heads of some of the most reputable nonprofits -- the United Way, the Salvation Army, Catholic Charities -- have reported that they can't keep up with rising demand for their services. "We're having to turn people away, or ration portions, to stretch supplies," says Deborah Leff, the president of America's Second Harvest, the nation's largest network of soup kitchens. And while charitable giving is up sharply, the growth has not kept pace with reductions in government aid to the poor. "People have replaced some of it with volunteering, some of it with cash, but not all of it," says Richard Steinberg, a professor of economics at the joint campus of Indiana and Purdue Universities in Indianapolis. He estimates that for every dollar of assistance that's cut, charitable organizations can recoup at most a third. Other problems are that volunteering is both inefficient and regressive. Most volunteers are located in suburbs deliberately located quite a distance away from the blighted urban neighborhoods needing them. Or, as Mosle puts it: "It would often take me 45 minutes each way by subway just to pick up my kinds." Which leads us to the regressive part: Partly because of this mismatch, volunteering is also regressive. Far from alleviating the gap between rich and poor, it tends to aggravate it. That's because people are most likely to give if they are asked to by someone who knows them or if they already have strong ties to an organization. ... Consequently, time and money tend to stay in a donor's immediate social -- and economic -world. When people talk about giving, they are often talking about contributing to institutions, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the New York City Opera, that confer prestige on the donor and improve the quality of life primarily for the middle class. Despite the roaring economy, organizations that work with the poor have actually seen their proportion of the charitable pie narrow in recent years. "Poverty relief, disaster relief -- it's a very thin slice," says Ann Kaplan, the editor of the annual report Giving U.S.A. A grim picture, indeed. Is there any relief in sight? Mosle provides some in an anecdote about how - after writing an Op-Ed for the Times about her "adopted" kids - she was offered a couple thousand dollars by an organization to start a program for her former students. The money was manna from heaven, but she was able to stretch it a great deal further (albeit for only 12 students when another 1500 at the school equally deserved such a program) because the school was a co-sponsor of the program, i.e. she received a room in which to meet, various supplies, and subway rides all gratis: Together, these items -- the room, the basic supplies, the free transportation -- constituted a considerable capital investment in my program, all of it provided at taxpayer expense. This in turn helped me make the most of my grant money. "Government spending causes volunteering," the economist Richard Steinberg explains. "You can't have a volunteer in a school without a schoolhouse. Government institution-building increases volunteering." I believe they call this - in worshipful tones - "leverage" in the private sector. Mosle mentions that what she's doing used to be called "parenting" a couple of times and eventually releases the following blast (probably additionally prompted by the reams of "save the chillun" rhetoric that also make me want to puke): For all the talk about children in this country, we do very little for them -- or their families. What my kids really need, I can't give them: better housing, less crowded schools, access to affordable health care, a less punitive juvenile justice system, and for their parents, better child care (so they can work without leaving their kids unattended) and a living wage. Even the churches, in whose name the claims of volunteering are often made, have begun to protest. In February, a surprisingly large and diverse coalition of religious leaders -- from the conservative National Association of Evangelicals to the liberal United States Catholic Conference -- came together in Washington to inaugurate a new group, Call to Renewal, to insist that government do more to fight poverty. "Since welfare reform passed, all these problems have been dumped at churches' feet," says the Rev. Jim Wallis, one of the organization's founders. "But we can't do it all." She details the way hunger and homelessness are on the rise in many states because of even the deserving poor getting trampled in the rush to self-righteously yank all benefits in favor of ostensibly morally superior minimum wage jobs, and