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My Contributions to the Web

I run two generic crossword game servers for Scrabble® players around the world. They look like MOOs, but they consist of about 200K of Perl code I wrote from scratch. They offer HTTP as well as telnet access, in English, French and soon Spanish, multiple ratings systems, configurable boards and accurate copies of both the NSA and APSP word lists. They've been in operation since October 1993 and have seen over 3500 users and 80,000 rated games as of late 1996, with currently about 200 active players and over 100 rated games a day. (See latest stats.) Over fifty MOOs refer to them for dictionary lookups using MOO code written by Quinn in 1993.

The dictionary files represent the collective work of many volunteers on the net, including most recently that of a group that I organized in 1994 to enter all the words of nine or more letters (and their corresponding inflections) in Merriam-Webster's 10th Collegiate Dictionary. This latter word list has found its way into the CD-ROM version of Scrabble, available soon in North America from Hasbro Interactive. See if you can spot my name in the printed credits.

I maintain a small archive of Scrabble®-related documents, including a selective archive of postings to the Crossword Games Pro mailing list, the Canonical List of Anamonics and home pages for the National SCRABBLE® Association, NSA Club #3 in Toronto, NSA Dictionary Committee and various other SCRABBLE® events and groups.

I maintain the Poslpeople Home Page and the corresponding private directory database.

I maintain the web mirror of the local department's Message of the Day. In the same directory is a variety of other hard-to-categorize miscellany.

I have a small archive of useful programs I've written, mostly in Perl.

I created the Inter-Network Mail Guide and maintained it for a few years, but passed it on to Scott Yanoff several years ago. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, when dozens of proprietary e-mail systems were just getting connected but we hadn't settled on Internet addresses as a lingua franca, sending e-mail from one system to another could be quite a convoluted affair.[1] The INMG offered detailed instructions (and a spiffy interactive query system) to help with navigating e-mail from system A to system B.

USENET Postings:

Web Scribblings:


[1] The situation was similar to the early days of the international postal system. You had to explicitly route your message through intermediate locations to get it to its final destination.

[2] This joke from 1987 is the earliest evidence I've found of my presence on the net, which dates to about four years before then.