TidBITS#871/19-Mar-07
=====================
Issue link: <http://db.tidbits.com/issue/871>
Remember Gopher? The Internet protocol for retrieving files that
preceded the World Wide Web isn't dead, writes Cameron Kaiser, but
surviving (where else?) underground. Glenn Fleishman notes new
capabilities for the Pando file-sharing service that drastically cut
the costs of hosting large, popular files such as podcasts. Also in
this issue, Adam notes a New York Times program that gives free
TimesSelect access to higher-education faculty and students and
points to interesting new research about why hard drives fail; Andy
J. W. Affleck records the praises of Freeverse's Sound Studio 3.5
update; and Jeff Carlson passes on news of Mark/Space's public beta
of The Missing Sync for BlackBerry. Finally, Apple last week
released Mac OS X 10.4.9 and Security Update 2007-003, as well as
bug-fix updates iTunes 7.1.1 and iPod Reset Utility 1.0.
Articles
Grab Bag of Security Fixes and Patches for Mac OS X
Mark/Space Adds BlackBerry Sync
iTunes 7.1.1 and iPod Reset Utility 1.0 Fix Bugs
TimesSelect Free for Higher Ed
Sound Studio 3.5 Adds Numerous Features
Hard Drive Failures and Contributory Storage
Pando Further Eases Big File Distribution
Down the Gopher Hole
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/19-Mar-07
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Grab Bag of Security Fixes and Patches for Mac OS X
---------------------------------------------------
by Glenn Fleishman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/8907>
Last week Apple updated Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger to version 10.4.9 and
provided a security update for Mac OS X 10.3.9 Panther. The security
update is incorporated into the Tiger update, and could have been
labeled "Fixes for the Month of Apple Bugs," a project we have
written about before (see "MoAB Is My Washpot," 2007-02-19).
<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304821>
<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305214>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/8869>
Security Update 2007-003 and the related code in Mac OS X 10.4.9 fix
dozens of problems reported in the Month of Apple Bugs, including
what was the most serious remaining problem, a way to exploit a flaw
in Software Update by "enticing a user to download and open a
Software Update Catalog file." We haven't seen reports of this - or
any of the rest of the bugs - in the wild. Most of the non-MoAB
exploits fixed by the security update require local users with
access to an account and software that isn't enabled by default in
Mac OS X.
There's no simple way to summarize 10.4.9's general enhancements.
Like the last few updates to Tiger, this one is a grab bag of fixes
for numerous individual problems, and it's likely the last big
hurrah for Tiger, as Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard's ostensible ship date
moves ever closer. Although Apple could release a 10.4.10, history
shows us they prefer the numerical purity of single digits. (Jaguar
ended its run with 10.2.8 and Panther with 10.3.9.)
Notable among the general changes are improvements to .Mac
synchronization. As a regular .Mac sync user, I have seen lots of
inconsistent behavior and long delays. I'm hoping 10.4.9 eliminates
these problems. Another fix related to USB modems I have to call out
as "I fax in your general direction": the note says that the update
improves reliability in faxing in France or Belgium when using the
Apple USB Modem.
Apple has made available separate incremental and combo updates for
PowerPC and Intel systems running both Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server;
you can use Software Update to download the best updater for your
system or view all eight updates from the Apple downloads page. The
combo updates work for 10.4.0 and later; the incremental releases
work for 10.4.8. Set aside some download time, since the size of the
updates runs from 72 MB (PowerPC incremental) to 350 MB (Mac OS X
Server Intel combo). Panther's Security Update 2007-003 is also
available both via Software Update and as standalone downloads for
both Mac OS X (36 MB) and Mac OS X Server (49.5 MB).
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/>
As always, if you experience any unusual problems after updating,
particularly with applications not launching, download and install
the combo updater for your Mac, since it can provide a cleaner
installation.
Apple also released iPhoto 6.0.6, which "addresses issues with EXIF
data compatibility and photocasting." The photocasting fix is in
response to another Month of Apple Bugs report. It's also available
via Software Update or as an 8 MB standalone download.