then offers an exception (or perhaps a bright, shining point of light): Minnesota, by contrast, has offered ample assistance -- cash allowances to supplement income, job training, more opportunities for health and child care -- in addition to requiring that welfare recipients work. The approach hasn't been cheap, but the results, according to a widely praised study released in June, have been remarkable: not only have poverty and homelessness declined but the marriage rate has also risen, domestic abuse is down, truancy rates have fallen and children are doing better in school. The best way to help kids, in short, is not to recruit strangers to take the place of parents, but to help those -- their families and teachers -- who are already in the best position to help them. A useful and blunt dichotomy is the final offering of the article: "If we're going to insist on smaller government and lower taxes," says Sara Melendez at Independent Sector, "then we're going to have to give more individually. But if what we're really saying is that we're giving as much as we can, that we're volunteering as much as we can, then we have a choice. We can either say, 'I don't care what happens to people in need,' or we can make sure that we have the government policies in place to pick up the slack." In other words, those who continue adding their shrieks to the braindead "all gummint evil!" din that originated in the early 80s via the Gipper - despite the evidence to the contrary - should at least have the balls to say "fuck the poor" instead of pinching off the usual mealy-mouthed bullshit about trickle-down economics (which, by the way, many of the the Reagan insiders even considered a joke). posted by Steven Baum 7/6/2000 08:50:04 PM | link MORE NEVERMORE A correspondent read the previous entry and clued me in as to the existence of other constrained versions of "Raven." One is called Near a Raven, another the AANVVV version, and the last is an anagram version. All are part of a fascinating site called Mike Keith's World of Words and Numbers. Other highlights include: The Anagrammed Bible, an "anagrammatic paraphrase" of three complete books of the Old Testament, i.e. the letters in each verse (or block of verses) are rearranged into a new text with similar meaning From Polychords to Polya, which explores the connections between basic musical building blocks and combinatorics "Jurgen: Symphonic Poem for Orchestra, by Deems Taylor", a recording of music based on James Branch Cabell's Jurgen an anagram page that verbally prestidigitizes Bulwer-Lytton, the period table, Dante, and others Cadaeic Cadenza, a short story of 4000 words that provides the world's longest English pi mnemonic (with commentary) a James Branch Cabell Page (that I found yesterday but didn't bother to explore further to find the above) There's much more on special numbers, pi, anagrams, prime numbers, math and music, and other topics. Mike's put together a fascinating and most exploration worthy site in the process of anticipating many of my obsessions. posted by Steven Baum 7/6/2000 09:55:04 AM | link NEVERMORE! Geez, and I thought I had too much time on my hands. Poe's "The Raven" has been transmogrified in a couple of different ways in A. Ross Eckler's Word Recreations, Games and Diversions. These are just a couple more examples of writers experimenting with various literary (or should I say structural?) constraints, with another form being the lipograms I've previously discussed. The first constraint allows the writer to preserve most of the story although very little of the rhyming scheme or meter: Midnight entombed December's naked icebound gulf. Haggard, tired, I nodded, toiling over my books. Eldritch daguerreotyped dank editions cluttered even my bed; Exhaustion reigned. Suddenly, now, a knocking, echoing door I cognized: "Eminent Boreas, open up no door! Go, uninvited lonely frigid haunt! Avaunt, grim guest - and roar! The second is quite a bit less restrictive with most of the rhyming scheme and meter returning: On a midnight, cool and foggy, as I pondered, light and groggy, Ancient books and musty ledgers, not remembered any more, As I nodded, all but napping, there I sensed a muffled tapping, Very much a hushful rapping, just behind my attic door. "'Tis a guest, mayhap," I muttered, "knocking at my attic door -- I can't judge it's any more. And, yes, both "poets" do the whole damned thing within their prescribed limitations. Another nugget to be found therein is a Newspeak version of Hamlet's soliloquy: Person or unperson. Query. Unbellyfeel Ingsoc, oldthink, ownthink, (PLUSUNGOOD THOUGHTCRIME. PENALTY: