Technical stuff

Anyone who cares about how all this was made, read on. You may also want to check below if you are encountering problems when viewing this site in your web browser.

XHTML 1.0 & CSS2 Compliant!

This site is now compliant to XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS level 2! Each page was checked using the W3C's Markup Validation Service and CSS Validator to make sure—click the buttons at the bottom of each page (like those directly below) to check for yourself!

Web pages

This web site was originally made almost entirely with Emacs 21.1.1 for the text and HTML bits (to slightly misquote the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork: Learn the codes! :P) and The GIMP 1.2.3 for the graphics, on a built-from-cheap-parts PC that ran SuSE Linux 8.1.

Since early 2005, it has been maintained and updated with Emacs 21.3.50.1 and The GIMP 2.2.3 on an iMac G5 running OS X 10.3.8.

The site should work properly with whatever screen resolution you're using—none of that annoying corporate 780 pixels wide because otherwise the layout gets messed up stuff here; I've got a 1440×900 resolution and I would like to get some advantages out of it if you don't mind, Mr. hot-shot web designer! Sorry, getting carried away there... ;)

Anyway, this site has been tested with a variety of browsers, and was found to work well enough with:

• Konqueror 3.0.3 for Linux;
• Mozilla 1.0.1 for Linux and Mozilla Firefox 1.0 for OS X—other browsers using the Gecko engine should therefore suffer no problems, either;
• Opera 6.05 for Windows, 7.23 for Linux, and 7.54u1 for OS X;
• Safari 1.2.4 for OS X;

which means later versions than those should give no trouble at all, either. On the other hand, the following browsers are known to give more or less serious problems:

• Links 2.1pre2 for Linux—cannot display images, but otherwise gives usable pages;
• Lynx 2.8.4 for Linux—pretty much the same as Links, above;
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.2 for Mac under Mac OS X—the Mac version of this browser does not suffer from the image- and buttonbar-related problems that the Windows version has (see below), but has a few other minor issues. None that make it too annoying to use, though;
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 with Service Pack 1 for Windows—since this browser (still!) cannot display transparent parts of PNG images, you may notice that they seem to have a single-color background that contrasts a little with the image background of the rest of the page. This is the result of probably the best possible attempt to solve this, until Microsoft does something about it. Another small snag is that the button bar (on the right of the window) scrolls along with the page in IE, but is fixed in the window in most other browsers; again, this is due to a fix needed to make things work more or less as intended in this browser;
• Netscape Communicator 4.8 for Linux—does not support cascading style sheets properly, and page display is also not helped by the fact that Netscape 4.8 has problems rendering transparent PNG images and does not recognise many standard special characters, displaying their codes instead (— instead of an em dash, for instance). Put together, this makes the site hard to use; basically, if you still use Netscape 4.8, upgrade now :)
• w3m 0.3.1 for Linux—much the same as Links and Lynx (above), though if you have the necessary extension installed, it does display images (sort of).

If you are using a different web browser than those listed above and you suspect it's giving you trouble viewing these pages in a way that's not documented above yet, it would be appreciated if you could send an e-mail to <jakko@xs4all.nl> to explain what's wrong.

Background illustrations

The sand-coloured background (behind this text) is a section of the paint job on the glacis armour of the Iraqi T-55 Enigma MBT at Bovington Tank Museum, while the olive drab bars at the top and right side of the page were made from a cut-out from the camouflage of a Czech OT-810 APC at the Imperial War Museum Duxford; each of these images was made tileable to present a seamless graphic on the page. Both museums are well worth a visit if you find yourself in England, by the way.

Icons

Many of the icons were found in the Crystal and HiColor icon sets for KDE, while the others came from GNOME. If you run Linux, you can probably find them in /opt/kde3/share/icons/ and in /opt/gnome2/share/pixmaps/, respectively. Some of the icons were slightly modified to adapt them to this page.

Net.books

The principal requirement for the net.books is, obviously, photographs. For the most part, these were taken with a Fujifilm Finepix 6900Zoom digital camera of 2001 vintage, and/or an Asahi Pentax SV 35-mm SLR camera from the late 1960s; those from the latter were digitised with a Hewlett-Packard ScanJet 3400 flat-bed colour scanner.

The computer-generated illustrations were made with POV-Ray 3.5, using KPovModeler 0.20 and, later, 1.0 as a front-end to more easily generate the required data files for it.

The layout was then created in QuarkXPress 4.1 for Windows, which was also used to write the captions for the photos and, in some cases, the full text of the net.book. For other books, the main text was written in Emacs. From QuarkXPress, the documents were printed to a Postscript files that were then turned into PDFs using Adobe Acrobat Distiller 3.01. The resulting PDFs were edited with Adobe Acrobat Exchange 3.0 to add in hyperlinks and get other minor details right for display—most of this under Microsoft Windows 98SE (mainly due to a lack of suitable Linux software for many of these jobs).