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/iphoto606.html>
Mark/Space Adds BlackBerry Sync
-------------------------------
by Jeff Carlson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/8912>
A few months ago, Glenn Fleishman and I wrote a feature article for
Macworld about using smartphones with the Mac (see "Get in Sync" in
the January 2007 issue). When we tested BlackBerry devices,
PocketMac for BlackBerry, which TidBITS also covered a year ago in
"Putting BlackBerries in Your PocketMac" (2006-02-06), was the only
method of synchronizing data between RIM's smartphones and the Mac.
<http://www.macworld.com/2006/12/features/sync_main/>
<http://www.blackberry.com/>
<http://www.pocketmac.com/products/pmblackberry/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/8413>
Recently, a new contender has emerged. Mark/Space is currently
offering a fully functional public preview of The Missing Sync for
BlackBerry as a 9.2 MB download. Like other versions of The Missing
Sync, this one uses Mac OS X's Sync Services to synchronize data
between the BlackBerry and Address Book, iCal, or other programs
that also use Sync Services. It also features photo and music
transfers from iPhoto and iTunes on the BlackBerry Pearl. Remember
that this is still beta software; Mark/Space has posted a list of
known issues. It requires Mac OS X 10.4.8 or later, and a BlackBerry
device running version 4.0 or later of the operating system. The
completed version of the program is expected to ship by the end of
this quarter; pricing has not been announced.
<http://www.markspace.com/missingsync_blackberry.php>
<http://www.markspace.com/missingsync_bb_issues.html>
iTunes 7.1.1 and iPod Reset Utility 1.0 Fix Bugs
------------------------------------------------
by Jeff Carlson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/8913>
Apple has released iTunes 7.1.1, an update that "addresses a
stability issue and minor compatibility problems in iTunes 7.1,"
according to Apple. The update is available via Software Update or
as a 28 MB stand-alone download. A 36.1 MB download for Windows is
also available.
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/itunes711formac.html>
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/itunes711forwindows.html>
The company also released iPod Reset Utility 1.0 for Mac (3.4 MB)
and Windows (2.2 MB), which is designed to reset either generation
of iPod shuffle if iTunes is unable to reset it.
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/ipodresetutility10formac.html>
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/ipodresetutility10forwindows.html>
TimesSelect Free for Higher Ed
------------------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/8910>
After all my puzzling over how to create permanent links to articles
in the New York Times (see "Easier New York Times Linking,"
2007-02-26), I was amused to hear from a friend that the New York
Times is now making TimesSelect free to any student or faculty
member with a valid college or university email address. TimesSelect
includes access to articles from the New York Times Op-Ed and news
columnists in both text and podcast forms, along with up to 100
articles per month from the full New York Times Archive, which
contains content back to 1851.
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/8881>
<http://www.nytimes.com/gst/ts_university_email_verify.html>
Sound Studio 3.5 Adds Numerous Features
---------------------------------------
by Andy J. Williams Affleck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/8914>
Freeverse has released Sound Studio 3.5, which adds many new
features of interest to all users of this excellent audio editor and
recorder. Sound Studio has long been my favorite tool for editing
audio files, whether I'm producing a podcast, trimming a file in my
iTunes library, or recording my son's funny snore one night (and
later removing the laptop fan noise from the recording - it's
important to have high quality embarrassment material for when he's
a teenager).
<http://www.freeverse.com/soundstudio/>
Among Sound Studio 3.5's many new features are the addition of new
audio formats for opening and saving, including Apple Lossless, ADTS
AAC, NeXT/Sun Audio, and Ogg Vorbis. In addition, Sound Studio now
supports 8-, 16-, and 24-Kbps bit rates when saving MP3 format
files.
