| German: | Schweiz |
| French: | Suisse |
| Italian: | Svizzera |
| Romansch: | Svizra |
Can't you speak Latin? Index Librorum Liberorum is Latin for “List of Free Books”,
which seemed an excellent title for a site consisting primarily
of public-domain software and documents. It is a parody,
of course, of Index Librorum Prohibitorum,
the list of books banned by the Roman Catholic Church.
Liberorum is itself a Latin pun, meaning both free
of charge and promoting liberty.
laboratory”. As it happens, I've been interested in
artificial life since the mid-1970s, long before it became respectable.
Ants and ant colonies always seemed to me to be the most
interesting models, since they exhibited complex emergent
behaviour with simple organisms and a limited number of
chemical signals. When
Rudy Rucker
and I were discussing his “Artificial Life Lab” program, I
often urged him to adopt an ant colony model for it.
Being a science fiction writer, he had his revenge upon me.
The villain of his 1994 novel
The Hacker and the Ants
was based on me, with the final scene set in the building
which now contains the www.fourmilab.ch server. But he laughs best who
writes last.
Amusingly, not long after the publication of
The Hacker and the Ants, the largest
interconnected network of ant colonies known as of that date was
discovered in the Jura mountains, not far from Fourmilab.
Not at the moment. But if you're interested in unleashing
autonomous mobile robots yourself at home, check out the Swiss made
desktop-scale (50 mm diameter) Kephera and the compatible six-wheeled
Koala from
K-Team.
Both are programmable in GNU C and other
languages, equipped with a variety of sensors, and expandable with
accessories such as grippers, vision sensors, and radio modems. I am
an investor in K-Team.
As many of the topics discussed in pages here are rather obscure,
it's inevitable some of the books they cite are out of print. I've
found
abebooks.com
an invaluable resource for tracking down and buying such
volumes. Their database connects you directly to booksellers
worldwide, and allows you to choose a suitable edition, price,
and condition before forwarding your order to the bookshop for
fulfillment. If you can't find it there, the book you're
seeking is in all likelihood extremely rare. We are an
abebooks.com affiliate, and earn a modest commission
when you order books through their site.
grail.cba.csuohio.edu - - [03/Dec/1994:00:26:26 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 0
Mea culpa!
(This audio clip is from episode 605 of South Park, of which season six is now
available on DVD.)
Apache, of
course. It's fast, versatile, secure, and free.
As of January 10th, 2016, Fourmilab has been hosted at
Amazon Web Services,
(AWS) which provides a Linux/Apache environment which provides me
complete control over the configuration. Moving Fourmilab's hosting
to AWS has reduced the cost of hosting the site by a factor of fifty
compared to local hosting and has reduced the anxiety when leaving
town, since the Amazon-hosted site can be administered from anywhere
in the world and has high availability and hardware redundancy.
Backup is provided by mirroring the site to other AWS regions which
can be activated if the primary site goes down or in the event of
a bad asteroid day, and by regularly mirroring the site to the
local in-house server which is backed up daily.
Keep on programming, of course!
Unscheduled electrical power outages are extremely rare in Switzerland;
we've experienced less than an hour total at this site since 1992. Much
more worrisome is when things suddenly get too bright. We're
located on a plateau at an altitude of about 800 metres above sea level; in the summer
we experience frequent violent thunderstorms, with an average of
about four nearby lightning strikes per year which get into the power and telephone lines.
Circumstances like these require comprehensive power
protection, and we've found the Smart-UPS series
Uninterruptible Power Sources (UPS) from
American Power Conversion
do the job superbly. Since installing APC Smart-UPS
units on all non-resistive loads in 1994, we have had zero equipment losses due
to lightning strikes and zero downtime due to transient power outages.
High-wattage equipment insensitive to power outages, such as
laser printers and copiers, are protected by APC Line-R
voltage regulator and load protection units; they provide
the protection of a UPS without the backup battery power in
case of outage.