Sirius News home 'net resources on island travel on cryptography the PowerPC chip PGPFone on writing bug reports 'net resources II useful Mac apps on ThePalace time on Macs Macs <-> pagers! a web-rendering engine Newtons for Technomads on obsolescense a popourri a digital hub extending Frontier the Apple soap opera Java for poets
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My Contributions to Sirius News
In the springtime of 1995, facing forced separation from the Internet due to a hostile pruning of our branch of the corporate tree, my staff and I ventured out to find a new network provider. At the time I was managing a high-performance network test-bed for a San Francisco research and development satellite office of a Massachusetts-based company.
We had some choices, but not many. Well-known options were CompuServe, America On-Line (AOL), and Apple's EWorld. Two years earlier I'd given up using Netcom because it wasn't able to gracefully endure growing pains. The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (The WELL) was around, but it was more into providing a virtual discussion space for the artistic and literary community than providing services to geeks.
Local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) were in their infancy. The Little Garden (TLG) was perhaps the best known of the era. James Dornan and Mark Slayton - the latter became a webmaster at HotWired and Red Herring - started their own ISP called Catch-22, which has since dissolved. It was in this rapidly-changing environment that we stumbled across Sirius Communications, a small gathering of folks determined to share the costs of a big pipe to the Internet.
What happened to that hardy band of digital pioneers? Read a March 1998 article by Wendy Tanaka of the San Francisco Examiner entitled Sirius Business and find out.
We grilled them, and they vetted us. We liked what we saw, especially since their offices were a scaled-up version of our test laboratory. Se we signed up, en masse. I liked the staff so much that I began social contact in person.and via the net - waging a one-man battle to answer every general and Mac-related question on Sirius' USENET newsgroups. Don Hurter (whose delightful prose I've collected in a local archive I call Adventures of an Internet Service Provider) approached me after a few months of this campaign with a question: would I consider writing a column pseudononymously as "Dr. Sirius"?
That opportunity morphed into being a writer for "Sirius News", the ISP's official organ. The first meeting of the writers was a strange and troubling one, partially because I had never before written to such a large audience, but mostly because some of the attendees were truly strange and troubling people. As luck would have it, our contributory longevity seems to have been inversely proportional to our wierdness. Some folks didn't make it to the premier issue. I've been contributing on an"almost-monthly" basis since August of 1995.
I've had one editor at Sirius the entire time. Wendy has been an invaluable help to me in writing these articles. In addition to the customary editorial duties of proofing and copy-editing, she's obtained images to brighten things up, identified interesting external resources to which words in the article could linked, given me interesting factoids and rumors from her sources in Silicon Valley, paved the bureaucratic way for me to go to shows and conferences and interviews, acquired review copies of books, and provided the oh-so-necessary moral support when the deadline was too close and my head too fuzzy. Thank you, Wendy.
Wendy is also the keeper of the official "Sirius News Archives". These pages are my local back-up. Both sets are copyrighted 1995-1998 by "Sirius Connections", all rights reserved.
Enjoy.
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My first column for Sirius News: how to use the net's resources (especially USENET newsgroups) to start to find information about your Macintosh.
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A rambling discourse on my computing adventures during my three-month trip to Eivissa and Gran Canaria (during which I wrote a book for Macmillan/Sams.net about CU-SeeMe entitled "Internet TV with CU-SeeMe").
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The practical basics for understanding, obtaining, and using cryptographic software to protect data both on your computer and in transit to another. Includes information about the political situation of cryptography.
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A dissertation on the Motorola PowerPC chip, how we benefit by the increased horsepower, CHRP, and some related web sites of interest.
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A first look at the PGPFone (audio privacy software), of which I was a beta tester. Complete with a step by step operations guide.
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How to use USENET newsgroups to get help and how to write an effective bug report that elicit responses from the software or hardware authors.
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Macintosh-related sites on the world wide web that I visit each day.
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My homage to Apple's "What's on your Mac?" ad campaign. This column covers many aspects of my Macintosh's computing environment, including the desktop patterns, icons for the hard drive, icons in the menu bar, and applications I often use.
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About Time-Warner's two-dimensional avatar chat system, Palace.
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All about the notion of time viz-a-viz Macintosh. Includes Network Time Protocol (NTP), the Date & Time control panel, SuperClock, World Clock Lite (a geochron), and XEarth (draws a real-time image of Earth in the Finder Desktop).
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How I use Mark/Space Softworks' PageNow! for Macintosh to communicate with alphanumeric pagers.
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How to start using Userland Frontier to manage an entire web site. Contains step by step instructions and screen shots of version 4.1.
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How I use my Apple Newton MessagePad in my daily life. Another facet of being a technomad.
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How to go about rejuvenating your aging Macintosh. There's life in the old dog yet.
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A roundup of open issues with very little in common except that they somehow landed on my (virtual) desk.
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A report about the Apple MessagePad 2000 and the software I use with my "MP2K".
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How I extended UserLand Frontier 4.2.3 to allow imageTag() to have thumbnail images.
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A report on the soap opera that is Apple Comuter. Includes Macintosh and Newton news.
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Braving the slings and arrows of hyperbole I timidly immerse my toe into the Java flood raging nearby.
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