Curious Ellie's Annex

NSA Comix Archive

I was browsing through the website of my recent acquaintance on Pinterest, the National Cryptologic Heritage Museum. In fact, I am sincerely proud to say Pinterest friend, as the follow is mutual. This led me to another website, where I noticed that the Public Information, Declassification and Transparency Department of NSA Communicators had posted a delightful document archive.

Cryptolog!

Newly declassified by the National Security Agency! Browse through any, or all, of the 136 issues of comic-formatted Cryptolog, from Volume 1 (1974)  through Volume 23 (1997). Each issue of Cryptolog is available as a PDF file, for your extended and leisurely enjoyment.

I found this puzzle transcribed as a webpage (HTML), as a sample of the fun to be found within.

The larger event is the 60th anniversary of the NSA

"Established on Nov. 4, 1952, the National Security Agency celebrates this week 60 years of service to the nation. NSA's achievements [are] in areas such as signals intelligence, information assurance, innovative research, and contributions in support of U.S. military and foreign policy goals."

Prior to 1952, the NSA existed as the Army Signal Corps. I didn't know this. My grandmother worked for the Army Signal Corps in Philadelphia during World War 2, and for several years following. She enjoyed her work there enormously. If she had been able to continue... wow! Instead, she returned to her job as a librarian assistant at Central High School. I feel so proud of my grandmother! I wish I could tell her what I learned today.

"A public ceremony will be held on the same day at the agency's National Cryptologic Museum, where officials will present a new 60th Anniversary Exhibit including the SIGABA cipher machine, the only such device that remained completely unbroken by an enemy during the war."

The date was 12 November 2012. This post is a little after the fact. However, the National Cryptologic Museum remains open, in its full glory.

The Cryptologic Foundation describes it as a Museum Like No Other. I wish I could visit. I wish it could be soon.

36 Views of Mount Fuji and then some: Asian art exhibits at the Smithsonian

I have been fond of ukiyo-e woodblock prints for many years. My favorites haven’t changed: Hokusai for nature and Utamaro for portraits. My favorite Hokusai work continues to be the first I ukiyo-e I ever saw, his Wave. Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji: Under the Wave off Kanagawa is a beautiful digital reproduction!

 

Three Known Beauties 寛政三美人 by Kitagawa Utamaro, circa 1803

 

* The image above is not part of the exhibit, but it is one of the many Utamaro ukiyo-e that I like.

I submitted a comment, an inquiry. No surprise there!

If possible, I hoped you might be able to answer a question, Mr. Kaplan. I viewed the enlargement of the image above, and noticed a graphic in the lower left corner, on the black matte surrounding the image. What is it? is it used for photographing and digital reproduction?

Asian art line-up

The Freer and Sackler Galleries of the Smithsonian Museum of Asian Art have a fine line-up for the entire year. The current exhibits are a series of Japanese spring-themed art with more Hokusai as well as Kabuki and contemporary works.

Beauty of the Sea

Via an article by G.W. Bowersock in the New York Review of Books.

Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, click here to enlarge.

Details of the exhibit are available directly from the Met, including a video about the discovery of the mosaic and a feature story, published by metmuseum dot org on 23 September 2010.

via romanhistorybooks.typepad.com

This is a spectacular Roman mosaic, now on exhibit for those within hailing distance of Manhattan and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I love mosaic art, modern and ancient. The image above is one small part of a larger collection found in Lod, Israel in 1996. It was created in 300 A.D.

I'm certain that I've seen this mosaic in classics texts. While the discovery may not be recent, the traveling exhibit is. It will be open through 3 April 2011.

Footnote: Does the mosaic image seem crooked to you? Perhaps it is a figment of my imagination (or astigmatism). Could it be due to parallax effect when the image was clipped and/or cropped?

A Short History of Search Engines from Archie to Google

Google has become so dominant in the world of search that it is easy to forget that there were search engines before Google. In fact, there were search engines before the web.

What many people believe was the very first search engine was developed in Canada. It was the creation of a McGill University graduate student named Alan Emtage. In 1989, even before the birth of the worldwide web, he developed a way to search and index public internet-based archives. He called it Archie (archives without the "v"). He neglected to tell the people running the university's computer science program what he was up to, but Archie was an instant hit among students and other early adopters of the net

By 1992, Archie's server was using about half the available bandwidth in eastern Canada. A few thousand devoted users were asking about 50,000 queries a day. In pre-web world, Archie was an effective, if cumbersome way of finding documents on the internet. If you typed in the name of the file you were looking for, it could look around the net and find it, though when things got busy on weekday afternoons, it could take Archie several hours to respond to your query....

via The Sunday Edition | A Short History of Search Engines from Archie to Google.

A History of Enterprise IT in One Slide

via aiim.typepad.com

Digital Landfill made this slide for a conference he attended recently. It got a lot of attention.

These were some of his accompanying thoughts:

... the challenge is in managing information systems that are much more distributed, informal, and ubiquitous than anything that has been known previously.