UNLIFE) Or Ingsoc foolthink doubleplusungood, Own unlife bellyfeel, make self unlifer, Unperson, unofficial. (PENALTY: JOYCAMP) Only unwake: become unlifer. (FOOLTHINK) Unwake, and thusby unperform our Ingsoc duty (GOODWISE NOTE: BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU) seems goodthink (DOUBLEPLUSUNGOOD THOUGHTCRIME). Unwake: become unlifer. In case anyone's feeling cheated (or moreso than usual), I'll tack on an addendum in a day or so explaining what the limitations in each "Raven" version are, although I don't expect any of my sharp as a tack readers to spend much time in the land of confusion. posted by Steven Baum 7/6/2000 12:17:15 AM | link Wednesday, July 05, 2000 ON-LINE BOOKS PAGE MORSELS Some interesting recent additions to the On-Line Books Page - one of my top 25 sites on the Web - are: A Broken System: Error Rates in Capital Cases, 1973-1995 (with an especially salient Summary of Central Findings) Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice by James Branch Cabell, a fantasy writer from the first quarter of last century whose prose, while a bit stylish, makes most of the post-Tolkien fantasy hackwork look as bad as it is Worlds Apart: How the Distance Between Science and Journalism Threatens America's Future by Jim Hartz and Rick Chappell, in which they methodically document that mainstream journalism doesn't get science right either and the reasons why (although I could do without that "threaten" rhetoric in the title) The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, because I really, really like encyclopedias The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication by Charles Darwin, a scanned facsimile available in PDF format of a book in which Chaz typically drowns us in details A History of England: Vol. I, II, III, IV, V by Thomas "that bloody tory!" Macauley Nature's Numbers: Expanding the National Economic Accounts to Include the Environment by the National Academy Press Probability and Algorithms by the National Academy Press La Bonne Soupe Cookbook by Jean-Paul Picot and Doris Tobias The Efficiency Expert by Edgar Rice Burroughs, a famous author and a rare and intriguing title The Leaning Tower of Babel and Other Affronts from the Underground Grammarian by Richard Mitchell, gripes about language (mis)use from one of my favorite cranky writers Mathematics and Physics of Emerging Biomedical Imaging by the National Academy Press Biographical Dictionary of English Literature (1910 Edition) The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States by H. L. Mencken The Best Enemy Money Can Buy by Antony C. Sutton, a conspiracy classic from the "the Trilateral Commission and Bilderbergers are in cahoots with the Soviet collectivists to the detriment of our sacred children" school The Malay Archipelago: Vol. I and II by Alfred Russel Wallace, a contemporary and sort of rival to Darwin (pick up the Dover edition of this if you have the chance) A House-Boat on the Styx by John K. Bangs, a book I've never heard of but the parts I've read so far are damned funny posted by Steven Baum 7/5/2000 10:31:01 PM | link SCHEMES It's just infuckingcredible how many figures of speech there are that deal with word order, syntax, letters and sounds rather than the meaning of words. The term for such beasties is schemes, and that slightly vulgar construction in the previous sentence is known as epenthis or infixation. A short list of schemes is part of the Rhetorical Resources for Students compiled by Kip Wheeler,, who also offers an interesting Heresy Handout. He recommends Arthur Quinn's Figures of Speech as a larger, deeper resource for schemes and related rhetorical devices. A glance through the list tells me I've used most of them, although I never pause to remember other than that a given construct probably does have a name. I place such things in the same category as those Brit group names for birds (which have spawned a cottage industry for coining collective nouns) or their many different equivalents to "carving" for various wild game, i.e. fun things to have around at parties but let's not get anal about them. And now for the obligatory coinage I'm congenitally incapable of not attempting: a defenester of stockbrokers. posted by Steven Baum 7/5/2000 02:31:52 PM | link MORE LOST BOOKS I may not always agree with the choices made on lists of lost literary gems, but I enjoy the hell out of reading the reasons given for the inclusion of particular books. Back in 1997, Salon had a score of writers tell of their choices for books that undeservedly fell through the cracks in a feature called Save These Books. A list of all