Neon Alley
- Internet and Programming Tutorials
- Internet and Programming Tutorials ranging from HTML, Javascript, and AppleScript, to Evaluating Information on the Net and Writing Non-Gendered Instructions.
- What Your Children are Doing on the Information Highway
- There’s something happening here, and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?
- About Negative Space
- Negative Space was founded October 13, 1995, from the ashes of Cerebus the Gopher, FTP server extraordinaire.
- The Book of the Machines
- “There is a plant that eats organic food: when a fly settles upon the blossom, the petals close upon it and hold it fast till the plant has absorbed the insect; but they will close on nothing but what is good to eat; of a drop of rain or a piece of stick they will take no notice. Curious! that so unconscious a thing should have such a keen eye to its own interest. If this is unconsciousness, where is the use of consciousness?”
- Breaking In to Mac OS X
- Sometimes Apple’s security appears to be akin to the Roman defensive structure: heavily arm the border, but leave the interior unprotected. It works, as long as no one gets through the border. But once they break through, there are some relatively simple ways to gain root access.
- Cultural Histories of the Internet
- Influences on the future and the history of cyberspace.
- Education and the Internet
- Copying from a chalkboard to the Internet?
- Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter Writing
- Charles Dodgson—AKA Lewis Carroll—gives us advice about writing letters that may be satirical but also might not be.
- MOO Stuff
- Text archive of MOO stuff, mostly some old objects.
- Negative Space Software Select
- Recommended software to make serving and browsing easier.
- Negative Space Spaced Out
- The best sites on the net, according to Negative Space.
- Neon Alley Recommended Reading
- The best books about the Internet.
- PowerShift, Information, and the Internet
- Short review of Alvin Toffler’s PowerShift.
old
- Collegium for Research in Interactive Technologies
- The Internet and computers provide—require—a new way of looking at documents and at the world. Cooperative Computing in the 1990s and Computers, Telecommunications, and Western Culture. From the World Conference on Computers in Education, Birmingham, England, 1995.
- Negative Space Software
- A long time ago, I wrote AppleScripts to manage my site, and I wrote osaxen to help speed up the scripts. These things are getting pretty old, and I don’t use them myself any more, but if you find them useful, great!
- Webserving on Eight Megabytes a Day
- This article is a blast from the past. Yes, I used to run Negative Space on eight megabytes. Over a 14.4 modem. Uphill. Both ways. Presumably you could still do it, but it would have to be static files for the most part (and you might want to hook that Macintosh up to Ethernet).
- Joy of Access
- What the net has to offer you. This tutorial is quite old, and hasn’t been updated since the last century. I’m leaving it available mostly for historical reasons. I’m not likely to write a newer version.
- Web Design for the Rest of Them
- Prepare yourself to enter the mid-1990s, when not all browsers supported tables, let alone javascript and style sheets. This ancient tutorial discusses writing pages to support browsers with varying support of the new-fangled web.
tutorial
- AppleScript Basics
- Basic AppleScript to automate the use of your Macintosh.
- Easy Web Design
- Creating basic web pages with Netscape Composer.
- JavaScript for Beginners
- Basic JavaScript to enhance your viewers’ reading experience.
- MySQL for Other Applications
- The basics of working with MySQL for users of other applications such as Dreamweaver, PHP, Perl, or Python.
- Perls Before Swine
- A basic Perl tutorial covering reading files, filtering files, importing into SQL databases, and displaying on the web.
- Persistence of Text
- A series of useful Persistence of Vision tutorials, starting with the very basics of simple object creation and progressing to automation and the usefulness of math.
- PHP for Dynamic Web Pages
- Basic PHP to store form data.
- Simple Photorealism using Persistence of Vision
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Simple photorealism for people who can’t draw. This tutorial guides you through using the free Persistence of Vision ray-tracer. You’ll create a planet, with rings and an orbiting moon set against a starry background.
- Come to Valhalla
- Valhalla is—or was—a MOO. MOO is a ‘programming language’ for creating multi-user dungeons (MUD). MOO is object oriented (thus, MUD, Object Oriented). MOO was created by Pavel Curtis and Xerox PARC, who are to be commended for their work. While MOO is ancient technology, there are still people who find it fun and useful.
- Evaluating Information
- Some things on the net are true, some things are not, and many are both. If you want to believe impossible things before breakfast, however, you can do so just as easily off the net as on the net. The best evaluation techniques will work for any information, not just Internet information. We have never been able to trust the printed word.
- Gender Neutral Instructions
- Writing for all of your readers.
- HTML Writing Guide
- Creating basic web pages with straight HTML code.
More Information
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The Idiot Virus
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Fake e-mail virus warnings hound the net almost as badly as get rich quick schemes. If I were a virus writer, I’d stick my virus inside of an e-mail message, call it a “warning”, and let the idiots send it around the net faster than Morris’ Worm.
