So it really was cockeyed.com that got us started on this whole All Too Flat web page notion. Rob also put a link to All Too Flat that has given us over 250 visitors to date, which is huge. Given that, here's our chance to throw him a shout-out. Presenting, How Much Inside Cockeyed.com! (if you have no idea what I'm talking about, try this: How Much Inside)

How much is inside a website? Specifically, how much is inside cockeyed.com? First we had to become intimately familiar with Cockeyed. Not a problem. Here is a screen shot of the web site at the time of this calculation.

And here is a screen shot of the "How Much is Inside" main page. At the time of this page, the scientific team has calculated how much is inside Coca-Cola, French Fries Print Cartridge, Ketchup, Chewing Gum, 40-Foot Shipping Container, Magic Shell, Batteries, Doritos, Cheerios, Newspaper, Lipstick, Silly String, Blood, Expanding Foam, Aluminum Foil, Whipped Cream, EZ Cheese, Toothpaste, and Shaving Cream.

The first step was to download everything on the cockeyed site. Thankfully there are programs that will do this for you. Specifically, I downloaded Teleport Pro 1.29 build 1530 because it already had 567,725 and a user rating of 85%. Then I pointed it to http://www.cockeyed.com and started the download.

Immediately it became clear that there was not a trivial amount inside cockeyed. The shareware version of Teleport has a limit of 500 files per website. The download failed immediately! I needed a registered version before I could even continue. After registering my copy of Teleport, I tried again, this time successfully downloading 3,552 files in 127 folders, totalling 134 MB! (note: that total depends on how you define a megabyte, but that number's close enough.)

Of course my first question was, "what is the distribution of files?" Questions like that are really tough to answer in Windows (without grep and all), and I didn't feel like copying all 3,552 files in 127 folders to a Linux box to do the analysis (in your interested, you'll have to wait for How Much Inside 2.0, AKA Xhow Much Inside). As a partial solution, I got to bust out some of my mad MS-DOS skillz, such as dir /s *.html to find out how much was in .html and .htm (lame) files. The following table summarizes the results:

File Distribution on Cockeyed.com Filetype Number Size (MB) .html 200 3.51 .gif 44 .43 .jpg 3303 129.69 .txt 1 .05 .swf 1 .09 .jar 1 .02 TOTAL 3550 133.79

Note that it is totally unclear where those extra 2 files disappeared to. According to the Teleport logs, there should be 202 HTML pages, but I can't seem to find the last 2. Oh well.

Now that we know how much is inside cockeyed, what does it all mean? Here are a bunch of tables of results of our experiments:

How Big is 134MB? Media Type (size) Number Needed To House Cockeyed 3.5" floppy (1.44 MB) 93.05 Palm m105 (8 MB) 16.75 Zip Disk (100 MB) 1.34 Zip Disk (250 MB) .536 CD-ROM (650 MB) .206 DVD-ROM (4.7 GB) .028 iPod (6 GB) .022

Need a standard of comparison for these numbers? A single typewritten page takes about 2KB and a low res photograph is around 100KB. 1MB can hold a small novel, and 5MB can hold the complete works of Shakespeare. 100MB can hold a 2 volume encyclopedia.

How Does Cockeyed Compare to 100 Terabytes? Here's how the size of the Archive Way Back Machine's collection compares to some familiar data banks: (source: http://www.archive.org/xterabytes.html   A copy of your favorite mystery novel 1 megabyte Cockeyed.com 134 megabytes   One copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (2,619 pages per copy) 1 gigabyte   The ancient Library of Alexandria (400,000 scrolls) 800 gigabytes   A thousand copies of the Encyclopaedia Britannica 1 terabyte A public library branch (300,000 books) 3 terabytes A video store (5,000 videos) 8 terabytes (1 gigabyte per hour of video) A radio station (10,000 LPs and CDs, or 15,000 hours of music) 8 terabytes (535 megabytes per hour of music) The Internet Archive's collections as of March 2000 14 terabytes The Library of Congress (20 million books, not counting pictures) 20 terabytes The Internet Archive's collections as of March 2001 (about 4 billion Web pages) 43+ terabytes The Internet Archive's collections as of October 2001 (about 10 billion Web pages) 100+ terabytes I guess the answer to that question, "How does cockeyed compare to 100 terabytes," is "not very well." In Rob's defense, 100 terabytes is pretty stinking big. Oh well. Let's do more comparisons: Google found 201 HTML pages on cockeyed, which is one more than I did. But hey, being 1 shy of Google isn't bad. On the other hand, this has taken me an entire afternoon, and Google did it in 0.11 seconds.   Well, that about wraps up "How Much Inside Cockeyed?" By the way, it's funny that Cockeyed couldn't do this site iteself. I mean, once Rob start writing how much was inside, that value would have immediately changed! That's some Heinsenberg shit right there! You know, "The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known" kind of thing. Observing the state of the object changes the state of the object, or something like that, no? I mean, you are in alltooflat.com/geeky. What did you expect?