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The stately Slater manor

My main reason for putting up a web page is, frankly, to brag about the Slater name.

If I can make you feel inferior at the same time, why then that'll be a bonus (or lagniappe, as the Cajuns say around here).

Slaters have founded a museum on the U.S. west coast in Seattle, and they recently talked the Greek government into donating the USS Slater to a New York City museum. Originally, they had planned to loan it to me for shrimping on Lake Pontchartrain, but my generosity got the better of me.

We Slaters are indeed appreciated. In both Iowa and Missouri people have named their towns after us, while the students at Brown University did the best they could and named a dormatory after us (It would have been better to rename the whole university).

That's not to say that everything is going smoothly. Some renegade Slater in Indiana has annoyed a lot of people with his political incorrectness, and so we Slaters have to deal with the adverse effects of that page. Fortunately, the net is a fad, and the negative publicity caused by the renegade page will fade away sooner or later.

In the meantime, don't believe the Naval Observatory when they pompously tell you that their sunrise / sunset calculator is not available to the public, because it is "good for the soul" to write one of your own. They just don't want people to see their ugly source code.

I, on the other hand, don't mind putting ugly code on the net. Here is a sunrise / sunset calculator that I wrote in both QBasic and in C which gets the same answers as the one on the Naval Observatory's page. Since it is pure source code, there is no possibility that you will unknowingly trigger a virus or a trojan when you run it either. You do have to have either QBasic or a C compiler installed on your computer of course, and you have to know the latitude and longitude of your location. In any case, this is another instance of a Slater making that which was denied to you by others freely available.

As a further example of free code, those using unix or Linux may be interested in dungn32c.zip, a zip file which contains the classic Dungeon / Zork interactive fiction game for Linux. The file includes a walk through of the game for those who don't want to be bothered solving all of the puzzles. For those of you who trust the executable files distributed by complete strangers (and you really shouldn't), dungn32cx.zip contains a statically collected, ELF format Linux binary of the game which requires no external libraries. You can download it in addition to dungn32c.zip, and start playing the game immediately.

It's tough being so wonderful, but like Bill Clinton, I have a tight schedule to which I adhere. Discipline makes one a better person.

And discipline is what leads to an outstandingly concise and pointed web page such as this one. Otherwise, it could have rambled and started to discuss tiddlywinks.

c ya,
Rick Slater