Scout Report: Week ending September 23, 1994

September 23, 1994

The Scout Report is a weekly publication provided by InterNIC Information Services to assist InterNauts in their ongoing quest to know what's new on and about the Internet. It focuses on those resources thought to be of interest to the InterNIC's primary audience, researchers and educators, however everyone is welcome to subscribe and there are no associated fees.

The Scout Report is posted on the InterNIC InfoGuide's gopher and WorldWideWeb servers where you can easily follow links to resources of interest. Past issues are stored on the InfoGuide for quick reference, and you can search the InfoGuide contents to find the items reported in all previous issues. The Scout Report is also distributed in an HTML version for use on your own host, providing fast local access for yourself and other users at your site.

http://www.internic.net/infoguide.html
gopher is.internic.net choose Information Services/Scout Report

Comments and contributions to the Scout Report are encouraged and can be sent to scout@cs.wisc.edu.

See the end of the report for additional information, detailed access and subscription instructions, and a correction from last week:

Newbie Newz subscription instructions corrected at bottom.

Highlights In This Week's Report:

  • Several great Web sites, including the Oneida Indian Nation of New York, Salzburg's Sommerszene Festival, and Filmmaker magazine.
  • Tidbits of 'Net stats in 'NetBytes
  • Glass Wings

World Wide Web

  • AgriGator is a WWW server at the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (IFAS). The Institute is part of the University of Florida and serves the agricultural, human, and natural resources needs for the State of Florida through on-campus instruction, at 20 Research and Education Centers, and at Cooperative Extension Service offices in 67 counties. This WWW is provided as a resource to support the many and varied agricultural and related activities of the Institute and other interested individuals. IFAS welcomes you to the SWAMP, home of the AgriGator. Visit the different areas within the swamp but be careful where you step, it has not been completely explored and there are many hidden gators in the water.
  • The Andy Warhol Museum Home Page includes a tour of the museum, samples of various works by the artist as well as directions, times, admission fees, and other information.
  • The first Aviation/Aerospace Newspaper to be available on the Internet via the World Wide Web is The Avion Online. Produced at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, this weekly college newspaper specializes in coverage of aerospace activity, such as the space shuttle, and aviation topics like the Lockheed/Martin merger. Get weekly reports from students who are studying the very stories they are reporting.
  • The Cascades Volcano Observatory of the U.S. Geological Survey has announced a WWW server offering information on volcanically-induced geologic and hydrologic hazards as well as images of volcanoes and volcanic phenomena. Includes links to ther components of the USGS Volcano Hazards Program such as the Alaska and Hawaii Volcano Observatory and the international Volcano Disaster Assistance Program.
  • Vice President Al Gore's National Performance Review announces the release of Creating a Government that Works Better and Costs Less: 1994 Status Report in full hyper-media. The 1994 report summarizes reinvention efforts across federal agenices during the last year. The report includes several hundred links to pictures, audio clips, as well as the NPR's extensive library of reinvention reference materials. The report is a complement part of the National Performance Review's recently released ToolKit, an interactive World Wide Web Home Page.
  • Florida Tech School of Aeronautics.
  • Fractal Geometry, Feedback and Chaos are the themes of Contours of the Mind, An exhibition of Sonic and Visual Art at the Australian National University in Canberra. The event has brought together a unique blend of visual art, science and music from Australia and abroad. An online catalogue of submitted works is now available.
  • Canada's Geographical Names of Canada Centre for Mapping, Geomatics Canada, Natural Resources Canada, has announced the opening of a bilingual Web site offering a variety of selections including information about the CPCGN, publications, digital products and the Canadian Geographical Names Data Base (CGNDB). A popular selection will be the "query" of Canada's official geographical names, a limited search of the CGNDB, displaying such fields as province, latitude, longitude, NTS map, etc. At this moment, "Geo-Names Canada" is a stand-alone site, but the National Atlas Information Service (NAIS) web site is soon to be released and these two resources will then be integrated.
    [Note: Site title has changed since the original Scout Report review. Site formerly referred to in the Scout Report as "Geographical Names Section."]
  • NASA Public Affairs HomePage: Do you know why Congress created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1958? NASA's directives are to conduct aeronautical and space "activities; create a science program using aeronautical and space vehicles, and inform the public as widely as possible about agency activities and their benefits. The homepage contains images, sound and text to explain what NASA does and why, and has links to many other NASA pages.
  • NYU's Center for Digital Multimedia welcomes the first of its affiliates onto their World Wide Web server: FILMMAKER, an informative and irreverent magazine that focuses on independent movie-making. It is a joint publication of the Independent Feature Project and the Independent Feature Project/West.
  • The Oneida Indian Nation of New York WWW site provides historical and cultural information about the "Onyota'a:ka:"- "The People of the Standing Stone". Read the Introduction to Oneida Indian Nation by Ray Halbritter, the federally recognized Nation Representative. Look into such topics as Economic Sovereignty, Cultural Rebirth, and Mind, Body, and Spirit.
  • Sommerszene Festival 1994 in Salzburg, Austria is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its international festival of contempory performing arts. "An Inquiry into the Art of Survival Part I: A Season in Hell" offers Theater, Dance, Text, Music and Film. Over the years renowned artists from all over the world have met an open audience here to give the town the reputation of being more than just the upper-class meeting point for traditional culture.

