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| col-o-phon \'käl-e-fen, -,fän\ n [L, fr. Gk kolophô summit, finishing touch; akin to L culmen top -- more at HILL] (1621) 1: an inscription placed at the end of a book or manuscript usually with facts relative to its production 2: an identifying device used by a printer or a publisher. | |
| - Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary | |
As you will see, I am not of the type that "needs" the latest hardware to do fun things, like this site. Most of the horsepower of modern machines is wasted on decoration, in the visual and functional senses. Neither do I use any fancy "web design" gadgets, because none of them are very good for anything more than making posters.
| Systems | |
| BSS-Gate | Internet Gateway 486DX2-66 | 16M | IDE 280M 350M | Cirrus Logic 5426 Soundblaster internal 4X | 2x 3Com 3C509 | Sceptre 15" @ 1024x768 | SMC EZ Switch 10/100 108DT Motorola CyberSURFR Wave cablemodem |
| RedHat Linux 5.2 Linux is the only way to do secure Internet service, and the only way it could be done on cast-off hardware, for really cheap. RedHat was my first full exposure to Unix, and it hasn't given me a reason to dump it yet. This machine provides IP-Masqueraded and Firewalled Internet access, DNS, Web service and Mail. Oh, yes, I also run the FVWM2 (X Window) environment. Try that with anything else on a machine most people don't want anymore! http://www.redhat.com | |
| Avra-Desk | Network and Desktop Services AMD Athlon 1.2G | 1G | 30G | Matrox G450 Viewsonic 19" Flat | APC SmartUPS 700 |
| RedHat Linux 7.2 It's Linux. Rugged, dependable and real cheap. I use the KDE environment. http://www.redhat.com | |
| BSS-Desk | File & Print Services : De-commissioned 2003-03 after 10 years of service Pentium 100 | 48M | SCSI 500M 1G | ATI Mach 64 PCI (2M) Plextor external 4X | USR Sportster external 28.8fax | Conner 4G tape | 3Com 3C509 | MAG 17" @ 1024x768 | TrippLite 850 and Sola 250 UPSs |
| OS/2 Warp Server Advanced This used to run my business. I worked for IBM for a short while when Warp was released and wrote a few articles for their newsletter that you can find here. | |
| SEAF-Desk | Desktop2 Pentium 166 | 32M | IDE 4.3G 1.7G | Cirrus Logic 5446 PCI (2M) Goldstar internal 8X | Creative Labs AWE-32 | 3Com 3C509B-TX | Prima 17" @ 1024x768 | IBM Color Flatbed Scanner |
| Windows 95 I got it for another project years ago and now it's just used for watching the weather, using MSN and Yahoo! Messenger, and running my scanner. http://www.microsoft.com | |
| Software | |
| vi | Editing Text This document is, ultimately, about words and thus text. No amount of GUI mousing around can replace the hot-wired brain to keyboard to magic that vi gives a capable driver. Elvis on OS/2 Warp and VIM on Windows95 and Linux. |
| Apalon | Markup Processing A whole bunch of Perl that takes a much-more-regular markup language and generates all the HTML your browser can eat, produced by a very good friend and inspired computer scientist. No WYSIWYG tomfoolery, but styles, aliases and macros expressed as Perl functions (with bracket-matching courtesy of vi) that let me do reference-controlled links like my Tomato everywhere as @my @Tomato and sophisticated but sweatless table layouts like the Rebuild Checklist for my car. This page is one large table built from about a half-dozen macros and aliases. I feel sorry for anyone using anything else. |
| Perl | Apalon processing Quite amazing what one can do with a Practical Extraction and Reporting Language... Perl 5.6.1 or better on OS/2 Warp and Linux; ActiveState Perl on Windows95. http://www.perl.com |
| Apache | Web Serving It's free, and works great! It also runs most web servers on the 'Net. http://httpd.apache.org |
| PaintShop Pro | Image Capture, Conversion, Touch-ups, and Processing The best of the shareware best. Does everything but vector drawing and has an image browser handy for grabbing things out of my Netscape cache. http://www.jasc.com/psp.html |
| Map This! (now Live Image) |
Client-side Image Maps The first. Superseded now, but it still does what I need. http://www.mediatec.com |
| Microsoft PowerPoint | Vector-based Image Design Sometimes I need to draw lines and boxes and shapes... http://www.microsoft.com |
| Microsoft Excel | "Working" tables Even with a markup language like Apalon, HTML tables are tough to manipulate, so why bother? I use a spreadsheet for anything I need to actually work on over time. I write spreadsheet macros to create Apalon strings in a column to the right of my work area. You could create HTML strings the same way. To generate a page I Copy the list of strings to the clipboard and Paste them into a file for processing. http://www.microsoft.com |
| Netscape Navigator | Local and On-line Browsing Works great and knows how to resolve local UNC filenames, unlike MS-Explorer (without Network Neighbourhood). I use a 640-wide Netscape window on my desktop: nothing but image zooms are wider than a 640x480 screen. http://www.netscape.com |
| Winzip | Archiving and .ZIP Management The best. http://www.winzip.com |
| WS_FTP | File Transfer I like it. http://www.ipswitch.com |
| VMWare | Virtual Machine I run Windows98, 2000 and XP in virtual machines running on Linux, for the very-few Windows apps I use anymore. Mostly I just need to be able to answer questions and test a few things. http://www.vmware.com |
| Services | |
| Shaw Business | Internet Access - cable It's either this or ADSL and I already had this and it works well. http://www.shawbiz.ca |
| WebRing | The Sunbeam Auto Showroom web ring The first and still the best way to link your site with others that share similar goals or interests. http://www.webring.com |
| WhatUSeek | Search Engine A free site-index and -search service. Jerome's Sunbeam Pages uses it. http://www.whatuseek.com |
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