<http://forum.freeverse.com/viewtopic.php?pid=3387>
For podcasters, Sound Studio has added the capability to manage all
iTunes-supported tags, including the podcast bit that determines
whether a file appears in the Podcasts section of iTunes or in the
regular Music section. This is a major boon to me, since I would
like to move podcasts I want to keep into my music collection and
let all others automatically delete themselves after listening,
something that's been difficult to accomplish so far. Now I can open
the file in Sound Studio, toggle the appropriate checkbox and
re-import the file into iTunes where it appears in my Music section
rather than in the Podcasts section. The reverse approach enables
you to move spoken audio files from the Music section into the
Podcasts section, if you so desire.
Podcasters will also appreciate the fact that markers set by Sound
Studio within audio files are now automatically saved as chapters in
podcasts. In other words, when playing back in iTunes, the marker
titles are listed within the Chapters menu and enable one to jump
directly to that spot in the playback. (For more information on how
to use Sound Studio for podcasting, see my ebook, "Take Control of
Podcasting on the Mac.")
<http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/podcasting-mac.html?14@@!pt=TB871>
Other enhancements in Sound Studio 3.5 include new preferences for
how scrolling occurs during playback, the capability to loop sound
in filter previews (rather than requiring you to play the sound over
and over as you make adjustments), and new AppleScript support for
referencing individual tracks and changing the pan and volume of
each track.
Finally, Sound Studio now provides an innovative way to set the
beats per minute (BPM) of a track. BPM is a piece of metadata that
appears in the iTunes tag editor and as part of the display grid of
the main Sound Studio window; it can be useful for generating smart
playlists of slow or fast music in iTunes. All you have to do to set
the beats per minute is click a button in time with the rhythm of
the music.
Sound Studio 3.5 costs $80, and upgrades are free to registered
owners of 3.0 or higher. Special upgrade pricing for users of
earlier versions is available as well, as is a free demo (a 10.2 MB
download) for anyone who hasn't yet tried Sound Studio.
<http://www.freeverse.com/download/select.php?name=soundstudio&platform=osx>
<http://dev.freeverse.com:16080/faq/index.php?action=artikel&cat=394881&id=84>
[Andy J. Williams Affleck built Dartmouth College's first Web site
in 1993, created the original Web site for the sitcom Friends, and
started a virtual community that's still around a decade later. When
he's not producing his Podcrumbs podcast or working on "Take Control
of Podcasting on the Mac," he's a senior project manager and
accessible Web design expert.]
<http://www.podcrumbs.com/>
Hard Drive Failures and Contributory Storage
--------------------------------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/8911>
At last month's 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage
Technologies, two academic papers - one from Bianca Schroeder and
Garth A. Gibson of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and the other by
Eduardo Pinheiro, Wolf-Dietrich Weber, and Luiz André Barroso of
Google - looked at the reliability of hard drives in large-scale
installations. Among other conclusions, the CMU team found that
real-world replacement rates were much higher than would have been
expected from vendor-provided mean time to failure (MTTF) estimates,
and Google's researchers concluded that there was little correlation
between failure and either elevated temperature or activity levels.
The papers weren't written for the lay audience and aren't easy
reading, but they are worth a look if you're interested in when and
why hard disk mechanisms fail.
<http://www.usenix.org/events/byname/fast.html>
<http://www.usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder/schroeder_html/>
<http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf>
Also interesting is the paper by James Cipar, Mark D. Corner, and
Emery D. Berger of the University of Massachusetts Amherst on the
Transparent File System (TFS). The goal of TFS is to create a
contributory storage system in which multiple people could
contribute unused disk space to a shared pool, much as the [EMAIL PROTECTED]
project enables users to contribute unused CPU cycles to the shared
task of analyzing radio telescope data. (And yes, there is still an
active TidBITS team for [EMAIL PROTECTED]) Apparently, TFS can contribute
all of the unused space on a disk while imposing only a negligible
performance drag on the contributor. Prototype source code is
available; I'll be curious to see if anyone cleans it up and ports
it to MacFUSE (see "MacFUSE Explodes Options for Mac File Systems,"
2007-01-29).
