The Virtual Neal McBurnett: nealmcb

Web: http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/ (you are here :-)

Blog: Technology serving Community: My new stuff goes here - posts on voting, stories I share from Google Reader, etc. (And let's face it, this site looks its age....)

Email: (avoid spammers - generated by Email Image Generator)
Formerly nealmcb@avaya.com, nealmcb@bell-labs.com, AKA nealmcb@lucent.com, Neal.McBurnett@att.com, neal@dr.att.com, attmail!neal, ihnp4!druhi!neal (1987), ucbvax!ihnss!druxj!neal (Dec 1981), and I-don't-remember at Berkeley before that :-)

Other networks: FOAF (Friend-Of-A-Friend - the open social network), Zaadz, Orkut, I do instant messaging via the standard: xmpp/jabber (see e.g. googletalk).

Home: Boulder CO (by Bear Creek, )

Contents:

• Work
• Family
• Contributions
• Issues
• Humor
• Interests
• Affiliations
• Internet Recommendations
• Friends: Personal Home Pages
• GPG - GNU Privacy Guard (free version of PGP)

Work

I'm currently spending most of my time volunteering for various organizations and working with open systems and free software and tools like Google's Android mobile phone system, Ubuntu Linux (an alternative to Windows or Mac), the Firefox web browser, the OpenOffice suite, and open standards from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

I'm also working on the Internet2 Middleware Initiative and the annual IDtrust Symposium series (formerly the PKI R&D Workshops).

Between June 1977 and July 2001 I worked for Bell Labs, ending up as a "distinguished member of technical staff" (really a software engineer :-). The Bell System ("Ma Bell" - once the largest company in the world) split up over 2 decades. My division ended up at Avaya, having spun off in 2000 from Lucent Technologies which itself spun off of AT&T in 1995, which divested the Baby Bells in 1984 after calling our PBX division American Bell for a year. AT&T jointly owned Bell Labs along with Western Electric when I was first hired. Wow.... But I think split-ups are much better than the anti-competitive mega-mergers that are all the rage! During the summer of 1977 I worked as a summer intern in Holmdel NJ, and summer of 1978 was at Murray Hill. After a "One Year On Campus (OYOC) scholarship at Berkeley, all the rest was in Westminster CO. I like keeping in touch with Bell Labs Alums

Family

My wife Holly Lewis was a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal in 1981 (Satineta, Arghakhanchi district), sings with Resonance Women's Chorus of Boulder and Planina, enjoys designing with glass beads, as well as many other arts and crafts, travel, bird watching, bicycling, dancing, and adventures of all kinds. She is a physician at Frontier Internal Medicine.

My dad, Roe McBurnett Jr., is a champion golfer, humanist, patent lawyer, singer, and a great proponent of The Power In Positive Thinking

My mom, Trish McBurnett, is an insatiably curious "jack of all trades", organizer, singer, photographer, painter and Registered Nurse, who loves crafts and has done extensive genealogical research.

Contributions

I've enjoyed many different activities:

