Seeing that page led twoleftfeet on Metafilter to reminisce about creating the first “Under Construction” animated gifs, mentioning the earlier, clunkier “server push animations.”

A thread on Hacker News centered on that story. Scriptor asked “server push animations? How were those done?” And I dug up some information – including an implementation – & posted it there.

I’ve been curious about what it would do on current browsers, so. I took the Perl script, hit the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for some canonical test images, & put them together to make:

This is a server push animation. It surprised me that it worked in Firefox & Mobile Safari.

I can’t say that this is terribly useful, except for historical interest. Each frame of animation is sent as a separate picture, so, for example, a loop would require an ongoing connection.

I read about the Nielsen Haydens’ work to reconstitute from caches & whatnot after a server died, & it sounds familiar.

archive.org covered the Metaweb, & so did I. It sorta looked like I’d have to set up a wikibot to read the archive & push it back out to another wiki, possibly having to massage the input for formatting (no, you can’t log in!) & massage the output to preserve timestamps. Now it looks plausible to feed the html into something that spits out an sql dump.

This also got nudged a bit by finding out that Stephenson’s got a book, Anathem, coming out late this year. Aaand now I see a name I remember from the Metaweb asking about it. So I’m going to go ask if he got a copy of the database.

Updates (8/17): Since writing this, I’ve been in touch with Metaweb collaborators Jeremy Bornstein (who gave me an Anathem copy), Alan Sinder, & Patrick Tufts (due to a question I asked on Metafilter). There’s a small (four meg), corrupted, empty copy of the database at hand, & a larger (forty meg) copy hiding somewhere.

He’s doing a tour of readings; he’ll be in San Francisco for its release party September 9th, with Anathem-inspired music & Q&A.

A friend from hbmobile has offered the use of cryptonomicon.net, which I’m considering.

Update (12/10): There’s an Anathem Wiki. the database hasn’t made an appearance, & computer problems have provided another obstacle.  I’ll note any progress here.

                MicroMemo       TuneTalk

ipod - 4th gen  no              no

ipod - 5th gen  untested        works

nano - 2nd gen  works           works

nano - 3rd gen  works           works

nano - 4th gen                  works

ipod classic    works           works

iphone          no              no

iphone 3G                       no

ipod touch      no              no

touch - 2nd gen                 no response

There are other accessories that allow you to record – the ivoice (for touch & iphone, apparently) & the Griffin italk pro, at least – but I own neither, so haven’t tested those broadly. The italk pro worked well in a brief test with the nano 2nd gen & my microphones, at least.

Update (12/10): Tried the TuneTalk on a newer generation of ipods.

Oh, I don’t have forms for zero or Q yet. I picked up J & Z from issues of Teen Titans & Brave & the Bold, by the way.

Here’s a decoder ring graphic -

- & here’s a high quality PDF version of the decoder ring.

Edit – 2008-05-18 – the fixed zip link is all lowercase. whoops.

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