Third National Flag of the
Confederate States of America
P. A. Stonemann, CSS Dixieland
National Jack of the
Confederate States Navy
|
Third National Flag of the Confederate States of America |
P. A. Stonemann, CSS Dixieland |
National Jack of the Confederate States Navy |
CSS Dixieland
Probing the depths of knowledge
These essays by P. A. Stonemann, CSS Dixieland, cover a wide range of
historical, philosophical, scientifical and technical subjects. Each page
deals with a particular topic, divided into sections and explained by itself.
Every page shows at its top hyper links to every other page. The Start page
also has short descriptions of the other pages. CSS Dixieland expresses
gratitude to the readers that make this work meaningful.
This Web document has been tested with KDE Konqueror, graphic HTML interpreter
for Linux. It may not be rendered correctly by other graphic HTML interpreters.
It will probably be correct when rendered by text-only HTML interpreters (visual,
aural, or Braille tactile interpreters), but if feasible, please use KDE Konqueror.
Uniform Resource Locator:
Document Start page
Index, history, exchange policy, contact CSS Dixieland
Sections in this page
Index of CSS Dixieland
Index of CSS Dixieland
Introductory page
Start
Pages on historical subjects
History of the Aryan Race
Aryan
Women
History of Dixieland
Country Music
Migration
Victory
History of Río de la Plata
Tango Music
Pages on philosophical subjects
Solipsism
Pages on scientifical subjects
Biology
Whales
English Linguistics
Language
Teaching
Pages on technical subjects
Image and sound
Photography
Cinematography
Stereoscopy
Computing
Computing History
Computing Links
Free-DOS Operating System
Unics Operating Systems
Internet Gopher Protocol
Transportation
Railways
Pages on other subjects
Games
Chess
Technical note: In languages other than English or Latin, but which use mainly
Latin characters, some characters are taken from other alphabets, or some Latin
characters are modified with diacritic marks for representing different phonemic
sounds or other orthographic conventions of those languages. Those characters,
when used in this document, have been encoded as entities of Hyper Text Mark-up
Language or sometimes in Unicode UTF-8. Therefore computers using other character
encodings may render some characters inaccurately, but hopefully, it will still
be possible to read non-English words without too much difficulty.
History of CSS Dixieland
This document began in June 2003, manually created from scratch by using
almost exclusively MS-DOS 6.22 of April 1994, and the earliest version of
Hyper Text Mark-up Language written by Mister Berners Lee and Mister Daniel
Connolly in 1992 (published in June 1993 as CERN Convex Atrium specification,
later retroactively known as 'HTML 1.0').
Pages were thus created in the following years. Gradually, all pages received
some commands of HTML 2.0 (July 1994 standard of the Internet Engineering Task
Force, last official revision in September 1995), of HTML 3.2 (January 1997
standard of the World Wide Web Consortium), or of HTML 4.0 (April 1998
standard of the WWWC), and some pages received Java Script.
The gradual introduction of newer specifications was done following the
philosophy of CSS Dixieland on backward compatibility and accessibility:
-First, some years must have lapsed between the publication of any new
specification and its adoption by CSS Dixieland, hopefully to ensure that the
specification really have had initial acceptance. For instance, the HTML+ and
HTML+ Reference of 1993, as well as the HTML 3.0 of 1994 (all of them by
Mister Dave Raggett and other authors) never had general acceptance, but they
inspired the creation of tables for the HTML 3.2, 4.0 and 4.01 specifications.
-Second, acceptance must also be gauged for a wide diversity of user agents,
operating systems and display media. As much as possible the policy guarantees
that older agents, systems or media will not be left out by the incorporation
of newer resources. As a test, the document was re-structured in frames with
the adoption of the HTML 4.0 specification.
In 2009 the operating system used for creation of new pages and maintenance
of existing ones was changed to Free-DOS 1.0 of September 2006, which offers
in general more possibilities than MS-DOS.
As a consequence of the move to Free-DOS, serious problems with single-task
operating systems became evident: When not using a task swapper, DOS systems
cannot manage frames efficiently. This forced to remove all frames. It was a
fact that the test of frame structure had failed to comply with the policy of
accessibility. The lack of a task swapper for Free-DOS, but the otherwise high
quality of Free-DOS, well justified to take this decision. MS-DOS had some low
memory, limited, primitive, third-party task swappers, but in most other aspects
Free-DOS is a better operating system. The whole document was then made compliant
with HTML 4.01 Transitional (December 1999 standard of the WWWC).
