Unfortunately, you are trying to run our Search Applet, which supports our full text indexing capability, on a Macintosh running Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

This is not supported for reasons we'll detail below for the truly interested. The rest of the index page works fine. However, if you want to use our full text index capability, you'll have to use Netscape Navigator or (if you prefer MSIE that much) move to an MS Windows machine.

You can download Netscape Navigator free of charge from the Netscape web site, here.

Return to "The Amateur Scientist" index page

Explanation for the truly interested:

One of the constraints that we set for ourselves in producing "The Amateur Scientist" was that we would run directly off the CD, installing no software on your computer. This presented some interesting challenges when we wanted to support a powerful search capability. Normally, when you invoke a search from within a web page, your search request is sent to the web server that fed you that page in the first place. That server runs a program that actually performs the search and then communicates back to your browser the results of the search, encoded in a format that looks just like a web page.

But we are running on your local machine, with no connection to the Internet, and so there is no separate program to produce the quasi web page representing the search results. So we needed to somehow construct an actual page and tell your browser go read it. This can be done (at least so far as we could figure out) in a platform independent way only by writing an html file to the local disk. So we created a Java "applet" to perform the search and write the results to a file.

But, for well-founded security reasons, applets (which you might have downloaded from heaven-knows-where) running within browsers are not normally allowed to write to your disk. They are restricted to a "sandbox" where, if the the security mechanisms were bug-free (dream on!), the applets couldn't do any damage. Well, everybody quickly realized that such a strong restriction limited the power of applications that designers could build to run inside browsers, so various techniques and protocols were invented that allowed users to grant trusted software publishers (like Tinker's Guild, of course) permission to access the disk, etc.

Since this was all done in "Internet time" by fierce rivals, Netscape and Microsoft each developed their own techniques and protocols. Netscape has implemented and supported these on all supported platforms (at least on Macintosh, Windows, and Linux). But Microsoft has not yet implemented them for the Macintosh version of its Java engine. Nor have they said that they ever will. This means that we are simply not able to write to your disk in order to show the results of a query.

And now you know why.

Return to "The Amateur Scientist" home page