the chosen books and authors is supplied below, with both title and author separately ABEcized. Many copies of most of them are available, although a few are dear in either quantity or price. Read the original recommendations to link choosing authors with chosen authors. The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones - Stanley Booth A House in Order - Nigel Dennis The Big Con - David Maurer Mindfuckers - David Felton My Talks With Dean Spanley - Lord Dunsany The Making of an Assassin - George McMillan Sears Catalog The Raft is Not the Shore - Daniel Berrigan and Thich Nhat Hanh My Dog Tulip - J. R. Ackerley The African Witch - Joyce Cary This Was Racing - Joe H. Palmer Dear Dead Days - Charles Addams To Absent Friends - Red Smith Lord of Light - Roger Zelazny (although my personal favorite is still Doorways in the Sand, the reasons for which become obvious by about page 5) The Medusa Frequency - Russell Hoban (whose name on a spine is sure to pique my interest) Blue Boy - Jean Giono (more about whom) Alma - Gordon Burn The Cooking of Vienna's Empire - Joseph Wechsberg (part of a Time-Life book series, strangely enough) Life is Elsewhere - Milan Kundera Steps in Time - Fred Astaire The Gospel Singer - Harry Crews (more about whom) A qualitatively similar and quantitatively vaster version of the above is near the top of the "in the works" pile. posted by Steven Baum 7/5/2000 10:29:14 AM | link Monday, July 03, 2000 UNIX SEVENTH EDITION MANUAL The entirety of the 7th edition of the UNIX programming manual is available online. This edition was released in 1978 and forms the basis for nearly all UNIX versions currently available. Most significantly, this edition preceded the split between AT&T's future System V releases and Berkeley's BSD releases, with the latter prompted by AT&T's decision to commercialize the 7th edition and later releases. A Brief History of UNIX provides more details. The printed version originally came in three volumes, with Vol. 1 containing the traditional man pages describing commands, system calls, etc. and Vol. 2A and 2B containing papers describing parts of the system in greater detail. A History of UNIX Before Berkeley: UNIX Evolution, 1975-1984 more fully describes the contents, purposes and intended users of these manuals: The UNIX Manuals are a prime source of information about UNIX. It's trendy to deride the UNIX manuals, but for their intended purpose and audience the Bell Laboratories man pages generally exemplify good technical writing: concise, accurate, and to the point. The Programmer's Manual or User's Manual as it is variously called, more colloquially known as ``Volume 1'', summarizes in a standard format each command, system call, library function, and many special files (in the technical sense!), system file formats, games, miscellany, and maintenance information. Comparing a series of manuals of different vintages offers the student of UNIX evolution a good view on changing conditions. Volume Two of the Manual set (beginning with PWB and V7; before that it all fit in one binder) is a series of short papers. These range from notes on installing the system to reference manuals on compilers to introductory tutorials. These, too, are typically well-written but occasionally incomplete. They are concise and to the point; some people find this obscure. Remember the audience and the background. The papers are written for the benefit of someone with the source code and with some knowledge of the system. It was always assumed that you would have somebody around to help you - a wizard. Or you would go to the conferences and ask others about problems. A careful reading of the manuals was (and is) required to become a wizard, along with hands-on time spent using (and eventually modifying) the system, learning by doing. While volume 1 has gotten a bit creaky with age what with changes in the details for specific commands, the articles in volume 2 are still valuable for both historical and pedagogical purposes. The contents of the latter were split into several sections over volumes 2A and 2B: General Works 7th Edition UNIX - Summary The UNIX Time-Sharing System - D. Ritchie and K. Thompson Getting Started UNIX for Beginners (2nd Ed.) - B. Kernighan A Tutorial Introduction to the UNIX Text Editor - B. Kernighan Advanced Editing on UNIX- B. Kernighan An Introduction to the UNIX Shell - S. Bourne Learn: Computer Aided Instruction on UNIX - M. Lesk and B. Kernighan Document Preparation Typing Documents on the UNIX System - M. Lesk A System for Typesetting Mathematics - B. Kernighan and L. Cherry (describes the EQN language) TBL: A