<http://www.usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/cipar/cipar_html/>
<http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/>
<http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/team_display.php?teamid=30293>
<http://prisms.cs.umass.edu/tcsm/TFS.html>
<http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/8835>
Pando Further Eases Big File Distribution
-----------------------------------------
by Glenn Fleishman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/8908>
The file-distribution system run by Pando has opened itself up to
developers and podcasters (for more information about Pando and
related services, see "Secure Transfer Using Civil Netizen and
Pando," 2006-08-21). Instead of managing your own bandwidth and
dealing with your service provider's limits or their overage charges
on busy months, you can now employ Pando's combination of
centralized and distributed downloading at no cost at all for files
of up to 1 GB in size. Larger files can be distributed with Pando's
paid levels of service.
<http://pando.com/>
<http://developers.pando.com/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/8649>
With Pando, you upload an individual file or set of files (a
"package") via a free application that incorporates advertising into
its display. When you upload the package, you can provide email
notification, where up to 10 people per transmission (for free
publisher accounts) initially receive a Pando link to download the
package or file. You can also receive a special link that you can
send separately and some HTML to post on a Web site for download. In
essence, Pando's client application works like a combination of an
email application and a file manager. It's available for Mac OS X
10.3.9 and later, along with Windows 2000 SP4, XP, and Vista.
<http://www.tidbits.com/resources/2007-03/Pando-interface.jpg>
<http://pando.com/download>
The copy of Pando running on your computer is also a "peer," or a
potential uploading server, in a peer-to-peer network that Pando
uses to connect anyone who has downloaded or wants to download the
package in question. For files you want to distribute as broadly as
possible - like a podcast, software download, or white paper PDF -
the more people running Pando with a downloaded copy of that item,
the greater the distribution network.
This method is what has driven the popularity of BitTorrent, but the
addition of central servers to prime the pump and ensure a minimum
level of bandwidth gives Pando some advantages. Pando requires
accounts, and with a premium subscription as a publisher, you can
even control who can download and use files.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent>
With the addition of a developer site and associated toolkits and
recipes for distributing files, you can bypass using the Pando
program to upload files as a publisher. Anyone wanting to download
files must first install Pando, but if you have sufficiently
compelling content or if Pando really takes off - especially if they
can get their software bundled by computer makers - that will be no
bar. For anyone whose audience has no interest in using a separate
application to retrieve files, Pando isn't yet a solution. But as a
measure of their current popularity, Pando says they push 60
terabytes of downloads a day across their network.
For instance, you can convert your existing podcast RSS feed to work
via Pando, and any audio or video enclosures are automatically
retrieved by Pando and converted into retrievable packages.
Currently, you need to request that Pando (the company) enable this
option for your feed. But you can also use the Pando program to
create URLs for uploaded files that you can embed in a Web page and
that work in RSS feeds. A recent upgrade to the Pando application
lets the program subscribe to Pando-compatible RSS feeds; for
instance, they have a sample high-definition video channel that lets
you download specific videos directly within Pando from that
channel.
<http://developers.pando.com/rss-feed-converter>
A software developer could offload some of the distribution burden
for new files by using Pando's application programming interface
(API), the programmer's toolkit, to create a package for files
uploaded to the developer's Web site. Adding peers increases the
efficiency of peer-to-peer networks; thus, a popular new application
or update would have an extremely efficient Pando profile.
Pando uses advertising to defray the costs of its free service. The
company also recently added three tiers of paid service; if you pay,
you can transfer larger files to larger initial distribution lists,
and your files can remain on Pando's central servers for longer
periods of time. Right now, the free service allows packages of up
to 1 GB each to be transferred, and it keeps the files active on
Pando's servers for either 7 days (for Pando-emailed or
IM-distributed files) and 30 days (for Web posted files) after the
most recent download or message forward through their system.
<http://www.pando.com/premium>
All three higher level services - Plus, Pro, and Publisher - allow
password protection of packages, weekday 24-hour technical support,
and no advertising. They also let you send messages from within
Pando to 100 people at a time rather than 10.