The current world of transactionally centric content management is not going away -- in fact it is bigger and more robust than ever -- but organizations need to start thinking about how they extend their thinking about governance and taxonomy and compliance and control into this new world.

 

The Hydraulis

The hydraulis or water organ is said to have been invented by Ctesibius in the 3rd century BC.

In Ctesibius’s version, water was used to regulate the flow of air through pipes to produce music from a keyboard, but as time went by the use of bellows became as popular as water. Both versions of the instrument died out in the West after the fall of the Western Empire, but survived in the East.

via romanhistorybooks.typepad.com

The hydraulis, or hydraulos (romanhistorybooks seems to use both spellings) is an appealing concept. It evokes thoughts of water with a sense of musicality. It reminds me of Archimedes' Water Clock also. I wish there were a mosaic depicting that! But Archimedes hailed from Ancient Greece, probably predating the Roman mosaics such as this one by at least 400 years. I could find out definitively from a Google search in less than five minutes.

However, the answer, and further details about the Water Clock, with (modern) images, is ample subject matter for a full-blown post all of its own. I will try to remember to follow up on that.

I Can See That Imperial Romanov Russia Is a Bear.

via delong.typepad.com

"But What Is England?" asks Professor J. Bradford DeLong.

His perspective seems to be a bit Cthuluhesque. Or Cthulean.

Ancient Petra

Quest for Solomon's Mines on Nova tonight, though not entirely satisfactory as a documentary, has some nice images of Ancient Petra...

via romanhistorybooks.typepad.com

RomanHistoryBooks is a grace note of elegance in the Stream.

Perfect Vision is a Myth

via MiguelCarrasco: 10 Biggest Computer Mistakes (2006)

Over the years, computers have changed the way we live. In order to get where we are today, many software development and hardware companies have pushed the envelope...

There were plenty of mistakes made along the way. I've culled highlights from Miguel Carrasco's 10 Biggest Computer Mistakes of All Time. The list includes Apple, IBM, Xerox and Microsoft products.

Miguel's website is a bit of journey back in time too: "Best Web 2.0 Websites of June 2007" is featured in the banner. The post following the one I viewed is titled "FireFox 2.0 Debuts Tuesday".

It's worth glancing at the comment thread too. There are some excellent, very funny comments. Did you know that Melinda French, now married to Bill Gates, was the project manager for the Microsoft Bob O/S that was replaced by Windows 95? I didn't!

Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition

Windows Me was touted as the first operating system to support Universal Plug and Play. Unfortunately, it was also notoriously difficult to re-install, which was terrible because it needed to be re-installed almost weekly.

 

Apple 3

The Apple 3 was one of the worst personal computers ever built, and one of the most expensive. It was designed for the high end business market, yet was hard to justify, priced at $7,800, in 1980, no less.

About the Apple 3:

When it became too hot inside the computer (engineers opted not to use a fan), chips would start popping out of the boards! In order to correct the issue, Apple tech support could be heard saying "please lift up your Apple 3 about 10 centimeters off the desk, and drop it." This would put the chips back in the slots sometimes. 

IBM PCjr

I actually owned an IBM PCjr from 1986 to 1989. It had been lightly used for a few years before I gratefully substituted it for the monstrous VT220 "dumb terminal" sitting on my bedroom floor. I needed it to check batch jobs running overnight. The much maligned "ridiculously small keyboard" didn't seem unduly awkward to me. If only they could've seen a QWERTY Blackberry!

My IBM PCjr even retained value, as I was easily able to sell it for $400.00 to an IBM Almaden Research lab tech, purchased as a gift for his 9-year old son. I can't imagine spending that much money now for a five year old PC, no printer, speakers or peripherals, with not one but two prior owners!

Xerox Alto

No price point information was provided for Alto, but I am dazzled by its list of features, even after discounting for it being state of the art (in 1972!)

Developed at Xerox's Palo Alto Research center, the Alto had a bitmap display, windows, drop-down menu bars, a mouse, built-in Ethernet and hard disk, keyboard, word processor and more in their software productivity suite, a paint application, and even e-mail. Xerox was far too busy fighting the copier patent war, and was not interested.

Over a decade elapsed before any comparable product was ready to go to market: Steve Jobs introduced the Apple Macintosh in 1984.

iPad Copyright Violation?

i'm probably late to this party... but i just wanna point out that they even stole the NAME. "Personal Access Display Device (PADD)" does this mean that steve jobs is actually from the future, too? are there cases out for the ipad yet to pay homage to it's future design? cuz there should be.

via www.qasixapart2.com

This image could lead the casual observer to believe that the true provenance of the iPad is the late 1980's motion picture Star Trek, The Next Generation! I didn't realize there was any intellectual property of any sort associated with that movie!

Is it possible that Steve Jobs was one of the originalfen  circa 1987? Because it is uncanny how much the item on display at the IBM Museum resembles today's iPad and iPhone designs.... Well, maybe not that closely.

I wonder if Mrs. Rodenberry's estate is aware of the situation, perhaps contemplating a pending copyright infringement action at this very moment? Probably not, but it would be such a delightful scenario....