If you've got the hardware for it – and the communications line – you can download Geek of the Week from the Internet.
But if you can't yet slurp 15 megs of digitized audio off the net and listen to it on your desktop box, O'Reilly & Associates will be happy to sell you the cassettes for ten bucks each. You can even subscribe.
Geek of the Week is a series of interviews with people immersed
in the technology of the Internet – how it works, how it's changing, where it's going. Carl Malamud – Internet Talk Radio founder – hosts the program, which is sponsored by O'Reilly & Associates and Sun Microsystems.
Malamud's guests know more about networking than you do. A lot more. Rob Blokzijl is the network manager for the Dutch Institute of High-Energy Physics. Peter Deutsch co-developed archie and is working on whois++. Glenn Kowack is chief executive of EUnet, which is bringing uucp to the masses, one European nation at a time. Even if you're not up to speed on this stuff, Malamud is, and he knows how to get these people talking.
The best of the first batch of tapes is probably "Security & Networks," which brings us Jeff Schiller and John Romkey. Schiller, who manages MIT's campus network, has a lot to say about encryption, privacy-enhanced mail, and how the Net should and should not be policed. Romkey's talk is full of sound advice, like "never log into your home system as root from Interop."
These tapes aren't for the easily intimidated. You have to stand your ground when Clifford Lynch, directory of library automation at the University of California, interrupts his very interesting discussion of online libraries to say that "Z39.50 has some unfortunate heritage. It's written as an OSI application-layer protocol. It has, incidentally, a parallel international protocol, ISO 10162 and 10163, which is sort of a subset of Z39.50 as done in the US, which is also of course in the OSI framework." You don't necessarily have to understand talk like this to enjoy these tapes, but it better not spook you.
For more information about Internet Talk Radio's Geek of the Week, e-mail geeks@radio.com. Geek of the Week cassette version: US$10 each. O'Reilly & Associates: (800) 998 9938, +1 (707) 829 0515.
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