The Plus ($5 per month) and Pro ($20 per month) service increase
maximum package sizes to 3 GB and 5 GB, respectively, and both allow
Pando-distributed and IM-distributed packages to remain for 30 days
without any downloads or forwards, rather than 7. The Publisher
package allows packages up to 50 GB, and unlimited persistence on
Pando's servers.
**Pando versus Other Services** -- Let's compare these offerings with
other typical bandwidth charges. Amazon's Simple Storage System (S3)
costs 20 cents per GB transferred, plus 15 cents per GB stored each
month. Many co-location firms charge $1 to $2 per GB transferred
with some monthly included amount. And some ISPs offer truly insane
transfer amounts, notably DreamHost, which includes 2 TB per month
in its $10 per month accounts.
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16427261>
<http://www.dreamhost.com/hosting.html>
At those prices, delivering, say, 10,000 one-megabyte files each
month, or 10 GB of data, costs me nothing with Pando, $10 with
DreamHost, $0 to $10 with a co-location host (if I'm under or over
my allotment, respectively), and $2 with Amazon. Scale that up to 1
TB a month of smaller-than-1 GB packages, and it's free with Pando,
$10 with DreamHost (unless they decide my usage is abusive), at
least $800 and as much as $1,800 with a co-location host (assuming
100 GB to 200 GB of included usage), and $200 with Amazon (plus a
few dollars for storage).
I'm particularly interested in this subject because of the potential
risk for average people as an increasing number of us host audio,
video, and other huge files, and thus face the peril of popularity.
Nearly four years ago, I ran into just this problem when I tried to
give away an electronic version of "Real World Adobe GoLive," a book
I co-authored with Jeff Carlson (for the full story see "Publish
(Electronically) and Perish?" 2003-03-24 and "The Boy Who Cried
Bandwidth," 2003-04-07). I wrote about how it all worked out in the
end in the New York Times, but I could have been on the hook for up
to $15,000. (In that case, an older method of sustained transfers
had ridiculous tiered levels of fees: one toe over the line, and
whammo!)
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/7115>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/7144>
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/24/technology/circuits/24band.html/partner/rssnyt>
Most network service providers charge you for the bandwidth you use
over your monthly allotment; these companies tend to run co-location
facilities that house hundreds or thousands of servers. Many
Internet service providers, along with Apple and its .Mac service,
cut you off when you hit your limit; ISPs tend to provide bandwidth
to residential and business customers, and they try to preserve
bandwidth rather than serve hosting customers. It's annoying to be
taken offline, but at least you know that you're just out of luck,
but not out of pocket, when you hit the limit.
I like the notion that Pando is bearing some of the risk for
popularity, but balancing that with fees for higher levels of use
and support. I also like the notion that bandwidth is such a
commodity that Pando can use advertising to offset the cost of most
file delivery. Pando needs to hit a mass audience to make the mental
cost of downloading its application approach zero - or get
pre-installed deals with computer makers - but this latest addition
makes it increasingly likely that "Pando me that file" could become
a common phrase.
Down the Gopher Hole
--------------------
by Cameron Kaiser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/8909>
[Editor's Note: Some of the URLs in this article use the gopher://
scheme rather than the familiar http:// scheme. These gopher URLs
can be viewed directly in Camino or Firefox, but if you are using
Safari, which does not support the Gopher protocol, view these pages
using the HTTP<->gopher proxy. For more information, check out this
document describing Gopher support in most Web browsers.]
<http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/>
<http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?gopher/0/gopher/wbgopher>
Back in the early 1990s, when I was an undergraduate at the
University of California camping out in the beat-up, 24-hour-a-day,
VT100 terminal lab under one of the lecture halls, the World Wide
Web was, well, not very wide and certainly didn't encompass much of
the world. Graphical interface to the Internet? Are you kidding?
Most of what the Internet had to offer then could be viewed on those
text screens. All my activity happened while logged in over a serial
port to one of the campus Unix servers.
