... to Google’s privacy practices, I have to side with the skeptics. Remembering Gopher and realizing it is not entirely dead Nate Anderson at Ars does a nice bit of digital archeology. I too have fond memories of using Gopher before the web took off. I find it heart warming that the protocol lives on even if the number of servers available is shrinking away to nothing. Preserving digital pre ...

The most recent episode of Software Engineering Radio is Software Archeology with Dave Thomas. In his interview, Dave Thomas gives many practical tips for how to read code, especially when inheriting a project. This interview should be required listening for computer science students. They spend the majority of their time writing code while they’re in school and yet they will spend the ...

An article published today on the Guardian Technology Web site entitled “Geocities: dead but not lost” describes how Geocities, which was founded in 1994 and was at one stage the third most-browsed site on the web, is now dead. We discussed Yahoo’s announcement that the Geocities service was to be shut down some time ago in a post entitled ““Seething With Anger” at ...

Gale Banks (legendary Southern California hotrodder and auto engineer) shares this photograph of the old Los Angeles Subway Terminal. This image of unknown date and origin is remarkable to me, as an LA resident, in part because our city is not thought of as a "subway city." Throughout the 20th century, the growth emphasis here was all about freeways and cars, and public transportation ...

The computer that held my resume and related professional documents died. It just needs a new stick of ram but that is pretty low on my list of priorities. I started poking around for a copy of my resume at the request of someone who may want to do some work together and the most recent thing I could find is from August of 2006. Could it really be over three years since I updated my CV? You are ...

Today's archeology class was fun! We looked at all these reliefs from an old Greek temple at Poisidonia, and tried to figure out what was depicted. I got quite a few of them right. I picked out several labors of Hercules, the Niobids, and even managed to figure out (without ever having come across the idea before) that a centaur with human forefeet is supposed to represent Chiron (because ...