Boring ENGL366E Assignment

[Clothing, housewares, bric-a-brac. Cambridge, MA. May
2000.]

A Very Workman-Like Page

for an ENGL366E assingment,
lovingly thrown together by Mike Sugimoto

To fulfill my assignment obligations, I'm assembling this page to do exactly what the instructions tell me to do. As a part of the admonishment to complete something more advanced, I offer a couple of suggestions of other places that I'm going to lump into my assignment.

Without further ado, let's get started.

"dot-C-A, dot-N-U, M-O-U-S-E"

ccTLDs (country-code Top Level Domains) are assigned by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority and conform to ISO-3166, the "ISO ALPHA-2 Country Code" standard. A full list of IANA-sanctioned ccTLDs is available, along with the links to the relevant sponsoring authorities. These lists are trivially easy to come by, and it's kind of cheating to cut and paste, so instead I've decided that I'm going to take aim at the most obnoxiously overused ccTLDs and describe them (and where you can own one for yourself):

ccTLD Where is it? Want one? Obnoxiously overused by..

.tv Tuvalu nic.tv will sell you one for $1,000 USD .. TV marketing executives and producers.
Saving grace: Has not exploded into mass-media meme. Yet.

.am Amernia $200 from amnic.net .. nobody, yet. I just can't figure out who'd want one.
Run for your life: Won't stay this way for very long.

.to Tonga get it from tonic.to for about $50/year .. easily amused Web designers who think URLs like "surf.to"
and "come.to" are spiffy.
Saving grace: Strong anti-spam policy

.cc Cocos Islands $100/2 years from nic.cc .. an awful lot of people, for reasons I can't understand.
Saving grace: None of my friends fall into this category.

.tm Turkministan too bad .. people concerned about trademarking.
Saving grace: You can't get one anymore.

.fm Federated States
of Micronesia $200 initially, then $100/year afterwards
from dot.fm. .. FM radio stations; 100.3 the Q.
Saving grace: "It's a premium domain name!"

Baby, squish that file!

To hell with PKZip. Nuts to RAR. I bet most people don't even remember the archiver jungle from the good ol' BBS days -- ARJ, ARC, LHA/LHZ, and ZOO, which is exactly what it was. UC2 was a cool format for early-generation multimedia, until the last person on the planet using it died. And don't even get me started on them Macintosh compression tools.

In my world, the most important file compression methods are gzip and bzip2. gzip is a freely-available derivative of the old Unix compress, which didn't work all that well and had all kinds of irritating quirks that used to drive people like me nuts (until we all changed to gzip, anyway). Technically speaking, it reduces the size of files using Lempel-Ziv coding (LZ77), and plain-text files (source code, HTML documents, that kind of stuff) can expect compression ratios of up to 60-70%, which isn't bad.

Although it isn't a standard or anything, it is pretty much the universally accepted way to distribute files in the Unix world -- purists will argue that you should only use compress to do this, since it's the only compression utility available by default in all flavors of Unix, but these people probably still think vi is a good editor as well and should probably be ignored.

To compress a file using gzip, the syntax looks like this:

gzip -c filename

This outputs to filename.gz and works for single files. For multiple files,

gzip -c file1 file2 .. filen > gzipfile.gz

is the syntax needed to produce gzipfile.gz. Decompression is the much simpler

gzip -d filename.gz

which dumps whatever files lived inside the archive with their original names in the current directory.

bzip2 is a relative newcomer to the compression game, but it is quickly becoming a favorite of administrators all over the network. It compresses better than gzip and comes with its own libraries so geeks like me can write applications that take advantage of it -- but that's really secondary to the fact that it compresses files really well. I used to make Linux kernels using gzip to compress the imgaes; using bzip2 instead lets me get down to 3/4 the size of the gzip'd equivalent. Syntax is functionally identical to gzip, and this is fast becoming a popular way to send big files around between Unix systems.

Most people, however, don't use gzip, or bzip2 to pack multiple files together. Instead, we use tar, the tape archiver, which bundles files into one convenient package (but does not compress any of them). To assemble a "tarball" (collection of files compressed and packed up for shipping), you say something like this:

tar -zcf archivename filename(s)

It's typical for archivename to end in .tar.gz; the software will not automatically add these extensions, as it would for a simple compression with gzip.

There's another option that's become popular with some people recently, at least for the distribution of applications -- the package bundle. RedHat made the format popular with their RPM (RedHat Package Manager) format, but most commercial Unices (Solaris, HP-UX, IRIX) have been using some kind of package system for quite some time. Still, I think package managers are for weenies -- real men use tarballs.

Lookin' for love in the title kinds of places

To find a document that had a specific keyword in the title, using Altavista, you would need to use a query with a structure like:

title:"search term"

There's really not much else to say here, except perhaps to editorialize on how crummy Altavista is and how Google (or, even better, Topclick) is a much, much more useful search engine. Altavista has a nasty habit of losing my pages and not returning relevant documents that live on my Web server. I'm not sure why.