Still, that monochromatic interface was the gateway to an
interconnected world of computers very much like the Web - a world
accessible both to the people typing away on those ancient dumb
terminals, and to the lucky folks on the spanking new Mac IIci
computers in the Mac labs. It had weather, headline news, music,
search engines, and even video clips (if I could use one of the
Macs). This was Gopherspace, and it's still alive today.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)>
<gopher://gopher.floodgap.com:70/0/gopher/welcome>
Back in 1991, Gopher sprang out of a University of Minnesota campus
information service project aimed at building a "friendly" method of
accessing university documents and services. (The University of
Minnesota's sports teams are the Golden Gophers.) In those days,
most campuses and corporations maintained their own walled-garden
services and access policies, and almost all of them operated in
unique and sometimes wildly different manners.
In contrast, Gopher provided a unified, consistent hierarchical
interface to access everything. The approach translated well to both
text and graphical interfaces, and better still, it offered an easy
way to connect a varied set of hosts using simple links. This beat
the stuffing out of getting files via FTP, which usually required
using a command line. Gopher's method was a large improvement over
interacting with library and campus directory systems via Telnet and
trying to remember how to compose searches from system to system.
Thanks to Gopher, the public resources other servers offered weren't
merely accessible - they were usable.
Within a year or two, many other campuses were using Gopher for
their own local operations, along with some private users and
corporations. Gopher servers and gateways pulled together many
disparate Internet resources, such as local directories and white
pages (using CSO), and access to FTP servers and WAIS (Wide Area
Information Servers - WAIS was an early standardized way to search
remote databases).
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_area_information_server>
At the same time that Gopher's purview expanded, point-and-click
Gopher clients appeared, including some for Macs - remember
TurboGopher, anyone? An increasing amount of information started to
pour into Gopherspace, including electronic books, email magazines,
pictures, programs, software and more.
<gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/gopher/clients/mac>
<http://www.bio.net/bionet/mm/bio-soft/1992-October/003180.html>
Sorting through that growing mass of content required yet another
piece of software: a search engine called Veronica (its name was a
play on Archie, the search engine for FTP). No accounting tells us
exactly how many Gopher servers existing during Gopherspace's
heyday, but I remember all seven Veronica servers being busy during
the day. As the Web become more generally popular, Gopher links were
still rampant on Web pages because a lot of data was still in
Gopherspace.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_(computer)>
By 1995, Gopherspace had largely evaporated, thanks to a combination
of the University of Minnesota's restrictive and expensive licensing
policies (they eventually released Gopher under the open-source GPL
license, but years too late) and the wide availability of a better
technology. The new technology had the same interconnectedness of
resources, while offering a prettier interface and wider
possibilities for creative and informational communication.
Naturally, that was - and is - the Web.
<http://listserv.uh.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9303b&L=pacs-l&T=0&P=5660>
<http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html>
The University of Minnesota tried to salvage Gopher, with neat
tricks like merging Gopherspace with virtual reality via the
GopherVR project, but the Web had already passed Gopher by.
Fascinated as I was with the Gopher world I used to inhabit, I threw
together my first bits of HTML and put up my own home page on the
Web in 1994, and Gopher became history to me, too.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GopherVR>
Or was it? In 1998, while working as a programmer for Point Loma
Nazarene University in San Diego, I wondered what happened to the
old world down the Gopher hole. I brought up my own Gopher server
software on the Apple Network Server sitting in the office early in
1999 and told it to go find the other Gopher servers out there.
Surprisingly, a few answers came back.
The University of Minnesota's Gopher pages still worked, and they
still had most of their links to former Gopher peers. Many of those
hosts had turned into Web sites, and some had utterly disappeared,
but a few were not only still operating but also still maintaining
their content. I started compiling a list and trying to index their
content, and eventually I put my database up for searching and
browsing as gopher.ptloma.edu (with the IT department's blessing),
the host that was the forerunner of Floodgap's Gopher server.
<gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/>
Other people had been wondering what happened to Gopher, too, and
had erected their own servers independently. One day I got an email
message from a fellow named John Goerzen, who had also written his
own new Gopher software to run a service he whimsically called quux.