Six different servers have hosted this document in the course of twenty years,
from 2003 to 2022. Every one of those hosts had some problem. All of them were
free hosts, which did not require any payment, therefore there was no reason to
complain. The only recourse was to stop using their service, and this was finally
done one after another. CSS Dixieland also used a third-party redirection service,
but this provoked problems of content integrity (insertion of totally irrelevant
advertising), which forced to quit from the forwarding service.
It became necessary in early 2017 to change operating system from Free-DOS to
Knoppix Linux. This move justified a renaming of links and data sets from the
8.3, all capitals standard of DOS, to longer names in lower case. The version
of Hyper Text was maintained as HTML 4.01 Transitional, based on SGML. It was
thought as yet unnecessary to change to HTML 5, mainly due to the problem of
having in existence two official standards for HTML 5, one from the World Wide
Web Consortium and the other from the Web Hyper-text Application Technology
Working Group. As of 2020 this document continues as HTML 4.01 Transitional
with minor changes, such as the removal of background sound, a feature that
has been eliminated in the HTML 5 of both standards, the WWWC and the WHATWG.
With the change from Free-DOS to Knoppix Linux the standard encoding of the
document was also changed from 7-bit ASCII to Unicode UTF-8, but special or
accented characters, those with diacritic marks, are usually encoded as HTML
character entities and not as Unicode. They should be rendered correctly by
any device capable of interpreting HTML character entities.
The programming of this document is static, executable at client side. There
is no inclusion of dynamic languages that are executable at host server side.
The document is intended for view with a screen width of at least 640 picture
elements, thus avoiding horizontal scroll bars for those screens, although
graphic elements may appear disaligned. They will appear correctly aligned
with 800 picture elements or more, and with a suitable HTML interpreter.
Since 2017 the testing interpreter has been Konqueror for Linux.
The text may be shown as too small for easy reading with larger screens, but
text size can usually be modified also from the user agent. Only vertical
bars should normally be necessary for scrolling. Computers with tiny screens,
however, may show horizontal scroll bars, or they may resize graphic elements,
or they may show only text. Those actions depend on the user agent and its
configuration.
All that means that the document has been created from the start, and has
always evolved, with ACCESSIBILITY and with BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY constantly
in mind. Regarding accessibility, the HTML 4.01 Transitional version should
be perfectly presentable for absolutely ALL user agents. Tables have been
constructed to be efficiently rendered by visual user agents (graphical or
text-only), by aural user agents (text-to-sound), or by tactile user agents
(text-to-Braille), which visually impaired persons may prefer or need to use.
Hyper links may be activated by any suitable pointing device (light pen, touch
sensitive screen, touch pad, track ball, table mouse...), or by keyboard,
voice commands, or automated programmes.
Cascading Style Sheets, or another style sheet language, has not been used.
All instructions for presentational mark-up are exclusively written in HTML.
The decision has been entirely taken by CSS Dixieland, but the reasons are
explained in "Adding a touch of style", written by Mister Dave Raggett in
2002. Mister Raggett notes that HTML presentational mark-up may be useful
when targetting user agents made before the release of HTML 3.2 in January
1997, this is, before Netscape Navigator 4.0 and Microsoft Internet Explorer
4.0, both of which were released in 1997, therefore targetting user agents
that were made during the Browsers War or earlier. The document is available
at the World Wide Web Consortium:
World Wide Web Consortium
Regarding backward compatibility, the vast majority of HTML user agents or of
computer screens made since the mid 1990's, with operating systems of 32 or of
64 binal digits, should be able to show correctly all pages of the HTML 4.01
Transitional version of CSS Dixieland.
Computers with operating systems of 16 binal digits or with any user agents
of the early 1990's may have some difficulties for following the internal
links, may not execute Java Script, or may also present scarce contrast of
colours between text and background, thus provoking more or less difficulty
of reading.
Computers with operating systems of 8 binal digits will not work at all if
having only their original installation. However, if having later installed
capability for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol and for interpreting HTML, then
the document may be shown, although perhaps only as text. Gopher is a more
appropriate protocol for those computers, but the scarcity of free servers to
host Gopher documents makes it difficult to offer a Gopher version of CSS
Dixieland, because only Super Dimension Fortress and maybe one or two other
Gopher hosts still operate as of 2020. Super Dimension Fortress predominantly
uses Telnet Protocol, and the very few others require SSH and are unreliable.