• I initiated the free ElectionAudits software package to support better election auditing. We used it in Boulder's historic audit of the 2008 election.
• Co-founder and currently chair of the board of the Boulder Community Network, providing up-to-date information on the community via the World Wide Web, and providing community access to the information on the Internet. Here is a 1997 viewgraph presentation about BCN.
• The Boulder Area Sustainability Information Network (BASIN) is a big part of BCN. Learn your Watershed Address. Mine is Bear Canyon Creek, Boulder Creek, St. Vrain, South Platte, Platte, Missouri, Mississippi, Gulf of Mexico.
• I'm an Ubuntu Linux member and participate mostly with the Ubuntu Server Team and the Colorado Ubuntu Linux Team. See my Ubuntu wiki page and my Launchpad page.
• A few of the talks I've given over the years.
• Former member of the Boulder Public Library Commission and the Energy Advisory Board.
• Citizens for Verifiable Voting promotes voting methods that citizens can have confidence in. We convinced Boulder County to avoid buying a paperless electronic voting system in 2004. They thus avoided the need for costly upgrades required by subsequent laws which required verifiable paper records. We also got the Colorado legislature to pass a law requiring audits of elections. Unfortunately the system the county subsequently got doesn't support audits well, is based on secret code, and is too vulnerable to computer glitches and manipulation.
• Approval Voting Home Page: approval voting (vote for as many as you like) is the best way to run single-winner elections. I've maintained the page since 1995.
• Full public Disclosure of Software for Voting Systems is the only path to software that voters can trust.
• I did an Analysis of the PGP keyserver web of trust which inspired the keyanalyze collaboration.
• I used to sing with Planina - Songs of Eastern Europe - great asymmetric balkan rhythms, tight harmonies, challenging ornaments....
• Neal's UU site - A Story of Cosmic Evolution and other materials for Unitarian Universalists and the Unitarian Universalist Church of Boulder. See also the Unitarian Universalist Wiki (UUWiki), a collaborative site for UUs that I helped start.
• Here are some pictures of Comet Hale-Bopp I took. Also my own little Evening's Tour of the Universe
• In 1991 I put together a bit-mapped font using the ISO 8859-3 character encoding for Esperanto, contrib/fonts/bdf/9x15-3.bdf, which was part of the X11R5 contrib distribution. In 1985 I presented and shared some code: " Ilaro por Esperantaj Redaktoroj (Ilaro - a Toolkit for Esperanto Editors)" at Interkibernetik '85 in Budapest, Hungary. For use with it I also distributed esp-angla-vortoj.txt, the first widely available almost-dictionary for esperanto on the Internet.
• I'm a contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. See my user page there. Visit, and you'll be enticed to easily make your own contributions.
• In 1995 I hosted the Summit High School (NJ), class of 1975, 20-year Virtual Reunion.
• McBurnett on the Web has information on McBurnett genealogy and pointers to other McBurnett's out there. It seems that McBurnett is an American name, not in any Scottish or Irish records we've found.
• I wrote a program in perl (named "prtged" for the time being) that prints really detailed ancestry timeline charts. For example, see timelines for 387 of my direct ancestors on a single sheet of paper (with details inevitably lost as you get further back in time): 400-year Ancestry chart for Neal McBurnett. Note the scale of centuries at the bottom.
• I uncovered many tales, both honorable and sordid, of my Spalding ancestors, dating back to Perthshire, Scotland in the 1500's and Berwick in 1318. And my mom scanned in a fascinating gold rush memoir by my great-great-grandfather: "Westward Ho - in '49": Memoirs of Captain Thomas S. Wylly. He walked from St Louis to California, and returned via Nicaragua!
• My most hassle-free kayaking experience: after a water main break at Gilpin and Evans on 2004-08-19, I took Holly's kayak out of the garage, carried it to the bottom of the driveway, and "put in": close-up photo, context photo and movie
• Inland Passage of Alaska Vacation - a few whale and bear pictures from a lovely trip in July 1998.
• Your computer can contribute to solving humanity's problems. I recommend climateprediction.net (studying global climate change) or Folding@Home to put idle computer power to an excellent use, supporting open, non-profit research into the fundamentals of life. It's a pretty screensaver also - highly recommended.
• Neal's Questions - some with answers, but perhaps just asking a good question can be helpful....
• and, last and probably least :-) a bit of poetry, thanks to Donna Davis' great class at LaForet. See Lament of the Blue-Green Algae and Some new Twinkle Twinkle verses. See also Hacking Computers, to the tune of "Waltzing Matilda".

Issues

Go Worldwatch! Go GNU! Go Internet Society! Go IETF! Go CPSR! Go AFCN!