Gopher

National Information Infrastructure

  • Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (MPT), Japan has begun providing information on the Web, including the MPT News(press releases), white papers, and reports of the telecommunications council.
  • New documents on the Department of Commerce National Telecommunications Information Administration (NTIA) gopher.
    • Technology Policy Working Group Charter
    • Technology Policy Working Group Minutes 08/18/94
    • Global Information Infrastructure Update
    • IITF September Report
    • Calendar of Public Events
    • Irving Testimony on S. 1822, given 09/20/94
    • Health Information and Applications Working Group Charter
    • IITF Factsheet, Revised 09/12/94
    • America Speaks Out, Universal Service Hearings Summary
    • NTIA Universal Service NOI, Comments Requested
    • IITF Meeting Minutes from meeting held on 07/26/94

NetBytes

  • A new issue of the The Internet Index has been released, with a nice collection of trivia numbers related to the Internet. For instance, "Percentage of US public libraries offering Internet searches by staff: 21" Sources of the stats are also available.

    Email: send a message to internet-index-request@OpenMarket.com

    in the body of the message type:

    subscribe internet-index [Note: Resource(s)/URL(s) mentioned above is no longer available.]

  • The University of Twente (UT), The Netherlands, maintains a WWW server with information on network management protocols. Contains links to a large number of free SNMP software packages, including documentation and source code of UT-SNMPv2. It also includes lists of network management standards, articles, the Simple Times, CMIP-RUN etc.
  • The growth of WWW and Mosaic use seems unabated. Overall WWW traffic in August hit 1.3 Terabytes or 8 % of the total NSFNet backbone traffic. NCSA has become the second biggest Internet site in the world in terms of traffic from its site - 406 Gbytes per month. The biggest is still MIT (site for distribution of X-windows). [From the Internet Society.]
  • The Sept 15th snapshot of the commercial domains registered with InterNIC shows 20,242 unique commercial domains compared with 18,403 as of Aug 15, 1994. The net increase of 1,839 domains represents and 10.0% month gain. [From the folks at Internet Info. Additional details forthcoming.]
  • The Well Connected Mac aims to be a single entry point to all Macintosh resources on the Web. Check for software, online journals, product reviews, full hypertext versions of several Macintosh FAQ lists and more.

Weekend Scouting

  • Glass Wings has now opened its doors onto the electronic frontier. This Australian site covers a wide range of interests including news, games, entertainment, humour, travel, books and magazines, the environment, human rights, food, health, the educational, sexuality, the arts and a writers forum. Glass Wings is a companion project of Xanadu Australia.
  • The first Vangelis Home Page is online. The page consists of many pictures, digitized music and animations. Vangelis is a famous synthisizer guru and he has made soundtracks for many movies. Also included in this page is a section specific to Bladerunner, the most discussed movie of the Internet.
  • Over The Coffee is a new a World Wide Web site providing coffee-related information to both coffee enthusiasts and coffee professionals. Look for a glossary of coffee terminology and a list of retail mail order coffee and tea vendors.

Errata:

  • The address for subscriptions to the NewbieNewz was incorrectly stated in last week's Scout Report. The correct and complete instructions are below. Apologies for any inconveniences.

    send email to: NewbieNewz-request@IO.COM

    leave the subject line blank
    in the body of the message type: subscribe NewbieNewz

    (note, you can only subscribe yourself)

    for information about NewbieNewz, in the body of the message type: info NewbieNewz

    Newbie Newz archives .zip files.