In sum, an effort has been made to ensure that NEARLY EVERY DEVICE IN EXISTENCE
PAST OR PRESENT, capable of supporting HTTP and of interpreting HTML, will be
able to access the HTML 4.01 Transitional version in a manner enough for reading
the whole document, no matter how primitive or unusual that device might be.
Even without HTTP or HTML, just by transferring the document from another computer
with HTTP, an off-line device will still be able to show the document as plain text.
All the HTML tags will be shown in the text, and no HTML formatting, but it should
still be possible to read the document without excessive difficulty. Its source has
been coded thinking even of that remote possibility.
Data sets in CSS Dixieland: Formats, ownership, distribution...
With few exceptions, the data sets included in this document or accessible by
internal hyper links have the main characteristics listed below.
-Texts:
As explained in the previous section, all pages of this document are in HTML
4.01 Transitional, format of the World Wide Consortium. Most of the content
is authored by CSS Dixieland and is freely available for public distribution.
There are parts written by other authors, indicated by their names, who may
have other conditions for distribution (see 'General rules' below). Internal
hyper links point to texts in either of two formats:
Simple text without images is given as plain text, with character encoding in
Unicode Transformation Format UTF-8, Carriage Return and Line Feed for new
line (DOS Standard), and horizontal lines usually not longer than 80 columns.
Complex text (such as mathematical formulae), or also text with images, is given
as Portable Document Format (Adobe Corporation), embedding Open Document Format
(Open Document Foundation). Most executables for PDF or for ODF should be able
to open this combined format.
-Images:
Images are one of three kinds: static, animated, or dynamic. The format for static
images is either Portable Network Graphics (World Wide Web Consortium), used for
images in raster graphics, or Scalable Vector Graphics, used for images in vector
graphics. No other static image formats are used in this document.
The format for animated images is either Multi-image Network Graphics (World
Wide Web Consortium), or Graphic Interchange Format, 1989 version (Compuserve
Corporation). No other animated image formats are used in this document.
Some raster graphics images in PNG, MNG or GIF format have been created or
modified using GNU Image Manipulation Programme for Linux. Some vector graphics
images in SVG format have been created or modified using Inkscape for Linux.
The formats for dynamic images (cinematographic, video images) are indicated below.
-Sounds, or dynamic images with or without sounds:
For audio, the format is Motion Picture Expert Group, Layer Three. For video,
the format is Motion Picture Expert Group, Layer Four. No other audio or video
formats are used in this document.
Some audio has been created or modified using Audacity for Linux. Some video
has been created or modified using Kdenlive or Open Shot, both for Linux, plus
inserted frames or subtitles using GNU Image Manipulation Programme, Inkscape,
or occasionally also some other software for composition of documents.
Use of images or sounds for personal purposes is normally permitted (not always),
but licences for commercial distribution vary widely (see 'General rules' below).
-Executable codes:
Java Script code is the property of their authors, indicated for each code. They
have made their work public, but may impose some restrictions for distribution.
No other scripting languages have been included in this document.
Chess games are given as plain text in full descriptive notation, written by
CSS Dixieland and freely available for distribution, or given as Portable Game
Notation (algebraic), executable by Gnome Chess and by X Board, both for Linux,
and by most other recent executables for the game of chess. Content in PGN is
normally of free use.
-General rules:
External hyper links may point to data sets with other owners, in other formats,
under other conditions for distribution, or other legal requirements. CSS Dixieland
has no control over those factors, therefore the reader is advised to consult the
relevant information, if available, from the external documents thus accessed.
In general, most authors have made their work public for personal use, but maybe
not for commercial use. It is usually acceptable to include or link a text, image,
sound or executable code in a personal page, such as in a Gopher or World Wide Web
document, or in a personal comment, for instance in Usenet or a social network, but
before using for commercial purposes a work by another author, it is responsibility
of the reader to verify, if reasonably possible, that he can legally do so. At least
giving credit to the author, if known, is a courtesy to be respected.
In case of doubt the correct action is contacting the author, asking for permission.
