User:Baccala@freesoft.org

Hello, I (baccala) am the editor of freesoft.org.

Freesoft's main claim to fame has been the Internet Encyclopedia, most of which I wrote about ten years ago to "take the Internet tradition of open, free protocol specifications, merge it with a 1990s Web presentation, and produce a readable and useful reference to the technical operation of the Internet." The Encyclopedia has three main sections - the Topical Core, a collection of 100 or so essays on various aspects of Internet engineering; HTML-ified versions of what I thought were the most important RFCs, so I could link a reader directly into an RFC subsection; and the Programmed Instruction Course, which was never really "programmed instruction", but did manage to shed a little light on CIDR for a few people. There was also a full-text search engine (now broken).

I've added a little bit here and there to the Encyclopedia, but it has remained unfinished. The most glaring omission is the near total absence of any dicussion of routing or bridging, despite their critical importance. There are a lot of reasons it has languished, and probably laziness is one of them, but I've now decided to reinvent the Encyclopedia - hopefully replace a "1990s Web presentation" with some a little better for the new millenium.

First, I plan to wrap the Topical Core into Wikipedia. I always wanted to do something like Wikipedia with my site, but could never get over the spam/vandalism problem, and never decided to just put it out there and police the site, like Wikipedia. And Wikipedia's scope is a lot broader than my site. So, anything that I had in the Topical Core that seems to missing from Wikipedia, I'm merging it in. Hopefully we'll end up with a Wikipedia Internet section that's a heck of a lot better than what I had come up with ten years ago.

Next, I want the course to be video-based. I've developed a new version of rfbproxy that lets me capture a screen session and turn it into an MPEG, DivX, or OGG video. I want to use this to develop a coherent series of videos to introduce Internet network engineering.

As for the RFCs, it was way too much trouble to convert them to HTML by hand. It'd sure be nice to have an automated tool to break them down into sections for easier reading. It'd be even nicer to have a URL scheme that could point to individual lines or characters in an RFC, so I could link to something like "lines 134-137" in an RFC, so that when a user clicked on the link, they'd be taken to the relevent part of the document, highlighted. But this seems to require linking to the RFCs somewhere other than the IETF site, and Wikipedia seems to be commited (at least at the moment) to using the IETF site for links (understandably), so I guess I'll just punt on print-printed RFCs for a while.

In short, I plan to be doing a bunch of work in the Internet sections of Wikipedia, and hope to have some nice videos to show for it. If you're working in the same area, drop me a line &mdash; I'm not trying to go stepping on your toes.

9 Oct 2005 baccala@freesoft.org

Hi, Welcome to Wikipedia! The welcoming comittee shoudl arrive shortly and give you a more formal welcome. In the meanwhile, one little request: I notice that you made extensive edits to Category:Elementary algebra. Could I ask you to instead merge your edits with the article Elementary algebra? The category is kind of the wrong place for a detailed exposition. The right place is an article. The category should have at most a paragraph introducing the subject, and little more. Thanks! linas 22:56, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)