Malcolm's Little Corner on the Web

Welcome to my little corner on the web. It has a little information about me and some things that I find interesting.

First things first... my warmest thanks go to Ken Badertscher of Miracle Max Media who produced the very cool image of Simeonof Island above and kindly gave me his permission to use it.

The Internet, Best and malch

One of my first voyages of discovery on the Internet commenced on December 29, 1994, when I opened an account with Best Internet Communications in Mountain View, California. Sadly, this once wonderful Internet Service Provider was acquired by HiWay, which was purchased by Verio, which was gobbled up by NTT. Long story. Notwithstanding the eventual demise of Best, I came to make many great friends there and learned much about the Internet.

Best Internet (motto: We suck less!) started out in a little store on Castro Street in downtown Mountain View. They had a few machines, and a whole bunch of Sportster modems nailed to a wall ( literally). Founders Rich White and Mike Schwartz were joined by a motley crew including Matt Dillon, Sam Habash, Karl Mueller and Ron Echeverri and others. To preserve the history I have shamlessly stolen some pictures from Best's websbite. And if you doubt the historical significance of Best, you may be interested to know that other customers who started their websites at Best include Hotmail and eBay.

During that time, I registered the malch.com domain with Network Solutions (see companies that suck) and started this web site.

Some more about this website

I have a few nifty CGI-based tools available here. Let's start with some basic reports concerning visitors to this website:

Last 25 Visitors to malch.com	Most Popular Pages at malch.com
Log File Analysis -- Selected Documents	Log File Analysis -- The Whole Enchilada

Well, that was pretty boring. Here are some more real-time tools that will show you a little about the characteristics and performance of this server. Perhaps you would like to see a network traceroute from this computer to your own machine. And based on the same technique, a number of Unix command-line network tools are available from the comfort and safety of your own web browser:

System Performance	Show me the Route Home
Cool Network Tools	Search malch.com

Computing Stuff

I have three machines at home. One is a large Windows 2000 workstation with lots of RAM, disk and the usual goodies. The second is a smaller system running FreeBSD 4.7. The third is a backup. They are all connected to the Internet with ADSL from Pacific Hell, now SBC. Some of the products I use and highly recommend, include:

Product Recommendations
SonicWALL Firewall	ExamDiffPro -- Windows
Proxomitron -- Windows	IrfanView -- Windows
Super Flexible File Synchronizer -- Windows	Search and Replace -- Windows
SysInternals Tools -- Windows	FreeBSD -- Unix
Apache -- Unix and Windows	Perl -- Unix and Windows

Speaking of firewalls... although the SonicWALL mentioned above is pretty darn good, I'll sell you a better one for only $500. It stops all network intrusions stone-cold dead. And that includes all unwanted SPAM, viruses, worms, hackers and other nasties that you may encounter on the Internet. This device is so effective, it's Guaranteed Forever. It will completely eliminate every known and potential network vulnerability and installation is a snip. If you like my Guaranteed Forever Firewall, you're sure to love the WinDuck 2001 Install Accelerator.

Really, Really Hot Products
Guaranteed Forever Firewall -- Only $500	WinDuck 2001 Install Accelerator

Just For Webmasters (and Web Mistresses)

This site hasn't had much tender loving care (TLC) over the past few years. That's because most of my waking hours have been spent creating, enhancing and supporting a test automation tool for serious websites.

It's a fairly sophisticated commercial product, it pays my bills, and it's called:

Take a look at some of the organizations using LinkScan and you'll see why I feel more than a little proud of it:

LinkScan -- Unix and Windows

LinkScan Users

Older Computing Stuff

I have some interest in chemistry, and the application of computers to that science. Below is a picture of a chemical structure. This particular example illustrates the structure of the drug omeprazole which is a proton pump inhibitor used in the treatment of gastric and duodenal ulcers.

MDL has some cool software for chemists. You can even download their ISIS/Draw software:

MDL Information Systems Inc.

At one time I worked for Prime Computer. You'll find some interesting information about Prime on my site:

Prime Computer

Some years ago, in the Windows 3.1 era, I wrote a Data Communications FAQ. It's now pretty ancient.

Data Communications FAQ

Anyone still running Windows 3.1 might also enjoy this neat little shareware utility what I wrote. It's a clock, resource monitor, task switcher, program launcher and more. But, it's small, fast and intuitive the way software should be, but rarely is these days.

Finder Version 5.20 (26kb)

And here's another Windows 3.1 era tutorial on shared Internet access:

Internet Access for Multiple Win 95 Systems

My favorite news reader is NewsXpress. Sadly it's no longer being developed although I still use it every day:

NewsXpress

Something Completely Different

If you prefer some more touchy-feely content versus all this techno-babble, you might find a good friend's pages, also hosted here, more to your liking:

Natalie's Site

Coming Later

Politics, Free Speech, Movies. In the meantime, if you have any interest in the intersection of politics and technology, I highly recommend:

Declan McCullagh's Politech

Legal

In our litigious society, everyone needs a legal disclaimer. I'll refer you to one drafted by my old friend George Schaft and hereby incorporate it by reference:

Legal Disclaimer