• No Software Patents: patents on software increase the price of software, cause computers to be less secure and less reliable and paradoxically reduce innovation in the world of software. They give big corporations tremendous and unfair leverage over small and mid-sized businesses and individuals, thus affecting the most innovative sectors of the economy, where most jobs are created. And patents are being used to prevent the spread of free software. See No Software Patents for why these statements are true, and what you can do to help.
• The EFF - Electronic Frontier Foundation is non-profit civil liberties organization working in the public interest to protect privacy, free expression, and access to online resources and information. Joining them is a great way to help out and stay in touch.
• Promote freedom of digital speech. Tell Congress to stop promoting efforts by publishers to to use DRM to control how you read, view, or listen to their works that you've bought. Such restrictions are in violation of traditional "Fair Use".
• What's Wrong With Copy Protection outlines many other restrictions on fair use, creativity and free speech (including lawsuits against people just because they link to certain other web sites!) that are also a major concern, such as the Lawsuit about DeCSS/DVD and several provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The XKCD comic about DRM - the next generation suggests just what the industry will want to do when people program turn own coclear implants into ipods....
• Participate in the Creative Commons if you want to download good music you can play legally and often royalty-free, or if you want to spread or sell your own creations without seeing most of the revenue go to the middlemen. Help lower the legal barriers to creativity. And read Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig's book The Future of Ideas.
• Support The League for Programming Freedom fighting user-interface copyrights and software patents. See also the American Committee for Interoperable Systems.

• Environmentalism and Sustainability: Zero Population Growth || The Boulder Environmental Center || PLAN-Boulder County || Energy: check out the Rocky Mountain Institute || eating a vegan or vegetarian diet.
• The Apollo Alliance emphasizes how pursuit of energy independence is also good for jobs, our economy, public health, national security and the environment.
• The Long Now Foundation helps us focus on the long term rather than quarterly earnings reports or daily "news" or minute-by-minute stock market fluctuations. Think 10000 years... Very cool!
• The Foundation for Ethics and Meaning is a grass-roots movement. Its goal is "to change the bottom line in American society so that productivity or efficiency of corporations, legislation, or social practices is no longer measured solely by the degree to which they maximize wealth and power -- but rather also by the degree to which they tend to maximize our capacity to sustain loving and caring relationships and to be ethically, spiritually and ecologically sensitive" -- Michael Lerner.
• Colorado Green Party and the Colorado Democratic Party (we really need Approval Voting so we can support multiple options!)
• The anti-competitive and abusive practices of Network Solutions/Verisign lead me to suggest that you avoid them when looking for domain names or SSL/TLS certificates.
• World standards bodies are considering redefining time so it is no longer in sync with the rotation of the earth. Specifically they are discussing the elimination of the leap second in UTC, which keeps wall clock time in sync with the irregular spinning of the earth. See Leap Second Page and the excellent leap second bibliography for more information. I agree with The case against UTC leap hours and think redefining UTC to eliminate leap seconds is a bad idea. Use TAI if your system doesn't deal gracefully with leap seconds.

