The Virtual Neal McBurnett
Web: http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/
(you are here :-)
Email: neal at bcn.boulder.co.us [I'm trying to
avoid most spammers]
Formerly nealmcb@avaya.com, nealmcb@bell-labs.com, AKA
nealmcb@lucent.com, Neal.McBurnett@att.com, neal@dr.att.com,
attmail!neal, ihnp4!druhi!neal (1987), ucbvax!ihnss!druxj!neal (Jan
1982), and I-don't-remember at Berkeley before that :-)
Home: Boulder CO
Contents:
I'm currently spending most of my time volunteering for various
organizations and working with open systems like The Web, free software and tools
like Linux, the Mozilla web browser, the OpenOffice suite, and open standards
from the Internet Engineering Task Force
(IETF).
I'm also working on the Internet2 Middleware
Initiative, their Internet2 Public
Key Infrastructure (PKI) Labs and the annual PKI Research
Workshop.
Between June 1977 and July 2001 I worked for Bell Labs, ending up as a
"distinguished member of technical staff" (really a software engineer
:-). The Bell System
("Ma Bell" - once the largest company in the world) split up over 2
decades. My division ended up at Avaya,
having spun off in 2000 from Lucent
Technologies which itself spun off of AT&T
in 1995, which divested the Baby Bells in 1984 after calling our PBX
division American Bell for a year. AT&T jointly owned Bell Labs
along with Western Electric when I was first hired. Wow.... But I think
split-ups are much better than the anti-competitive mega-mergers that
are all the rage! During the summer of 1977 I worked as a summer intern
in Holmdel NJ, and summer of 1978 was at Murray Hill. After a "One Year
On Campus (OYOC) scholarship at Berkeley, all the rest was in
Westminster CO. I like keeping in touch with Bell Labs Alums
My wife Holly Lewis is a
former Peace Corps volunteer (Nepal) who enjoys weaving glass beads as
well as many other arts and crafts, bird watching, bicycling,.... She
is a physician at Frontier Internal Medicine.
I've enjoyed many different activities:
- Co-founder and currently chair
of the board of the Boulder
Community Network, providing up-to-date information on the
community via the World Wide Web, and providing community access to the
information on the Internet. Here is a 1997
viewgraph presentation about BCN.
- Former member of the
Boulder Public Library Commission and Energy Advisory Board.
- I did an Analysis of the PGP
keyserver web of trust
- Approval Voting
Home Page: approval voting (vote for as many as you like) is the
best way to run single-winner elections. I put up the first web page.
- Summit High School (NJ), 1995 20-year Virtual
Reunion
- Here are some pictures of Comet Hale-Bopp
I took. Also my own little Evening's Tour
of the Universe
- I put together a bit-mapped font using the ISO 8859-3 character
encoding for Esperanto,
contrib/fonts/bdf/9x15-3.bdf, which was part of the X11R5 contrib
distribution.
- Inland Passage of Alaska
Vacation - a few whale and bear pictures from a lovely trip in July
1998.
- I uncovered many tales, both honorable and sordid, of my Spalding ancestors, dating back to Perthshire,
Scotland in the 1500's and Berwick in 1318. It seems that McBurnett is
an American name, not found in any Scottish or Irish records we've
found.
- Neal's UU site - materials for Unitarian
Universalists and the UU Church of Boulder
- Neal's Questions - some with
answers, but perhaps just asking a good question can be helpful....
- and, last and probably least :-) a bit of poetry, thanks to Donna
Davis' great class at LaForet: Lament of the Blue-Green Algae
and Some new Twinkle Twinkle verses
Go Worldwatch!
Go GNU!
Go Internet Society!
Go IETF!
Go CPSR! Go AFCN!
- The EFF - Electronic Frontier
Foundation is non-profit civil liberties organization working in
the public interest to protect privacy, free expression, and access to
online resources and information. Joining them is a great way to help
out and stay in touch.
- Promote freedom of digital
speech. Tell Congress to stop promoting efforts by
publishers to to control how you read, view, or
listen to their works that you've bought. Such restrictions are in
violation of traditional "Fair Use".