HTML for English Students

The best and most comprehensive (read: usefully intelligent) HTML tutorial on the net was written by Philip Greenspun as part of Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing. The title sums it up quite nicely, I think: Learn to Program HTML in 21 Minutes. (All aspiring Web designers should read his book and then read it again so they understand what's actually important about a Web site.) A more nerdy alternative, and the way I learned HTML way back before it was possible to steal layout and markup tags from sites I liked (because there were no sites on the net to steal markup from), is to make your eyes bleed and read the HTML 4.01 specifications, as published by the W3C.

Although it isn't specified in any of the above-referenced documents, avoidance of several tags -- BLINK, BGSOUND, EMBED, and FRAME -- is mandatory if you don't want an angry mob of users to come burn your server farm to the ground.

Finding Shakespeare

Four places I thought were interesting:

The Folger Library publishes a very well respected series of plays and collections and is a good repository of information for readers. I particularly like their discussion of "fooles and fircassees" (food in Shakespeare's England), but don't think I'll be cooking anything from there quite yet..
While looking for something on the role of the military in Shakespeare's era, I stumbled across an article questioning Shakespeare's sympathies towards the Irish and another one asking about his pacifism.
The physician in me is always interested in the way medicine is portrayed in Shakespeare.
Film geeks (like me) will enjoy examining the University of Georgia's collection of reviews of the various plays that have been committed to celluloid. (Although I think they're rather dismissive of Kurosawa's Ran.)

It's worth noting that I've given up trying to read my Oxford Complete Works (the type is too small and my eyes are too tired) and am instead relying on MIT's collection of Shakespeare's work operated by The Tech. MIT is also the home of the Internet Classics Archive, which contains such gems as the original source (Plutarch's Coriolanus) of one of my favorite Shakespeare plays.

External resources: Assembled by high school students, Bloody Painful: Crime and Punishment in Elizabethan England was a fascinating read, particularly if you've read other works like John H. Langbein's Torture and Plea Bargaining. The high school kids in Springfield, IL, have done an amazing job on a number of Elizabethan topics.

Other classes: Despite their excellent classics archive and on-line edition of the plays, MIT's Course 21L (Literature) is kind of disappointing as far as courses on The Bard go. 21L.009 is the major Shakespeare course for the Institute, and depending on section you may or may not spend most of your time in a dark room watching films of the plays. (Or so promises Peter Donaldson, 21L.009's F00 instructor.) Diana Henderson's entry for this semester seems more interesting: "Why is Shakespeare `the central author of the English-speaking world'?"

English Geeks -- Life on the Web

As far as reference material goes, it's hard to beat Xrefer, the greatest collection of reference material I've ever run into on the Internet for humanities students trying to get a better grip on the "big picture" of the world around them. (Life is not a critical essay!)

Speaking of which, the old standby of American literary theory -- the Partisan Review -- is now on-line. Sadly, only miniscule portions of their content is available on the Web; the availability of articles, past and present, is a big selling point of Philosophy and Literature, "exploring the dialogue between Literary and theoretical studies and philosophy."

What would be useful: There's an interesting theory that there are really only eight or nine different kinds of stories in literature, and so there's really nothing new. What I want is a system like Xrefer's, except that encompasses the totality of "great" literature; I want to be able to backtrack across Shakespeare's plays and see how they relate back to Homer, and then move forward in time and see the other works that Homer influenced.. basically, I want a hypertext cross-referenced library -- so we can play "six degrees of historical thought."

Nope, I'm not asking for much.

Wasting time

More advanced design: It would be nice if modesty prevented me from also attempting to include my entire Web site as part of this project.
More advanced design: Try connecting to my development server -- not guaranteed to be up and running; certainly not guaranteed to be working. This is where I test out new ideas for gluing Web servers and database management systems together. (As with most software development, this usually doesn't work.) But, if I've done some development work in the past 24 hours or so, it'll be up and answering http queries.

ccTLD	Where is it?	Want one?	Obnoxiously overused by..
.tv	Tuvalu	nic.tv will sell you one for $1,000 USD	.. TV marketing executives and producers. Saving grace: Has not exploded into mass-media meme. Yet.
.am	Amernia	$200 from amnic.net	.. nobody, yet. I just can't figure out who'd want one. Run for your life: Won't stay this way for very long.
.to	Tonga	get it from tonic.to for about $50/year	.. easily amused Web designers who think URLs like "surf.to" and "come.to" are spiffy. Saving grace: Strong anti-spam policy
.cc	Cocos Islands	$100/2 years from nic.cc	.. an awful lot of people, for reasons I can't understand. Saving grace: None of my friends fall into this category.
.tm	Turkministan	too bad	.. people concerned about trademarking. Saving grace: You can't get one anymore.
.fm	Federated States of Micronesia	$200 initially, then $100/year afterwards from dot.fm.	.. FM radio stations; 100.3 the Q. Saving grace: "It's a premium domain name!"