Program to Format Tables - M. Lesk Some Applications of Inverted Indexes on the UNIX System - M. Lesk (describes the REFER program) NROFF/TROFF User's Manual - J. Ossanna A TROFF Tutorial - B. Kernighan Programming The C Programming Language Reference Manual - D. Ritchie Lint: A C Program Checker - S. Johnson Make: A Program for Maintaining Computer Programs - S. I. Feldman UNIX Programming - B. Kernighan and D. Ritchie A Tutorial Introduction to ADB - J. Maranzano and S. Bourne Supporting Tools and Languages YACC: Yet Another Compiler-Compiler - S. Johnson LEX: A Lexical Analyzer Generator - M. Lesk and E. Schmidt A Portable Fortran 77 Compiler - S. Feldman and P. Weinberger Ratfor: A Preprocessor for a Rational Fortran - B. Kernighan The M4 Macro Processor - B. Kernighan and D. Ritchie SED: A Non-interactive Text Editor - L. McMahon AWK: A Pattern Scanning and Processing Language - A. Aho, B. Kernighan and P. Weinberger DC: A Interactive Desk Calculator - R. Morris and L. Cherry BC: An Arbitrary Precision Desk Calculator Language - L. Cherry and R. Morris UNIX Assembler Reference Manual - D. Ritchie Implementation, Maintenance, and Miscellaneous Setting Up UNIX (7th Ed.) - C. Haley and D. Ritchie Regenerating System Software - C. Haley and D. Ritchie UNIX Implementation - K. Thompson (how the system actually works inside) The UNIX I/O System - D. Ritchie A Tour Through the UNIX C Compiler - D. Ritchie A Dial-Up Network of UNIX Systems - D. Nowitz and M. Lesk (describes UUCP) UUCP Implementation Description - D. Nowitz On the Security of UNIX - D. Ritchie Password Security: A Case History - R. Morris and K. Thompson At 336 and 250 pages (in PDF or PostScript format) the two parts of volume 2 make for nearly 600 pages of corking good documentation written by the same elder gods who wrote the programs. And even a casual perusal of the topics covered shows that that damned clever bunch had just about everything other than TCP/IP figured out over 20 years ago. If you've any sort of interest in the history and development of UNIX, these documents deserve a tour. posted by Steven Baum 7/3/2000 04:03:04 PM | link METAREPLY Heh. I ain't no Brit, although I play one on the Internet and Sam "bugger I've trod in some horseshit!" Johnson's one of my oldest and dearest drinking buddies. I really like the "ain't exactly eye candy" phrase, by the way, seeing how it so pithily summarizes the essence of my aesthetic goals vis a vis Ethel (not to mention providing a connection betwixt blog and proprieter). I wish I'd said it, and I probably will. P.S. Boy howdy but the inevitable backlash phase of all this is gonna be fun. My fingertips are drooling. P.P.S. Thanks. posted by Steven Baum 7/3/2000 12:58:50 PM | link PRACTICAL REUSABLE UNIX SOFTWARE While it isn't open source, the binary (and occasionally source) code associated with Practical Reusable UNIX Software (edited by B. Krishnamurthy) is freely available for non-commercial uses. It's also quite interesting. A brief summary from the back cover tells us: Over the past few years, researchers working at AT&T Bell Laboratories have developed a set of powerful new tools and software libraries that significantly streamline the job of software development by enhancing software reuse. A set of libraries called the ast (advanced software technology) provide the underpinnings for the rest of the packages. These libraries were developed as part of a research program to build highly portable advanced software development tools, and cover a broad spectrum including functions traditionally provided by libc (although more portable), general network connection functions, C expression evaluation, data compression, and more. The underpinnings for most of the accompanying software are provided by libast, a set of libraries covering a broad spectrum of functionality including functions traditionally provided in libc (although more portable), general network connection functions, C expression evaluation, data compression, and others. The libraries are: libast, a base library providing a common header and function interface for many UNIX systems and C compilers, e.g. implementation specific details are confined to this such that most ast tools are programmed with architecture specific #ifdefs; libcmd, contains rewritten versions of many common commands in the IEEE POSIX 100.2 Standard for shell and utilities, with each command implemented as a self-contained library function;' screen, functions for manipulating character terminals, i.e. a replacement for (n)curses with enhancments including a logical window hierarchy model and an efficient screen update