- What's Wrong
With Copy Protection outlines many other restrictions on fair use,
creativity and free speech (including lawsuits against people just
because they link to certain other web sites!) that are also a major
concern, such as the
Lawsuit about DeCSS/DVD
and several provisions of the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
- Participate in the
Creative Commons if you want to e.g. legally, royalty-free, play
music or show films to support a nonprofit, or want to spread your own
creations without seeing most of the revenue go to the middlemen. Help
lower the legal barriers to creativity. And read Stanford law professor
Lawrence Lessig's book The
Future of Ideas.
- Support The League for
Programming Freedom fighting user-interface copyrights and software
patents. See also the American
Committee for Interoperable Systems.
- Environmentalism and Sustainability: Zero Population Growth || The Boulder
Environmental Center || PLAN-Boulder County
|| Energy: check out the Rocky Mountain
Institute || eating
a vegan or vegetarian diet.
- The Long Now Foundation
helps us focus on the long term rather than quarterly earnings reports
or daily "news" or minute-by-minute stock market fluctuations. Think
10000 years... Very cool!
- The Foundation for Ethics
and Meaning is a grass-roots movement. Its goal is "to change the
bottom line in American society so that productivity or efficiency of
corporations, legislation, or social practices is no longer measured
solely by the degree to which they maximize wealth and power -- but
rather also by the degree to which they tend to maximize our capacity
to sustain loving and caring relationships and to be ethically,
spiritually and ecologically sensitive" -- Michael Lerner.
- Colorado Green Party
and the Colorado Democratic
Party (we really need Approval Voting
so we can support multiple options!)
- The Colorado
Telemarketing No-Call List is finally a reality. Sign up now!
- The anti-competitive and
abusive practices of Network Solutions/Verisign lead me to suggest
that you avoid them when looking for domain names or SSL/TLS
certificates.
- World standards bodies are considering redefining time so it is
no longer in sync with the rotation of the earth. Specifically they are
discussing the elimination of the leap second in UTC, which keeps wall
clock time in sync with the irregular spinning of the earth. See Leap Second Page
and the excellent leap
second bibliography for more information. I agree with The
case against UTC leap hours and think redefining UTC to eliminate
leap seconds is a bad idea. Use TAI if your system doesn't deal
gracefully with leap seconds.
- Community Networks, including BCN in Boulder, RITNet in Portland
(see City
Club Civic Networking presentation), and K-12 activities like the
famous Boulder Valley School District.
-
Peacemaker Community - a global, multi-faith community, training,
empowering and connecting peacemakers around the world. Includes the Bearing Witness Journal
and many other worthy organizations and wise leaders.
- Nonviolent
Communication - a refreshing language of compassion useful for self
growth, families, and activists.
- [PDF]
The Science of Self-organization and Adaptivity by Francis Heylighen
- Very fundamental stuff - I think this joins evolutionary theory in
clarifying how we came to be. It leaves behind "Intelligent Design" and
other creationist approaches, which still have to explain how the very
complex intelligence/creator itself came to be.
- The Santa Fe Institute is
the birthplace of some profound ideas about complexity and chaos. Swarm is a great simulation system.
- Artificial Life Online,
and The Live
Artificial Life Page.
- SETI,
the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, and Anticryptography,
AKA CETI, the science of creating a message that can be easily
deciphered, even by somebody (or something) who has no prior knowledge
of how the message is composed or what information it contains.
- The Great Story as told
by award-winning science writer Connie Barlow and the spiritually
grounded Rev. Michael Dowd - inspiring presentations based on the
History of the Universe, using evocative beads.
- The ancient Asian game of Go
is elegant and fascinating. Since Deep Blue beat the world champion
chess player, Go is the only significant board game in which computers can't beat the
best humans (or even regular players). It provides a major
challenge for researchers in the field of Artificial Intelligence. I
think it will take decades before Go programs achieve mastery. Check
out the Boulder Go
Club, Rafael's go
page and GoBase - the online Go
Encyclopedia.
