Monthly Renewal: February 2009
Let me tell you a story.
Occasionally, people ask how 10stripe chooses what topics to cover. Many sites, for instance, follow whatever is getting attention in the news (or the news within their niche, anyway) and write something about that. Others have a predetermined schedule. 10stripe does not do these things.
Recently I read a book (Where Wizards Stay Up Late) about, essentially, how the Internet came to be. This was mainly a history of the ARPANET, which preceded the Internet. This got me thinking about ARPANET a bit and, a few days with Google later, I found that there were actually a series of maps of the network's growth that were produced for a report from a contractor to ARPA. After some more time with Google, I had the report (and the maps) in hand. After some fiddling it occurred to me that a lot of interesting things could be done with these maps. And just like that, I had committed 10stripe to producing a series of Flash-based maps of ARPANET, as well as some other related things. The series will take a few weeks to complete.
The moral of the story is that 10stripe has, essentially, no process for these things. Interesting-sounding ideas, wherever they may come from, get written, or drawn, or what have you.
So if you have a deep interest in ARPANET, this should be an interesting month for you. And if not, don't worry. We will, as always, be publishing an unpredictable mix of all sorts of things. But a few of them will involve the ARPANET.