If not knowing his name or means of contact, a search engine may be useful in trying
to find the author by querying for relevant key words. If unable to find or contact
him, then the use of the work rests on the good judgement of the reader, depending on
the scope of the commercial purpose for which that work will be used. It is difficult
to give universally applicable rules, normally an author likes to see his work used
by others, but for various reasons he may complain. If so, then the immediate removal
of his work must be effected if at all possible, eventually followed by an apology.
Policy for link exchange
Texts in this document can be freely used, except where expressly specified.
However, it is requested from persons using any of these texts to have the
kindness of mentioning the author name as stated in the document. Authors of
documents in Gopher, World Wide Web, or another protocol, are free to insert
in their documents hyper links (or textual Uniform Resource Locator) pointing
to this document. Those gently wishing to reciprocate hyper links from their
documents to this one and vice-versa, are invited to write to the address
below, inform of their Uniform Resource Locator, and propose their ideas.
CSS Dixieland will examine their document and eventually insert another hyper
link from our document to that one. The decision about whether inserting it
or not will be mainly based on the content of that document. Merely commercial
documents without valuable reading, those showing liberal or immoral attitude,
or those showing an extreme carelessness in language or presentation, are some
examples of documents that will not be linked hence. Documents with good
content will probably be linked, at our sole discretion. They can be written
in any of the main European languages. Very possibly in minor languages too,
giving us a longer time for reviewing its content. For any questions, please
do not doubt in asking us by writing to our electronic address.
Contact CSS Dixieland
For notifications, comments or suggestions
It is important to receive different kinds of suggestions from our readers,
regarding for example elegant and accurate use of language (in particular for
scientifical or technical terms), good distribution and accessibility of
information in the different pages, correction of possible mistakes, updating
of old references, indication of interesting hyper links to other documents,
of inoperating hyper links in this document, or any other feedback. To those
readers who choose to make contact with the author of these essays, let us
express our deep gratitude.
They may use the electronic post address provided at the bottom of this page.
The communication may be sent anonymously, but it must be composed in a formal
and correct style. Informal language or incorrect statements will not be
answered or attended. Therefore a reader must take his time for writing a well
thought letter, if wishing to receive a response. Shortly pointing out a
possible mistake in the document or a dead hyper link, for their correction or
removal, is perfectly acceptable. However, a letter full of errors, of
subjective opinions, and of casual wording, is not acceptable and will be
disconsidered.
The correct operation of hyper links listed here is verified from time to
time, but between a verification and the next, it may happen that one or two
of them have become inoperating for a number of reasons. If finding an
inoperating hyper link, it would be of great help to other readers to let the
author know. In that case please send a short message such as "Broken" or
"Dead", and the Uniform Resource Locator of the inoperating hyper link,
including the protocol, looking for instance something such as:
Broken: ftp://... Dead: gopher://...
Inoperating: http://...
CSS Dixieland expresses a deep gratitude to those kind readers who take their
time to notify of the existence of any errors, to those who comment ideas, or
to those who suggest improvements. The document grows with their valuable help.
Messages to CSS Dixieland can be sent to the following electronic post address:
cssdixieland
The string "AT" must be substituted by the character "@" and the string "DOT"
by the character "." without surrounding spaces and in single horizontal line.
Sorry for the inconvenience, but there is a bunch of niggers from Niggeria
whose favourite sport is sending lots of spam. They use computer programmes
for automatic harvesting of addresses, and the above substitution is one of
the methods for thwarting such programmes and their nasty monkey users.
Hyper links to Linux software
There are many thousands of software components for Linux, most of them free,
others with shared payment of costs, or commercial. The list given below is a
selection of a few personal choices for free software, though there is often
more than one distribution or executable for a given purpose. It is difficult
to say which one is 'the best', because from tiny and simple executables for
old or limited computers, to huge and complex executables for new and advanced
computers, the collection is vast. The reader may try some of them, before
deciding which one better suits his personal needs or his style of working.
Knoppix
The Document Foundation
GNU Image Manipulation Programme
Inkscape
VLC Player
Audacity
Kdenlive
Open Shot
GNU X Board
Robot or human visitors to CSS Dixieland are recorded in raw access log. This
is a passive register purely for statistical purposes, no cookies are stored
in the client computer.
Hosted by Neocities:
https://konqueror.org/
Walkyrie who takes our dead heroes to Walhalla in Asgard.