-
Genetic Images by Ken Musgrave.
Another site, "International Interactive Genetic Art"' was cool, but I
can't find it any more. Viewers helped interactively evolve pleasing
art!
-
Esperanto, the international language, and other languages and
cultures. But I'm not above laughing at some linguistic humor....
- Patterns
are the recurring solutions to the problems of design. Patterns form
languages, not unlike natural languages. Visit the
PortlandPatternRepository to learn and share more about these
ideas.
- Music, e.g. Folk Music ( search for lyrics via
Mudcat and DigiTrad) and Classical Music (hear online MIDI files!)
- International Folk
Dancing and Music
-
Bicycling and
hiking (and maps!).
- Bird Watching
- Physics,
Astronomy and Archaeo-Astronomy.
Explore the universe from radio waves to gamma waves via SkyView, the Internet's
Virtual Telescope,
- Sundials - you can even
see a sundial reader:
a real-time image of a sundial in Cambridge England, with software that
automatically calculates the current time by measuring the shadow.
-
Timelines and Scales of Measure
- My
Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator type is INTP.
- Genealogy and family
history
- Internet Society - for
global cooperation and coordination of the Internet
- Internet Engineering Task Force
(IETF) - developing official technical internet standards. An
amazingly open and enlightened institution.
- I support truly open systems, where the spec itself is
democratically controlled, like the Internet, the WWW, and for most
purposes, Unix (see Usenix The
Advanced Computing Systems Professional and Technical Association)
- Free Software Foundation (FSF)
- produces and freely
distributes the complete integrated software system named "GNU". Note
that professional support is available for free software. E.g. see Cygnus Solutions.
- Advogato - the free
software developer's advocate. Cool testbed for work on group trust
metrics. See my page
there.
- Unitarian Universalist
Church of Boulder - a warm and open UU community which shares
common-sense principles.
Currently studying
Civil Liberties and Economic
Globalization.
- In his page The World Wide
Web and the "Web of Life", the person who invented the World Wide
Web (Tim Berners-Lee) explains how its philosophy, and that of the Internet Engineering Task Force is
similar to the Unitarian Universalist
philosophy.
- Humanism: ethics
and community without superstition
- Union of Concerned Scientists
- good environmental credentials
- CPSR (Computer Professionals for
Social Responsibility) and their Community
Networks Working Group
- Give.ORG: promoting
informed giving and charitable integrity.
- KGNU 88.5 FM - Community
Radio, and National Public Radio:
KUNC 91.5 FM
- City Club of Portland
- Brown University Computer
Science Department
- University of
California, Berkeley - Computer Science Department
- PFLAG - Parents and Friends of
Lesbians and Gays. I bet some of your friends are gay also.
- Hemlock Society - Death
with Dignity - Good Life, Good Death
- Email: avoid AOL, Juno, etc. On the Internet I strongly
recommend using programs and services that stick to IETF standards because that allows you
to easily switch from one service to another. This means using
providers like Earthlink, Indra's net, etc, and avoiding their
proprietary features. Consider getting your own domain name (e.g. from
DomainDirect.com or 000domains.com, and NOT the abusive monopolist
Network Solutions/Verisign) or using an email forwarding address. E.g.
perhaps mail.com or bigfoot.com. See Email
for Life for more insight. For some help on the process of moving
from one to another, see
converting address books from AOL, Juno, etc to Eudora, Netscape, etc.
If you want to run your own Linux computer with its own SMTP server,
see Running a mail server on a dynamic address.
- Think twice before sending email
attachments - especially Micro$oft Word attachments. You may reveal
information you consider private, spread viruses, the recipient may not
be able to read them, etc.
- The Web Authoring
FAQ has Great advice on how to get started, and great advice for
experienced authors on how to make better web pages. Another classic is
Essential Web
Authoring Advice by Jukka Korpel.
- Please support the
Best Viewed With Any Browser campaign. Don't get lulled into
relying on the fancy features of specific browsers or even the latest
HTML standard - it just makes your pages less widely viewable.
- Check your web pages for valid HTML with tools like W3C HTML Validation Service
or Doctor HTML.