Interests

• I strive for an integral world view, looking at many perspectives (All Quadrants, All Levels). For example, see Ken Wilber's view of the current world situation when you have some time....
• Compassionate Communication, or Nonviolent Communication - a refreshing language of compassion useful for self growth, families, and activists.
• The Great Story as told by award-winning science writer Connie Barlow and the spiritually grounded Rev. Michael Dowd - inspiring presentations based on the real History of the Universe, using evocative beads.
• I AM Awakening movie - A beautiful movie experience of how we are connected to the epoch of evolution: the universe, the natural world and exponential cultural and technological evolution. The movie itself is open for further evolution as an open-source project. Unfortunately, the project doesn't seem to be active and the domain has been taken over by advertisers.
• Individual growth and potential, using insights from folks like Gay and Kathly Hendricks of the Hendricks Institute, and the great folks at the Boulder Center for Conscious Living
• Community Networks, including BCN in Boulder, Longmont Community Wireless Project, Craigs List for Denver/Boulder, CascadeLink in Portland (see City Club Civic Networking presentation), and K-12 activities like the famous Boulder Valley School District.
• Peacemaker Community - a global, multi-faith community, training, empowering and connecting peacemakers around the world. Includes the Bearing Witness Journal and many other worthy organizations and wise leaders.
• Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy and other scientifically-grounded methods for helping people make their lives happier and dealing with mental health problems. The book Don't Shoot the Dog! The New Art of Teaching and Training by Karen Pryor is a fun, practical introduction, whether you want to teach your dog new tricks, or help yourself or your partner overcome bad habits.
• Physics, Astronomy and Archaeo-Astronomy, Titan/Saturn exploration and Mars rovers. Check out the chance of Clear Dark Skies in Colorado tonight. Explore the universe from radio waves to gamma waves via SkyView, the Internet's Virtual Telescope.
• [PDF] The Science of Self-organization and Adaptivity by Francis Heylighen - Very fundamental stuff - I think this joins evolutionary theory in clarifying how we came to be. It leaves behind "Intelligent Design" and other creationist approaches, which still have to explain how the very complex intelligence/creator itself came to be.
• The Santa Fe Institute is the birthplace of some profound ideas about complexity and chaos. Swarm is a great simulation system.
• Artificial Life Online, and The Live Artificial Life Page.
• SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, and Anticryptography, AKA CETI, the science of creating a message that can be easily deciphered, even by somebody (or something) who has no prior knowledge of how the message is composed or what information it contains.
• I love this thought-provoking picture of earth in perspective (a "pale blue dot"), taken by Voyager 1, with commentary on our place in the universe by Carl Sagan. Part of a family portrait of the solar system.
• Esperanto, the international language, and other languages and cultures. Gxangalo estas portalo en la mondon de Esperanto. I've taught classes, but I'm not above laughing at some linguistic humor....
• The ancient Asian game of Go is elegant and fascinating. Since Deep Blue beat the world champion chess player, Go is the only significant board game in which computers can't beat the best humans (or even children). It provides a major challenge for researchers in the field of Artificial Intelligence. I think it will take decades before Go programs achieve mastery. Check out the Boulder Go Club, Rafael's go page and GoBase - the online Go Encyclopedia.
• Genetic Images by Ken Musgrave. Another site, "International Interactive Genetic Art"' was cool, but I can't find it any more. Viewers helped interactively evolve pleasing art!
• Patterns are the recurring solutions to the problems of design. Patterns form languages, not unlike natural languages. Visit the PortlandPatternRepository to learn and share more about these ideas.
• Music, e.g. Folk Music ( search for lyrics via Mudcat and DigiTrad), progressive music (e.g. the Women's Chorus of Boulder, and Classical Music (hear online MIDI files!).
• International Folk Dancing and Music. In particular, Planina - Songs of Eastern Europe, the Boulder International Folk Dancers (BIFD), the Village Arts Coalition, and the East European Folklife Center Balkan Music & Dance Camps. "Think globally, dance locally"....
• Bicycling and hiking (and maps!).
• Bird Watching
• Sundials - you can even see a sundial reader: a real-time image of a sundial in Cambridge England, with software that automatically calculates the current time by measuring the shadow.
• The Gigapxl project (1000 megapixel pictures of world heritage sites) is amazing: a camera that can do better than a hundred simultaneous high-end digital cameras in a single shot. You can see the sort of detail it would take binoculars to detect live. One shot included the amuzing discovery that they were watching people people watching.
• Timelines and Scales of Measure
• My Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator type is INTP.
• Genealogy and family history
• I'm a lot more interested in parathyroid glands since one of mine was found to be hyperactive, sucking the calcium out of my bones. Recent advances in minimally-invasive surgery have made removal of the hyperactive gland the clear choice, but finding a surgeon experienced with this uncommon procedure can be hard. I recommend Dr Jim Norman.
• You can see a bunch of books I like, including a good selection of Esperanto books, at my librarything.com page.

