About These Pages

The pictures and graphics used here have been obtained from a variety of sources, including WebMuseum, Florida Wildflower Page, Psyched Up Graphics, The Bit Map Vault and possibly a few others I have forgotten, for which I apologize. 

Some original graphics were created using Pixelsight, which is a site for on-line, interactive creation of custom icons and other graphics. (Unfortunately, this now requires payment of a fee, so I no longer use it.) Other original graphics were created using various drawing and painting programs, including xpaint, LView Pro, Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Image Composer. Some graphics, both original and borrowed, were processed with xv to crop, resize and change colors and giftrans to create transparent backgrounds for icons. (The software mentioned above, as well as pbmplus, below, is available from multiple sites. If these links do not work for some reason, you can use the search feature at shareware.com to find other sites from which to obtain the programs.)

The 3-D virtual art gallery was created using several tools. The gallery itself was created using Cosmo HomeSpace Designer (formerly Paragraph Internet3D Space Builder, more recently purchased by Computer Associates, and no longer supported). Objects in the gallery were obtained from various sources, including the San Diego Supercomputer Center VRML Repository and Avalon, or built using HomeSpace Designer, Ray Dream Studio from MetaCreations (no longer available -- replaced by Carrara and sold to Eovia or AC3D by Andy Colebourne. Some objects were created or modified by editing the VRML source code in a text editor. The landscape for the latest version of the gallery (still under development, not yet open to the public) was made using U. S. Geological Survey maps (obtained through Microsoft Terraserver, cleaned up in Photoshop, converted to 3D lines using the free version of WinTopo, then converted to 3D surfaces in 3rd PlanIt. 3rd PlanIt is a program whose primary purpose is designing model railroad layouts, including the landscape through which the trains run; however, it is also useful for designing other landscapes, too. File formats were changed to VRML, where necessary, using Accutrans3D. New photos are added to the gallery by a script that simply inserts the appropriate code into the VRML file.

The database for the family history pages is maintained with The Master Genealogist by Wholly Genes Software. (I previously used Genealogical Information Manager.) The data is formatted on demand for the Web by a version of GED2HTML, by Gene Stark, heavily modified by myself. Among many other modifications, I added the ability to run as a CGI program (to generate the data on demand, rather than creating all the files and storing them on the web server), and to generate the graphical family trees, using the pbmplus package by Jef Poskanzer to create the GIF file. For more information, see the Creating WWW Pages from Genealogy Data page.