The Trash Heap

(03.04.95 While playing around with a perl script, i managed to trash (sic) half a dozen files. All changes made to {pearls.html, languages.html, paradigms.html, os.html, bad_trash.html, cspeople.html, sights.html} after March, 19 are now down the drain, into the great bit bucket in the sky. Teaches me not to program at night, at least not when the code changes directories and works on named files. Also teaches me not to delete the backup files that emacs kindly creates.)

Preamble

After it had grown to 126k, I decided to distribute the contents of the original, monolithic trash page into heap of smaller size (corresponding to the earlier-established sub-sections, and then some). Don't be surprised if the pages have vastly different sizes; i am in the process of rearranging stuff, but it takes time. Also, a lot of material is still mis-labeled, or stuck in "etc" sections. Yes I know, it was easier back in the olden days, when all you had to do was to sift through one humungous document (grep is your friend), but this way, the servers load is kept down, and it's easier on people that sit at the other end of a low bandwidth connection.

Caveats

Feel free to add a link to this page to your home page, but please don't link to the sub-documents (i.e., URLs of the form "something"). They are subject to change their name, form, and contents without notice.

Before reading any further, please take note of the disclaimer!

The size and link counts are made at irregular times, wheneve I feel that major changes have happened.

Introduction

Anyone who has ever visited my places of residence will have noted the omnipresent heaps of printed (and manuscripted) matter. These accumulate over time; maybe I should start covering them with dated sheets once a year. Nobody should therefore be surprised to find their structural analogon in my WWW tree. The following was originally partitioned in three "piles" (links to TRs; links to my own unfinished pages; others). The lion's share was in the third pile, which was then partitioned into thematic groups.

Nowadays, these groups form distinct sub-pages.

(14.02.95) The newer entries will be dated like this. I also tag entries with the time I last visited them. Not that I follow Jutta's advice of regularly visiting all links (that would be nearly impossible), but I have always an emacs frame with a trash page in it open, both to paste new entries in, and modify old ones. Oh, if you want to know how to create such a vast heap yourself: here are my emacs macros.

Another good name for this place would be `prima materia'', but that one is already used for one of the pages of Cosma Rohilla Shalizi. On the other hand, i have already written something called "Ylem" (the term was re-introduced by non less than Fred Hoyle!), so the idea is pretty much used up.

Index

(somewhat CS-related)

(somewhat less CS-related)

Colophon

Contrary to the usage wrt my non-trash pages, I don't date any of the trash pages. They are too volatile. Instead, this is a general last line that applies to all trash material in the heap:
This page, and any sub-page, was last changed a few minutes ago by yours truly. Fact is, a slightly different version of this page is probably just *now* being edited in an emacs buffer on lenin.cs.tu-berlin.de (How do YOU think a hundred k of this stuff was created? byte by byte.). Comments and corrections, especially regarding bad links and such, to me. Have a nice day.