Humor

• Amazon smarter than husband about gift ideas. (Who says the singularity isn't near?)
• The Order of Dis-Order - a community of clowns in service of inner peace and shared peace. Associated with the Peacemaker Community
• Ladle Rat Rotten Hut - must be heard to be believed.
• Check out BetterDogFood.COM, where they give you the Dog, and then sell you the dog food! They're revolutionizing the animal exchange industry by distintermediating the legacy business models for the sale of pet food.
• Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes of All Time
• The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation - Better living through ppt in 1863. See also how it was made.
• The TWINKIES Experiments - applying the scientific method to a food that deserves ridicule....
• The World According to Student Bloopers
• Academic Programmers - A Spotter's Guide
• Engineers Explained - hmmm - if I walk like one and I talk like one....
• Marvin the web server is depressed - a very creative "404 page not found" web server error.
• What would the world look like if the two sexes switched places? Explore the web in this regendered universe - great for both laughs and insights! The inverted Google search is amazing.
• Join the Coalition to Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide - the compound DHMO kills far more people than all illegal drugs combined.
• The Gospel of Tux - In the beginning Turing created the Machine...
• A real implementation of the CPIP (Carrier Pigeon Internet Protocol), calling the bluff of an 11-year-old April Fools joke. Complete with over 27 color glossy photographs with pictures and arrows and a paragraph on the bottom of each one.... Wow.
• Laugh along with GNU - Humor from the GNU Project
• The amazing, informative and very humorous story of the valid $95,093.35 "junk check"
• RFC Archive FYE - For Your Enjoyment - a list of RFCs mostly published on April Fools day - part of the famous document series. that defines how the Internet works.
• Emergent Zangelding - coming soon to a page near you!
• "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of sXXXch, or the right of the people peaceably to XXXemble, and to peXXXion the government for a redress of grievances." -- Marc Rotenberg

  (This is funny but also deadly serious to freedom fighters around the world. See The Digital Freedom Network for more information.)

• This is more in the "wow" category. On Dagen H (Sunday September 3, 1967) at 5:00 am, Swedes switched from driving on the left to the right.
• Wikipedia:Unusual_articles has some verey creative and amusing articles.
• xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language
• and, of course, my obligatory reference to Dilbert.

Affiliations

• Internet Society - for global cooperation and coordination of the Internet
• Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) - developing official technical internet standards. An amazingly open and enlightened institution.
• I support truly open systems, where the spec itself is democratically controlled, like the Internet, the WWW, and for most purposes, Linux (see Usenix The Advanced Computing Systems Professional and Technical Association)
• Free Software Foundation (FSF) - produces and freely distributes the complete integrated software system named "GNU". Note that professional support is available for free software. E.g. see Cygnus Solutions.
• KGNU 88.5 FM Boulder, 1390 AM Denver - Community Radio, and National Public Radio: KUNC 91.5 FM
• Advogato - the free software developer's advocate. Cool testbed for work on group trust metrics. See my page there.
• Unitarian Universalist Church of Boulder - a warm and open UU community which shares common-sense principles. Addressing issues like Civil Liberties and Economic Globalization.
• In his page The World Wide Web and the "Web of Life", the person who invented the World Wide Web (Tim Berners-Lee) explains how its philosophy, and that of the Internet Engineering Task Force is similar to the Unitarian Universalist philosophy.
• Humanism: ethical community without superstition
• Union of Concerned Scientists - good environmental credentials
• CPSR (Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility) and their Community Networks Working Group
• Give.ORG: promoting informed giving and charitable integrity.
• City Club of Portland
• Brown University Computer Science Department where I got to work with the amazing Andy van Dam
• University of California, Berkeley - Computer Science Department
• PFLAG - Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. I bet some of your friends are gay also.
• Final Exit Network and Compassion & Choices (formerly named the Hemlock Society and End-of-Life Choices), and the local chapter End of Life Choices - Boulder - Death with Dignity - Good Life, Good Death

