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Samantha was my PowerBook 170, whose name is
explained in
Chapter II (as well as in the
Dramatis Personae).
Samantha served me well for over two years. Apple's rigorous engineering procedures and quality assurance programs resulted in a laptop so rugged that ... every single piece failed. The motherboard ($700). The daughterboard ($400). The power adaptor ($100). The floppy drive ($250). The keyboard ($125). The display ($700). The 40 MB disk drive presumably would have failed but I replaced it with a larger one.
Thousands of dollars shoveled into Apple repair parts were enough to keep Samantha cheerful but then, in May 1995, someone broke into my minivan in Boston and stole my backpack, which contained Samantha. She is presumably running Chop Shop (a parts inventory program for car thieves) right now.
[Note: Samantha gets at least a couple of emailed propositions every week. I'm presuming that these come from guys who haven't carefully read Travels with Samantha and/or from guys who haven't read my guide to picking up babes on the Internet.]
The 1993 Dodge Grand Caravan that I drove to Alaska and back was starting to rattle in 1997, so I gave it away to an animal shelter from my Web site (and bought a new Toyota Sienna minivan off the Web).
There is a hardcopy edition with lots of four-color photos. It was published in July 2000 and is available from bookstores.
I spent perhaps
half an hour every evening working on my diary for the whole summer, then a few
hours every week refining the diary into a chapter. A few months later, I spent a
couple of more days editing the manuscript, then several weeks converting it to
HTML, adding photographs, feedback scripts, etc. [For what I've learned about Web
publishing, see
Philip and Alex's
Guide to Web Publishing. More specialized information is available from
Web Tools Review.]
About 1,000 people per day read at least a chapter or two of TWS on the Web
(the overall photo.net server gets in the neighborhood of 1.5 million hits/day on
busy days from about 30,000 visitors). This has been going on ever since 1993
when it was first published on the Internet.
You are reading
files from a Sun Microsystems E450, a low-end Unix server. To facilitate
discussion, the machine is running the free open-source
ArsDigita Community System.
I wrote the original in Microsoft Word and it took me about three days to get all the text and pictures up on the Web, using RTF_to_HTML, Emacs Lisp, HPCDTOPPM, and the PBM tools (all public-domain). Subsequently I went back and redid the photos consistent with my new religion for scanning and personalized presentation.
The pictures look better than much of what you see on the Web because they were transferred from the original slides onto PhotoCD rather than scanned from prints. Everything I know about photography is somewhere in photo.net.
(They would look a lot better if I had ever had enough time to edit each one individually in PhotoShop; what you see on-line now was batch-converted automatically.)
UNIX: Your gamma is uncorrected (see below). You paid $20,000 for a machine with an 8-bit video; upgrading to 24-bit will cost you more than a PowerMac 9500 and a P6 PC. You are running X Windows, which means that a clock program will consume 650K to 1.4 Mbytes of memory and each of your three mouse buttons will do something unexpected at all times. You might as well kill yourself now. Actually, if you are one of the rare few with a 24-bit Sun or SGI, you might be able to set the gamma and tell X Windows and Netscape about your 24-bit hardware and be happy.
Macintosh: Web browsers call high-level operating system functions that "do the right thing" with in-line pictures. Thus, if you have a 24-bit display, you can look at the in-line GIFs without horrible distortion. If you have an 8-bit display, you can't expect miracles.
Windows: The situation is much the same as with Unix. Be aware that, at least through the 4.0 version, Netscape Navigator does not intelligently use 16-bit color. You must have 24-bit color if you want to avoid banding.
There are basically no standards in the computing world for color rendition and illumination, except in the Macintosh world where there are competing standards. Thus, most of my JPEGs look to me a little too dark on most UNIX boxes and a little too light on Macintoshes (this has to do with the magic of gamma).
Adobe PhotoShop comes with a little tutorial to help you adjust your program to the monitor, room illumination, etc. If the Web standards people ever come to understand gamma and the systems programmers get their act together, eventually the operating or window system should do the right thing automatically.
Don't get me started on color.
If you lugged a 50 lb. Rollei 6008 system down to the bottom of Tower Falls in Yellowstone National Park, you'd want to show off the results too.