Wagner Frost Illustration
History of CSS Dixieland
Data sets in CSS Dixieland
Policy for link exchange
Contact CSS Dixieland
Hyper links to Linux software
Index, history, exchange policy, contact CSS
Dixieland
Providing Knowledge for the Victory of the Aryan
Race
Fighting in defence of our Language, Religion and
Eternal Values
We are not the last of yesterday, we are the
first of tomorrow !!!
Fierce Women who fought, killed, or died, for
what they believed
Their admirable Courage dispels the fallacy of
the 'weak' sex
Strong inpiration for every Idealist to follow
their example
History and records of North American Old Time
Root Music
Confederates who chose migration rather than
accept foreign occupation
Counter factual history of a Confederate victory
in the war of 1861
Alternate future of the World after a Confederate
victory
History and records of Río Platense Music
The awful suspicion of an unreal reality
The void of existing as the only thinking entity
in a non-existing Universe
The mysterious whales of Abrolhos Islands
Scientific enigmas surrounding these cetaceans,
the biggest animals that have existed in Earth
History and character of the Jute-Anglo-Saxon
culture and the English tongue
Personal tutoring for those who want to master
the English language and its culture
Teaching Languages: Approaches, methods and
techniques
Technical knowledge on how to record unusual
images for posterity
The graphic memory from the past to the future
History of a technique that makes possible the
materialisation of the strangest dreams on a screen
The capture of living action on the edge of for
ever
How to make three dimensional images with any
camera for still Photography
The realistic capture of the visual world,
technique adaptable to Cinematography
The dawn of cybernetic evolution
The fascinating history of how thinking machines
have come to be the powerful brains that they are today
Plenty of classified hyper links about many
subjects related to computers
An enormous diversity of available resources
The system for the Computing enthusiast who
really knows
The awesome power of the command line, in expert
fingers
The most portable and customisable systems ever
created
Full of advanced resources for the experienced
programmer
The most simple and uniform hyper text protocol,
free of commercialism
Underground, metropolitan or sub-urban railways
in the world
The charming attraction of smokey chimneys and
iron rails
The game for the superior mind
History and technique of the oldest and most
international of all games of intelligence
Adding a touch of style, written by Mister Dave Raggett in 2002:
Reasons for using HTML presentational mark-up instead of style sheet languages
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/Style.html
AT
gmail
DOT
com
Live distribution of Linux operating system, boot-strappable from optical disk or flash storage with persistence of personal preferences.
Needs about 5 Gigabytes of storage and has software for many purposes. Usable from pure command line or various graphic interfaces.
http://www.knopper.net/
Libre Office Suite of software, with full resources for Open Document Format and partly for Portable Document Format (Adobe Corporation).
Includes Writer for documents, Calc for spread sheets, Impress for presentations, Draw for drawings, Math for formulae, Base for data bases.
http://www.libreoffice.org/
Complete executable for professional creation or manipulation of raster graphics images in many formats. Huge collection of filters.
New filters can be programmed ad hoc in Script-Fu (a dialect of Scheme LISP), or in Python or Perl installing appropriate software.
http://www.gimp.org/
Executable for creation or manipulation of vector graphics images in Scalable Vector Graphics or Portable Network Graphics formats.
An image can be created using Inkscape, and then modified or converted to other formats using GNU Image Manipulation Programme.
https://www.inkscape.org/
Executable for playing many formats of sound (audio) or dynamic image (video). Plenty of options and some filters for playing
single records, play lists, Compact Discs (audio or video), Digital Video Discs, Blu-Ray Discs, streaming radio or television.
http://www.videolan.org/
Complete executable for professional creation or manipulation of many formats of sound (audio). Plenty of sound effects.
http://audacityteam.org/
Executable for creation or manipulation of many formats of sound (audio) or dynamic image (video).
Kdenlive has some features that Open Shot has not, and vice-versa.
https://kdenlive.org/
Executable for creation or manipulation of many formats of sound (audio) or dynamic image (video).
Open Shot has some features that Kdenlive has not, and vice-versa.
http://www.openshot.org/
Interface for chess playing engines with plenty of options, from beginner to Master. The Fairymax engine plays European chess,
Arab shatranj, Chinese xiangqi, and many other games similar to chess. A brave player can define and play his own fairy varieties.
http://www.gnu.org/software/xboard/
https://www.neocities.org/
