Cool Sites in Chronological Order

Reusable Launch Vehicle Information is an overview of current attempts to build reusable orbital vehicles, including a couple that should be doing atmospheric test flights later this year. The folks at Rotary Rocket Company appear to expect to fly their landing system test vehicle before June.

Frank passes along the Federation of American Scientists Nuclear Forces Guide (http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/ ). Links to all sorts of databases and data on nuclear weapons and delivery systems.

He also sent a link to the Temporary Temple Stock Image Library , aerial views of crop circles, with some really cool designs.

http://www.dragonsbreath.com/

Welcome to the World of All Purpose Ammo
Projectiles For Firearms, Specialty Explosive Items, Pest Control Devices, Signal Devices, Personal & Self Defense Products, And Specialty Pyrotechnics For Many Uses.

Purveyors of such products as:

12 Gauge Shredder Round The 500 MPH Thorn Thrower!
Dozens of razor sharp steel tacks blast a SUPER WIDE pattern unequal to any other. Virtually no response from any unwanted intruder. Each round is also stuffed with #12 shot which creates a double shock effect upon impact.

My first response was "Cool", but now I'm huddled under my desk wondering how much it'd cost to put a 1/2" layer of steel in the walls of any building I frequent.

On various weblogs and commentary sites there's been talk of building a common XML format for data to make it easier to turn these things into news channels on customized sites, or poke through them with spiders and robots more easily. Scripting News has been publishing XML for quite a while, Hack The Planet and More Like This do XML, and the latter also has a proposal for standard a DTD .

So I want to move Newwwsboy over to generate XML, then use a standard XML/XSL to HTML converter. Here's a couple of links of tools to do that: http://www.finetuning.com/xsl.html

Signs of the coming apocalypse: Whump points to Fists of God (Or Shaolin Messiah, When You Coming Back?) , merging two great genres of the early '70s, the religious musical and the kung-fu movie:

...The angelic chorus erupts into a syntho-funk melody performed by The Dreaded Umlaut Schwa, entitled, "Ninja Jesus", as the Messiah proceeds to kick, punch, and slap the two befuddled Romans about the counter, to the cheers of the tavern patrons:
Not a son of a gun, nor a son of bitch,
He's the Son of God, and you know which
Don't get him mad, or you will pay
His Fists of God call Judgment Day!

And the Marin Independent Journal featured Neil "The Messiah" Brandt 's web page, 'cutting edge, state of the art, automated audio-visual, color, half-hour, infotainment website show: "The Messiah's Millennium Message."' I didn't explore too far because of the intense use of large audio files...

With the proliferation of DSL and cable modems, more and more people are getting static IP addresses, and therefore opening themselves up to potential hackers. Eric forwards on a link to people who will help you figure out where the holes are first: http://www.cablemodemhelp.com/portscan.htm

Body Objective is selling pictures of naked women, but it seems to have a slight twist:

We at The Body Objective believe that every woman is innately gorgeous. It is time to start celebrating the beauty of the female body instead of judging it, condemning it, and destroying it.

Of course at $10/month it's going to be hard to differentiate it from the gazillions of other sites putting any picture of flesh they can get up, but at least the different marketing come-on is interesting.

Low content link of the day: http://www.gabocorp.com/ works "best" with the Flash3 plug-in. Zero content. Thank dieties I didn't have a speaker on my Windows box so I couldn't hear the background music. But in terms of annoying and time consuming ways to present boring text, these guys take it home.

Eric Boutilier-Brown's pages have moved to http://www.ebb.ns.ca I've talked favorably in the past about his treatment of nude environmental portraits and photography in general.

Take two persistently drunk slackers, a goat bequeathed to them by Thor, a demonic chicken, and what do you have? Goats . For instance :

"You got your Jesus in my peanut butter."
"You got your peanut butter in my Jesus."
"Little pieces of the son of god in a milk chocolate cup. There's no wrong way to eat a Jesustm."

http://www.alexchiu.com/ - "If my Eternal Life Device does not give immortality, then the entire bible is a joke."

In my post sickness haze I don't remember if I sent this on to Flutterby or not, but... Here's the Barney Protocol Stack , a set of software components that applications can use to drive Barney.

On the idrama mailing list I just wrote a long response to the proprietor of http://www.disobey.com , definitely a place worthy of a little more exploration.

A URL to give to people you dislike and wish would just... ummm... go away. Don't bother going yourself: http://www.amishrakefight.org/gfy/

And another one that's not particularly spectacular or anything, but someone had to do it: http://www.plastic-sheep.org/

Marylaine passes along this article from the UK which talks about evolutionary reasons for wasteful displays of excess.

"...sexually-selected traits, such as peacock tails, must be costly handicaps in order to be reliable indicators of an animal's fitness as a potential mate and parent."

Y'all have undoubtedly heard me rave about Scott McCloud 's book Understanding Comics, now y'all can check out his web site: http://www.scottmccloud.com/

Frank pointed me to a couple of articles on Sam Sloan's Home Page . I pass them on with a little hesitation, the guy seems lucid, but some of his writings come off as a little disconnected and paranoid, certainly not quite as coherent a set of arguments as I'd usually want from my reading material. However, covering the fringe is what Flutterby's about, so... Why Do Women Feel the Irrepressible Urge to Pose Nude on the Internet? is a piece that doesn't match my experience of the matter and seems quite naive, actually, and History of the Sexual Freedom League is an account of swinging in the 60s.

If you're a Linux user, you undoubtedly know about Ghostscript, Ghostview and GSView , the PostScript interpreter and associated viewing programs.

http://www.koth.org/ is the ultimate arena for CodeWars matches. Just in case you're not completely nerdly, from the FAQ :

Core War is a game played by two or more programs (and vicariously by their authors) written in an assembly language called Redcode and run in a virtual computer called MARS (for Memory Array Redcode Simulator). The object of the game is to cause all processes of the opposing program to terminate, leaving your program in sole posession of the machine.

Dave Winer is sending Mail to the Future .

Via Cameron , the Department of Justice guide to the Freedom of Information Act .

It's too bad car makers have gone to really lame designs, because the Bumper Dumper portable toilet would be really useful in lots of situations, but'll probably only fit on SUVs, most of which never get anywhere near as far from the pavement as I've had my sedan.

Two new indices: YaHooka , the guide to marijuana on the Internet, and Yahoosuck : "sometimes the net is just like purgatory."

A verse guide to English pronunciation .

The Origins of Kibology

The GALERIE ABOMINATE :

hosts some of the finest bad computer generated imagery and animation ever produced. Hopefully, some light relief from all the hard work. Have fun and remember that the longest journey starts with the first step.

No, really, I can stop updating Flutterby any time I want... One last update for a while: http://ryeham.ee.ryerson.ca/uClinux/simm/

We are working on a small module (a 1inch tall 30 pin SIMM) with 1Meg of FLASH and 8Meg of DRAM, 10Base-T ethernet and LCD panel drive that will cost less than $150US using a 68EZ328. A preliminary top overlay of the board is pictured above

Archives of neat sites posted to Flutterby , notes to webmaster@flutterby.com