Internet Recommendations

Email

• Email FAQs (all you ever wanted to know about email!)
• Avoid Hotmail, AOL, Juno, and other services that try to lock you in to nonstandard services. On the Internet I strongly recommend using programs and services that stick to IETF standards like IMAP and POP because that allows you to easily switch from one service to another. This means using providers like Comcast, Earthlink, Indra's Net, etc, but avoiding any proprietary features. I also recommend not advertising the email address that your ISP provides, and instead using the email service of your choice, or buying your own domain name. That way, when you consider chainging ISP's, you won't have to change your email address at the same time. FastMail.fm provides good free basic email (IMAP) with advanced features for a price. Get your own domain name from a reputable place like 000domains.com or DomainDirect.com, and NOT the abusive monopolist Network Solutions/Verisign or the sleazy, haughty godaddy folks who may take your domain away without warning or good reason (see nodaddy.com). Or use an email forwarding address, e.g. perhaps mail.com or bigfoot.com. For some help on the process of moving from one to another, see converting address books from AOL, Juno, etc to Eudora, Netscape, etc. If you want to run your own Linux computer with its own SMTP server, see Running a mail server on a dynamic address.
• Think twice before sending email attachments - especially Micro$oft Word attachments. You may reveal information you consider private, spread viruses, the recipient may not be able to read them, etc.
• Stop SPAM. CAUCE: The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email will tell you how to help.
• Don't enter your friend's email addresses into web pages, even on sites like Evite, the New York Times, etc that you may be willing to do business with, since that can sell them out to Trojan Marketeers. Just send the information in an email directly to your friend.

Web

• A WikiWiki Web is a cool way for a group to evolve a web site.
• Wikipedia - the Free Encyclopedia, the world's most popular and largest encyclopedia, is up-to-date, helpful and fascinating. And you are welcome to contribute.
• The Web Authoring FAQ has great advice on how to get started, and great advice for experienced authors on how to make better web pages. Another classic is Essential Web Authoring Advice by Jukka Korpel.
• Please support the Best Viewed With Any Browser campaign. Don't get lulled into relying on the fancy features of specific browsers or even the latest HTML standard - it just makes your pages less widely viewable.
• Check your web pages for valid HTML with tools like W3C HTML Validation Service or Doctor HTML.
• See Setting up your browser for some good tips on how to adjust your default browser text size, margins, etc.
• PDF is a bad choice for most documents compared to standard HTML or plain text.
• Good error handling for web sites, and especially 404 error pages that point back to the offending referrer page, help improve the web. See how BCN's error pages work and consider doing something similar on your site.
• Colorblindness affects hundreds of millions of people. Web pages will not be easily accessible to these people if they require the user to discriminate between certain colors. Please pay attention to Color Contrast. E.g. I'm red-green colorblind ("deutan"). Other good resources are Colors For The Colorblind and Color Perception Issues.
• If you want free server certificates for SSL/TLS, you can get them at CAcert, which is a grass-roots CA. You can also get personal certificates for email and code signing. And in the process you become part of the solution, and can help extend their Web of Trust to others.
• Pay attention to web site usage via the best tool around: Analog. And it's free!
• The Halfbakery is a fun communal database of ideas and inventions
• The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine can show you much of the World Wide Web as it looked years ago. Find many old pages that have gone away....
• Measure 4 Measure: Sites That Do the Work For You - a collection of on-line calculation sites
• NetMind Free Services
• Internet Tools by John December
• The Django web application framework is now the best way to create interactive web sites. It lets you use the excellent python language, and is designed for security, speed and modularity. A good web hosting service that I use for my blog is Webfaction. Disclaimer: if you sign up through that affiliation link I get a little bonus.

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS): Open Office, Linux, vs. Windows, Macintosh, and other platforms