- Good error handling for web sites, and especially 404 error
pages that point back to the offending referrer page, help improve the
web. See how
BCN's error pages work and consider doing something similar on your
site.
- Colorblindness affects hundreds of millions of people. Web pages
will not be easily accessible to these people if they require the user
to discriminate between certain colors. Please pay attention to Color Contrast.
E.g. I'm red-green colorblind ("deutan"). Other good resources are Colors For
The Colorblind and Color Perception
Issues.
- Pay attention to web site usage via the best tool around: Analog. And
it's free!
- Stop SPAM. CAUCE: The
Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email will tell you how.
- Wikipedia - the Free
Encyclopedia - and you can contribute. See
Current
Events.
- The Halfbakery
is a fun communal database of ideas and inventions
- The Internet Archive's Wayback
Machine can show you much of the World Wide Web as it looked years
ago. Find many old pages that have gone away....
- Measure 4
Measure: Sites That Do the Work For You - a collection of on-line
calculation sites
- NetMind Free Services
- Internet Tools
by John December
- The WikiWikiWeb
is a nice way for a group to evolve a web site.
- Java: a revolutionary
advance in programming languages and a new software platform.
- Linux - a free operating
system, so you don't need to rely on that overpriced, unreliable,
proprietary, insecure Windoze stuff that Micro$oft uses to illegally
extend its monopoly power. Linux runs on everything from an old 486 to
Macs to PDAs to cellular phones to hot new multiprocessor Alphas. It is
the OS of choice for servers and developers and anyone who doesn't want
Microsoft to be in control of their desktop.
- For ordinary users who want to use Linux, the easiest way to get
acquainted is with Knoppix. It
is a bootable CD that can be used stand-alone for running Linux
software (word processing, spreadsheets, browsing, etc.). It is also as
an educational CD and a rescue system for Linux or Windows. It is safe
to try it out even for just 10 minutes since it is not necessary to
install anything on a hard disk.
-
The table of equivalents / replacements / analogs of Windows software
in Linux
- Simple End User Linux
produces lots of good information and software. They have great sites
to support use of Linux in the
schools and in science
also.
- Scripting languages for the Internet: python is the latest and greatest.
- Using different languages and character sets with computers can
be hard.
UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ for Unix/Linux is a great contribution.
- Email
FAQ (all you ever wanted to know about email!)
-
Collaborative Networked Communication: MUDs as Systems Tools At
work I used to hang out (as the character "emergent") in a MOO that
provides a very nice "virtual watercooler" to keep me in touch with my
colleagues a thousand miles away.
- See Diversity University for
an example of a very constructive MOO dedicated to education and
non-profits. I hang out there as NealMcB.
- I used to use Macs all the time, and enjoyed Elliotte's The Well Connected Macintosh. That
is now "Appleholics Anonymous" -- it looks like Elliotte has moved on
from macs as I have. Though my reasons had more to do with the vigorous
attacks from Apple on anyone with a compatible "look and feel", which
thankfully were rejected by the courts. The closed nature of the MacOS
was also big hurdle, and even now, though the lowest layers of the
operating system are open, the windowing system and many other crucial
layers of OS X are closed.
GPG - GNU Privacy Guard (free version of PGP)
If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy. Don't shy
away from encrypting your email. You don't shy away from putting an
envelope around your postal mail, do you? See Thomas
Jefferson: Crypto Rebel? for some excellent insight into this
All-American activity.
Use GPG: GNU Privacy Guard, a
free and open replacement the better-known and highly respected PGP -
Pretty Good Privacy. See Neal's PGP Keys for my
keys.
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GCS/CC/S/O d-- s+: a+ C++$ US++$ PY++ P+ J++ L++$>+++ E++ W+++$ N+ o? K?
!w-- !O M V- PS++ PE-@ Y++ PGP+(++) t+ 5 !X !R- tv- b++ DI++ !D G
e+++>+++++$ h--- r+++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
Neal McBurnett
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modified: Tue Oct 14 14:45:50 MDT 2003
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