Better still, along with his new content, he had managed to preserve
a fair number of the archives of old Gopher sites that I thought had
disappeared without a trace.
<gopher://gopher.quux.org/>
John was only the first of many people I would hear from who
remembered the quick simplicity of Gopherspace. It got to the point
where I started tracking all the new hobby and user servers that
were cropping up. I even received a letter from Mark McCahill, one
of Gopher's original architects, after he noticed the new Veronica
clone that I had thrown together out of the data the Gopher crawler
had acquired.
<gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/v2/>
Gopherspace had never disappeared after all; it had just gone
underground. Even after the University of Minnesota finally turned
off gopher.tc.umn.edu a few years later, Gopher hobbyists live on,
writing new features (like the Gopher "phlog"), creating clients and
software, and adding new content to their own little worlds. Plus,
most of the old Gopherspace archives now have new homes, meaning
most of their content is still available today.
<gopher://hal3000.cx/1/Phlog>
<gopher://home.jumpjet.info/>
<gopher://gopher.quux.org/1/Archives>
Nevertheless, Gopher remains more than just a living fossil. In a
world where flash (and sometimes Flash) is often more important than
substance, Gopher replaces all the trappings with a clean, sterile,
and consistent interface of folders and files. The Gopher sites that
people visit have real content and real function, so there's nothing
but a menu between you and gigabytes and gigabytes of data. You can
still access Gopherspace with a dumb terminal just as well as you
can with a Mac Pro. It loads quickly over a dial-up link, and it's
instantaneous over a broadband connection. You can still get weather
reports in Gopherspace, you can still read mailing lists and
headline news, there are still lots of files for downloading, and
heck, you can even read TidBITS! (Thanks to Adam Engst for granting
permission.)
<gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/groundhog/>
<gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/feeds/>
<gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/feeds/tidbits/>
More people are discovering that there's an alternative to the World
Wide Web for many functions, and better still, an alternative that
can co-exist seamlessly with the Web - all the Mozilla-based Web
browsers work fine as Gopher clients too. Maybe it's for that reason
that the Power Mac 7300+G3 that runs gopher.floodgap.com today still
gets a few thousand hits daily.
Yes, there are far fewer Gopher hosts than there used to be (86
hosts and 740,000 unique resources, as I glance at the robot
statistics file while I perform maintenance on the Veronica-2
index). But the world down the Gopher hole is still alive more than
15 years from its inception. If the Web seems to be a heavy or
fluffy distraction as you wait for your browser to grind through
another Flash animation and a pile of ads, perhaps it's time you
took a trip back underground for a glance at the simpler and cleaner
world that the Internet used to be.
[Cameron Kaiser is a recovering database administrator and
programmer who unwisely got an MD instead and now works as a county
health physician in Southern California. He drives old United States
highways, maintains old Commodore and Apple computers, and
relentlessly implements old information technologies on his "$50
Wal-Mart server rack" in his rapidly disappearing spare time. He has
used Macs since 1987 except for a brief stint we shall not talk
about.]
<http://www.floodgap.com/>
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/19-Mar-07
------------------------------------
by TidBITS Staff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/8916>
**Nike+iPod Only for Fitness Runners** -- Adam's article about the
running device elicits discussion of stride lengths and the
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<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/1178/>
**TidBITS 2007 Reader Survey Results: Who Are You?** Readers respond
to the first results of our reader survey, including readers under
the age of 21 and a question of how the data breaks down. (3
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<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/1179/>
**I lived through Daylight Saving 2007 and survived!** Disaster
averted, readers note some of the side effects of this year's
adjusted Daylight Saving Time. (3 messages)
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/1180/>
**Mac OS X update weirdness?** Mac OS X 10.4.9 causes some sporadic
problems, which seem to be solved by using the combo updater on
Intel-based Macs. Also, a new delay in ejecting discs appears to be
a feature, not a problem. (11 messages)
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/1181/>
$$
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