From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl at KeithLynch.net>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: WSFA:  Alive and Well
Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2008 23:48:16 -0400 (EDT)
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>

Mike Bartman wrote:

> WSFA...that seemed to be the one you were talking about, since I
> doubt that the Aussiecon site has WSFA journals or WSFA events
> on it.

I was mostly talking about Aussiecon.  The WSFA mention was just a
parenthetical aside.

>> Does anything substantive appear there when it's viewed
>> with some other browser?

> Can't say... I haven't looked at it in any browser.  Since I won't
> be going, it doesn't seem relevant to me.

I won't be going to Aussiecon Four either.  I'm just trying to gather
information with which to update Wikipedia, as a service to fandom.

> The "cons and events" link from the WSFA web page takes you
> to http://www.wsfa.org/webcalendar/month.php (that's the
> one I was looking at that is seriously ugly in Lynx) not to
> wsfa.org/calendar.htm...that's probably the problem.  You are
> looking at the old pre-changeover calendar, which is most likely not
> maintained anymore since we went to the new one several months back.

Aha!  That explains the bizarre claims that various events were on
it that clearly were not -- and that it had been updated to say the
Fourth of July meeting was at the Bungalow, when it clearly said it
would be at the Scheiners' (and still does).

> Where did you see the link to that?  Or did you just know it from
> before?

I had it bookmarked.  Most people go to web pages they either have
bookmarked or find in a Google (or similar) search.  Very few people
navigate down through a site's main page, except maybe on their very
first visit to a site.

That's certainly what I do, what I've read that others do, what I see
from web hits on my personal website, and what I saw from web hits on
WSFA's website when I was its webmaster.

It would be interesting to look at recent web hits on calendar.htm and
on webcalendar/month.php.  I wouldn't be surprised if the former is
still getting more hits than the latter.  The former should have long
since been made into a pointer to the latter.  Or better yet, the URL
should have been left unchanged in the first place.

webcalendar/month.php is much clunkier, slower, and uglier, but I'll
grant that it is indeed much more up to date, and lists lots of future
events for those with the patience to navigate through it.

> I disagree that you'd need another ISP account, since how the
> packets get to and from your machine isn't really relevant to
> whether or not your security is in danger (unless you have some
> sort of unusual, very limited ISP service?).

I have a standard shell account.  I dial into Panix with my VT420
terminal.  Packets never get to or from my PC (or my DEC Alpha, or
my brace of Vaxen), which I all leave powered off 99% of the time
(including now) anyway.  You seem to be suggesting I should also get a
PPP account and the hardware and software to support it.  Why?  Just
to compensate for the occasional clunky or broken website?  That would
be killing a fly with a bazooka.

Any security issues, Panix takes care of.  I'm not really interested
in running what amounts to a one-person ISP, and dealing with all the
resulting headaches.  Similarly, I'm on the power grid instead of
running my own generator.  I don't see any value in having a computer
of mine directly on the net, except boasting rights.  And that
wouldn't be much of a boast these days.

Ironically, I may be the first person to put a microcomputer directly
on the net.  I did so on April Fool's Day, 1981.  It was a 8080-based
CP/M machine at my workplace.  I used a terminal to dial into the
local ARPANET TIP at 300 bps, and entered some hairy TIP commands
I found in an online manual.  Then I typed the CP/M commands that
told the computer to use its serial port instead of its screen and
keyboard.  Then I attached the modem to the computer's serial port
instead of the terminal, having first soldered a special jumper cable
that allowed me to do this without the modem hanging up.  Friends of
mine were able to get to the CP/M system's command line prompt from
home, via the net.

I can't convey just what a hilarious stunt the idea of putting a
desktop machine directly on the net was in those days.  There were
only about 200 computers online, and they were all million-dollar
machines, each atached to the net with quarter-million-dollar
refrigerator-sized Interface Message Processors.

> Sites that use things invented since 1990 aren't "broken", they just
> don't match your preferences for technology.

The vast majority of even the newest websites work fine with Lynx.
And the proportion that don't is *decreasing*, if only so as to be
usable by the handicapped.

  Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on
  a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the
  Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on
  another computer, another word processor, or another network.
  -- Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web.