About the Scout Report

The Scout Report is a weekly publication offered by InterNIC Information Services to the Internet community as a fast, convenient way to stay informed about network activities. Its purpose is to combine in one place the highlights of new (and newly-discovered) online resources and other announcements seen on the Internet during the preceding week.

A wide range of topics are included in the Report with an emphasis on resources thought to be of interest to the InterNIC's primary audience, the research and education community. Each resource has been verified for substantial content and accessibility within a day of the release of the Report.

The Scout Report is provided in multiple formats -- electronic mail, gopher, World Wide Web, and now HTML. The gopher and World Wide Web versions of the Report include links to all listed resources. The Report is released every weekend.

In addition to the ascii version, the Scout Report is distributed in HTML format via a separate mailing list. This allows sites to easily add the Scout Report to their local WorldWideWeb servers each week, providing fast access for local users. Subscription information for the scout-report-html mailing list is included below. Note that permission statements appear on both versions of the Scout Report, and we ask that these be included in any re-posting or re-distributing of the report. Thank you.

If you haven't yet subscribed or told your friends and colleagues, now is the time. Spread the news by word-of-net. Join thousands of your colleagues already using the Scout Report as a painless tool for tracking what's new on the 'Net!

Comments and contributions to the Scout Report are encouraged and can be sent to scout@cs.wisc.edu.

-- InterNIC Info Scout (SM)

Scout Report Access Methods

** To receive the electronic mail version of the Scout Report each Friday, join the scout-report mailing list which is used only to distribute the Scout Report once a week. Send mail to:
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in the body of the message, type:
subscribe scout-report
to unsubscribe to the list, repeat this procedure substituting the word "unsubscribe" for subscribe.

** To receive the Scout Report in HTML format for local posting, subscribe to the scout-report-html mailing list, used exclusively to distribute the Scout Report in HTML format once a week. Send mail to:

majordomo@is.internic.net
in the body of the message, type:
subscribe scout-report-html
** To access the hypertext version of the Report, point your WWW client to:
http://www.internic.net/infoguide.html
>> Gopher users can tunnel to:
is.internic.net
select: Information Services/Scout Report.

Resource Addressing Conventions

After each resource in the Scout Report one or more network addresses are listed. In all cases a convention is used for listing the network address of each resource. It is assumed that users recognize the type of address and know how to use it. However, for those users unfamiliar with the Internet we provide here the order in which addresses are listed (by network tool) and instructions for accessing additional information in the InterNIC InfoGuide about each network tool. A brief explanation of one tool, WWW is included below.

The four network tools referenced most often in the Scout Report are World Wide Web, gopher, email, and FTP. Occasionally WAIS and Telnet addresses are also listed.

After each resource at least one address is listed, and sometimes more. This is because some resources are available through multiple network tools. The network tool addresses are always listed in the same order after each resource:

  • World Wide Web (WWW)
  • Gopher
  • FTP
  • Email
  • Telnet
  • WAIS

A WWW address is called a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) and always begins with a string of characters followed by a colon and two right brackets. For example:

http://www.internic.net/
gopher://gibbs.oit.unc.edu:70/11/research.d/grants.d
ftp://ftp.digex.net/pub/access/hecker/internet/slip-ppp.txt

To access the resource through the WWW you will need a WWW client installed on your host computer. Clients are available for all major computer platforms, including Macintosh, PC, and UNIX. To use a WWW client on your computer, you will need a TCP/IP connection to the Internet, either through a dedicated line connection or a SLIP/PPP connection. See the InfoGuide for additional information about the World Wide Web and for sites which archive WWW clients. For more information about SLIP/PPP, which can be used over a dial-up connection, see the document listed in the NetBytes section above.

gopher://is.internic.net/11/infoguide/using-internet/basic-resources/email/

Gopher to: is.internic.net
** Choose: Information Services/Using the Internet/

Send email to: mailserv@is.internic.net
In the body of the message type:

send INDEX
Copyright 1994 General Atomics.
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of the Scout Report provided the copyright notice, this permission notice, and the two paragraphs below are preserved on all copies.

The InterNIC provides information about the Internet and the resources on the Internet to the US research and education community under the National Science Foundation Cooperative Agreement No. NCR-9218749. The Government has certain rights in this material.

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation, General Atomics, AT&T, or Network Solutions, Inc.

scout@is.internic.net
guide@is.internic.net