• Open Office is a free replacement for Microsoft Office, which works on Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and other platforms. It reads and writes Microsoft formats, as well as the internationally standardized office formats developed by OASIS and others.
  You can create dynamic documents, analyse data, design eye-catching presentations, produce dramatic illustrations, and open up your databases. You can publish your work in Portable Document Format (.pdf), and release your graphics in Flash (.swf) format - without needing any additional software.
  OpenOffice is the standard office suite for many corporations.
• Linux - a free operating system, so you don't need to rely on that overpriced, unreliable, proprietary, insecure Windoze stuff that Micro$oft uses to illegally extend its monopoly power. Linux runs on everything from an old 486 to Macs to PDAs to cellular phones to hot new multiprocessor Alphas. It is the OS of choice for servers and developers and anyone who doesn't want Microsoft to be in control of their desktop, e.g. because of their lack of clue about security (e.g. when Microsoft warned the world about the risks of macros in their Word software, they distributed their White Paper as a executable file!)
• Why use Open Source Software or Free Software? Look at the Numbers! - very popular, growing worldwide.
• For ordinary users who want to use Linux, the easiest way to get acquainted is with Ubuntu or Knoppix. Each of these is a bootable CD that can be used stand-alone for running Linux software (word processing, spreadsheets, browsing, etc.). It is also as an educational CD and a rescue system for Linux or Windows. It is safe to try it out even for just 10 minutes since it is not necessary to install anything on a hard disk.
• The table of equivalents / replacements / analogs of Windows software in Linux
• Data Portability is doing good work to help us maintain meaningful and flexible ownership of our data: "control over the profiles, relationships, content and media we create and maintain, regardless of what platform they are hosted on"
• Simple End User Linux produces lots of good information and software. They have great sites to support use of Linux in the schools and in science also.
• I used to use Macs all the time, and enjoyed Elliotte's The Well Connected Macintosh. That is now "Appleholics Anonymous" -- it looks like Elliotte has moved on from macs as I have. Though my reasons had more to do with the vigorous attacks from Apple on anyone with a compatible "look and feel", which thankfully were rejected by the courts. The closed nature of the MacOS was also big hurdle, and even now, though the lowest layers of the operating system are open, the windowing system and many other crucial layers of OS X are closed.
• Scripting languages for the Internet: python is the latest and greatest.
• Java: a revolutionary advance in programming languages and a new software platform.
• Using different languages and character sets with computers can be hard. UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ for Unix/Linux is a great contribution.
• Collaborative Networked Communication: MUDs as Systems Tools At work I used to hang out (as the character "emergent") in a MOO that provides a very nice "virtual watercooler" to keep me in touch with my colleagues a thousand miles away.
• See Diversity University for an example of a very constructive MOO dedicated to education and non-profits. I used to hang out there as NealMcB.

Friends and other Interesting Personal Home Pages

• The Briggle Blog by Amber Briggle, a singer, massage therapist and fellow Unitarian Universalist, is a delightful view of living abroad in Enschede, the Netherlands.
• Joni Teter, a mentor and Fullbright scholar on ecotourism, blogging on Excellent Adventures in Egypt.
• Phil Weinstein - civic-minded designer of beautiful web pages
• Roger V. Thomas "paintings in glass". A wonderful artist and the best neighbor I've ever had (along with Joann Thomas, Master Gardner et.al.).
• Mary Ann Schaefer has delightful poetry and imagery on her site.
• Prentiss Riddle: a fellow esperantist and nice guy. And a FOAF-savvy webmaster (Friend of a Friend): FOAF info for Prentiss Riddle
• Jim Waterman Fascinating Friend
• Strider Benston - a Veteran of the Civil Rights Movement (AKA "Arkansas")
• Markus Günther Kuhn Good info on standards, security, and much more.
• Amanda Birmingham - Humor, TheBigPicture, web design, astronomy, bioinformatics - it's all there.
• Erik Max Francis - a wealth of contributions and links on a broad range of topics: science, language, essays, poetry, technology.
• Oliver McBryan on the forefront of bandwidth to the home.
• Dan Garlen Buddy from Summit High School, turned entrepreneur
• The Homeport Collective - an intentional community.
• Geoffrey Landis, an old friend of the family who has gone on to fame in the worlds of science (e.g. Mars Pathfinder) and science fiction writing.
• David S. Goodsell a beautiful and thoughtful home page
• Gordon Irlam a real Unix/Web/freedom contributor
• Mel Haas an interesting colleague
• Göran Öberg a great set of bookmarks

GPG - GNU Privacy Guard (free version of PGP)

If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy. Don't shy away from encrypting your email. You don't shy away from putting an envelope around your postal mail, do you? See Thomas Jefferson: Crypto Rebel? for some excellent insight into this All-American activity.

Use GPG: GNU Privacy Guard, a free and open replacement the better-known and highly respected PGP - Pretty Good Privacy. See Neal's PGP Keys for my keys, and my biglumber.com entry for trust paths and related info.

Archives

• Neal's Perspective on the Internet from August 1993 (mostly)

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Neal McBurnett
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