Internet/Technology Articles

Some published, some not

by James E Powell

A Gaijin and His Color Zaurus

This article, from 1997, was published on a now-defunct mobile computing website. It describes my (mis)adventures with an early color PDA from Japan. I had fun writing it. I still have the "Zarusu" PDA and will post a picture of it to accompany the article later.

Under the Hood of Web Search Engines

I published this article sometime in 2000 on the semi-retired Fatbrain.com site (now consumed by Barnes and Noble). It was the first of a series of technology articles I was planning to publish there. I also enjoyed writing this article, because it is the direct result of an epiphany I had while taking a pair of seemingly unrelated college courses, one on digital libraries and the other on linear algebra (you'll have to read the article to understand the relationship). There's a lot of source code in the middle, because this was to be a hands-on technology series, with working examples of the concepts described in each article. I have a rough draft of the second article, which was about Web Portals that I will polish and publish here soon.

A Very Gentle Introduction to Perl (from HTML Plus!)

This is a chapter from my first and to date only book. I decided to feature a chapter that was about something other than HTML because these were among the best chapters (IMHO) in the book. Let's face it, reading about HTML tags can be pretty darn dull at times. The non-HTML chapters about VRML, Perl, Java, SGML and search engines were the interesting ones.

Introduction to Web Search Engines

Here's a link to a Web-based course I developed about Web search engines. It covers topics ranging from metadata to search form design, search engine installation to managed directories, and federated searching and the Open Archives Initiative. The course is free to Virginia Tech alumni. Others who are interested will need to pay a modest fee. Take a look at one of the course modules.

Portal Essentials book - sample chapter

Gartner Group refers to �portal� as the �most abused term in IT.� Perhaps this is one reason few books tackle the subject of portals. One widely employed, though loose, definition of a portal is �any web page that a user can log in to�, but this falls far short of defining what makes a portal a portal. Another suggests a portal is a portal because of its ability to combine content from multiple sources, but this too is only part of the portal story.

Middleware for Pervasive and Proactive Computing

This paper explores proactive and pervasive computing, and looks at the challenges faced by middleware for pervasive computing. This paper focuses primarily on middleware for pervasive computing, and various aspects of the pervasive computing environment that affect its design. It also takes a brief look at the as-yet unresolved privacy issues surrounding some elements of the pervasive computing infrastructure.

Adventures with the World Wide Web: Creating a Hypertext Library Information System

Here's the first thing I ever had published. It first appeared in Database magazine in the February 1994 issue. I recently discovered that there are ten different US patents that reference this article, such as US5761662: Personalized information retrieval using user-defined profile and US5745754: Sub-agent for fulfilling requests of a web browser using an intelligent agent and providing a report (need to read these sometime!!). I hate software patents!!! I started work on this article in the summer of 1993, so it was a fairly early Web article. It isn't the best thing that I've ever written, but it was insightful at times. The editor took some liberties with the article that I find embarrassing. They encouraged excessive repetition of definitions and acronym expansions, and came up with wonderful section headers such as "fortuitous hypertext experience." At the time, I was just happy to get something published.