algorithm; stak, a set of macros and functions for conveniently and efficiently building stack-like memory objects; libcoshell, provides a flexible alternative to the traditional system or fork, exec, wait methods for command execution wherein the shell is supported as a coprocess rather than executing a separate shell for each job; libcs, simplifies the Internet service addressing scheme by placing service names in the file system namespace and providing a common interface based on either BSD sockets or System V TLI; libexpr, an alternative for commands that require runtime expression evaluation that provides routines for parsing and evaluating simple C-style expressions; and libpp, a C preprocessor library that is runtime compatible with all C dialects. Additional libraries built on top of these (using a "disciplines and methods" procedure discussed in the book) include: sfio, a replacement for stdio that also provides many new features including string streams, portable numerical data, and safe and efficient buffer access; vdelta, a library that both compresses data and computes data differences, combining what are usually separate functions; libdict, a dictionary library that provides a set of functions for managing objects in runtime dictionaries; vmalloc, a virtual memory allocation library that provides a set of functions for managing any type of runtime memory; libgraph, which defines a standard graph data language and a small collection of C data types and primitives; n-DFS, a user-level library providing an implementation of a multiple dimensional file system that exists as a logical layer between the operating system and user applications and provides: a viewpathing service wherein a logical directory can refer to a sequence of physical directories/trees; a versioning service for providing multiple versions of files; an event notification service that collects file access events and notifies remote event-action servers; a visual process manager that monitors interactions among a group of processes; a tree replication service for replicating files; and a parrot service that presents users with a coherent, single copy view of two loosely connected replicated physical file systems. Several useful applications are built on top of these libraries including: nmake, a variant of the traditional make program that maintains state that records information for future runs; ksh, a shell and tool building language that had several new features implemented in 1993 (to make it competitive with other tools like Perl) including: floating point arithmetic; associative arrays; additional string processing capabilities; a hierarchical namespace for shell variables; formatted output; runtime built-in commands; support for internationalization; and usability as a library. EASEL, a language and system for writing end-user text-based applications based on interactive constructs, e.g. windows, forms, menus and hypertext; APP, an annotation preprocessor for C programs designed as a replacement for the standard preprocessor pass of C compilers to make the process of creating and running self-checking programs (that automatically check their own assertions) as simple as building unannotated C programs; CIA, a C information abstraction system for facilitating reverse engineering whose tools (mostly built as reusable ksh scripts) include: a database construction tool; a layer of basic query tools; program visualization tools; and program analysis tools. watchd, a watchdog daemon process for detecting application process failures and machine crashes; libft, a user-level library of C functions for specifying and checkpointing critical data, recovering checkpointed data, logging events, and locating and reconnecting servers; REPL, a file replication mechanism running on a pair of machines for online replication of critical files; YEAST, a platform for constructing distributed event-action applications using high-level event-action specifications; dotty, a customizable graph editor; TESTTUBE, a system for selective retesting that identifies which subset of a test suite must be rerun to test a new version of a system; Xray, a program animation system that animates the sequence of function calls taking place during program execution; and VPM, a visual process manager providing real-time views of processes executing on a network of UNIX machines. One could spend months experimenting with small parts of this suite of libraries and applications if one had the desire. Software Bob sez check it out. posted by Steven Baum 7/3/2000 09:52:34 AM | link

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