Stamp Column Archives

The Glassine Surfer Column Archive

This column originally appeared in the American Philatelic Society's monthly magazine, "The American Philatelist." Since then some of the information may be out-of-date depending on how far back you're reading.

January 2001

Station X

The post office that won World War II, otherwise known as Bletchley Park in England, is the subject of a big release movie this year.  "Engima," the film, is based on the real life endeavors of British code-crackers, hidden behind a bodyguard of lies at Bletchley Park, during WW II.

The film is based on the book of the same name by Robert Harris with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard and co-starring Kate Winslet.  The mystery plot is fiction, but the background is real, probably earning it the genre of "historical fiction."  Hopefully, there'll be some philatelic product placements in the movie to create some interest.  

Currently, there's a cachet maker running a site for first day covers with a Bletchley Park URL, and various censored covers to and from Bletchley Park during the Enigma period are well-known to postal historians, fetching over 100 pounds when available.

The original buildings in Buckinghamshire have been preserved and can be accessed online as well.  

Bletchley Park
http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk

Cachet maker
http://www.bletchleyparkpost.com/

404

It doesn't happen as much anymore, but in the old days webmasters at large sites used to reorganize their pages about every three weeks mostly for technical reasons.  And each time they did it, they changed the address of their pages causing thousands of people's bookmarks, shortcuts and links to die.  

Though eventually, webmasters learned to put in page redirect commands, something the equivalent of address forwarding on the WWW, 404 is still the most popular number on the Internet, as well known as 911.

There are other reasons for 404's popularity, and I have to think that among them is the fact that people change their internet service providers and move their Websites without giving much thought to the ensuing havoc for which they're then responsible.  But whatever the cause we've got to live with 404's.

Essentially 404 means the server has not found anything matching the URL requested and the number itself is the error code from the "http," which precedes all URL requests and which is the acronym for the "HyperText Transfer Protocol."

Other codes are things like "PaymentRequired 402" and "Forbidden 403," as well as "Internal Error 500."  If you really want you can read all about them at the World Wide Web Consortium, the folks who standardize the way the Web works.

The 404 is in itself a cause celeb in some circles.  I'm sure you've blundered into some server's 404 message that was more than a blurb.  Some are entertaining, some are scary and some just fun.  

Here are two 404 haikus, those Japanese three-line poems of five, seven and five syllables.  They arrived in my spam box not too long ago, which again proves the serendipity of the net.

The Web site you seek
Can not be located but
Countless more exist.

You step in the stream,
But the water has moved on.
This page is not here."

Definitely sometime to slow down the manic surfer and tease them to contemplate the wonders of the WWW.

Otoh, I produce my own fair share of 404's.  My site has lots of spaghetti addresses, long names jumping from directory to directory, and if I mistype one character, delete or insert one, it's another 404 added to the grains of sand on the beach.  I'd like to thank reader Jim Byrne for taking the time to alert me to my mis-typings so I could correct one of my many online problems.

World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/HTRESP.html

tech type things
http://www.sendcoffee.com/minorsage/404error.html

I hope you've had a safe New Years and I wish you many more.  Thanks for reading the "Glassine Surfer."