What's New?

(End of 1997)

These pages now have the dust of nearly two years upon them, in which nothing was added, changed, or even slighly updated. I am currenly employed at Das Büro am Draht, a small Berlin software company. I even got my own (virtual) server there, mfx.dasburo.com. It is but a pale copy of these here pages, and it only serves internal needs. Oh yeah, ere I forget: my PhD thesis is done; I only have to arrange for the printing now.

Jan 6, 1996

The new, hopefully ever-lasting address of my homepage is http://home.pages.de/~mfx/. home.pages.de is a non-commercial redirection service that can be used by just about everyone. (The commercial fore-runner is of course pobox.com, which sells lifetime e-mail aliases AND home-page addresses. www.pobox.com/~mfx also works).

Three days vacation on my old workplace, with a running 'net connection. Updated my address file, weeded out a few dead links all over the place.

(Just in case anyone wonders: I am still alive, but working at a place with a nearly non-existing Internet connection. Even e-mail (mfx@dasburo.de) doesn't work too reliably.)

Added a spiffy background image to the root page. Looks good on my screen, looks probably horrible on everyone elses. That's what you get for using NetScape.

Today, I was ordained as a minister of the Universal Life Church. You can become a minister, too!

(I still think about investing $5 to get a sainthood certificate... ULC also offers a PhD in religion at a reasonable price!)

Found the Kooks Museum and liberally sprinkled references to it all over the trash pages.

Expanded a short note to a full musing on Software Engineering Phases.

I now have a home page in Bielefeld. I don't know how long I'll keep my account at TU Berlin, so it is likely that everything in my site will eventually vanish here and reappear there (if they grant me the space, that is). No need to change your URLs yet, but don't say I didn't warn you.

Removed the tmp/ and old/ hierarchies. From time to time people managed to refer to documents in these, and they really shouldn't.

In a move widely thought to be not very wise, I have installed a page containing 5 heresies. If they don't offend you, you might at least find some of them funny.

Nice new image on the home page, snarfed from the WebMuseum's exhibit on Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry (Berlin mirror). I remember writing a test on one of these minitatures; they are full of fascinating details, and I found a lot of them during those two hours, a dozen years ago.

The trash heap has now a miniscule poetry page.

The Rant Space now contains the manifesto of the ``Verein zur radikalen Ausrottung des "ß"'' (and, no, I won't translate it into English, this is a very German issue ;-)

Jun 3, 1995

Around 23:30 local time, it finally happened: my PhD thesis text is done. Finished. Finito. Won't touch it anymore (well, if someone finds a glaring error ;-). I even found a final title for it that is suitably inscrutable ("Design and Implementation of a Partial Evaluation-Based Compiler for an Asynchronous Realtime Programming Language"). Locals might scrutinize it in all its awesome finality; here is the DVI file.

Jun 1, 1995

Not really new, but now completely marked-up: my quotations file (400 quotes, 100k).

May 9, 1995

Did a fast mark-up job on Phil Winterbottom's ALEF Language Reference Manual.

Apr 21, 1995

Pulled a sanitized version of the Arabian Nights off the net, marked & split it up, and created a small page on the different versions.

Apr 18, 1995

Wrote a short musing on Joyce, Machine Translation, and AI. Linked to from the Paradigms page (why does no-one access that page? Is the name to off-putting?).

Apr 13, 1995

Renamed the "html+sgml" directory into a simple "h" after I saw that Mosaic had problems with "file::" urls into it. Probably the "+". The change should be transparent to all users.

Apr 9, 1995

Newly installed: the Rant Space.

Apr 3, 1995

There is now an overview of (nearly) all my publically accessible files. This overview is updated daily (whenever i log out).

Mar 28, 1995

The Link Page has been greatly revised.
(The old verbose style (one sentence per link) started to irritate me; a no-frills approach (one uncommented word per link) should suit my needs better.)

Mar 27, 1995

Re-vamped the HTML, SGML, etc. page.

Mar 22, 1995

Many of the sub-pages of the Trash Heap are being cleared up, sub-sections and comments and all. It grows distinctly un-trashy, witness the the new Scheme page.

Mar 19, 1995

Finally, it happened: the Trash Page has blown up into little pieces. The organization hasn't changed much, and all old links should still work, although they now only point to a link to each section, instead of the section itself.

Mar 06, 1995

Translated my list of publications into HTML, and added comments. Added a Work Page and put all links to "serious" pages on it.

Mar 01, 1995

Due to a disk crash, some 4 day's worth of additions, mostly to the trash page, are forever lost. Only two files that were stored in emacs buffers at that time survived, one of them the book stack (which now contains 15 entries). Now, those are the times were religion helps: i firmly believe that the dead files are now in some HTML heaven, instead of having been drained into some prosaic bit bucket. (02.03.95) Some of the stuff has been magically reconstruced by Willi and his cohorts.

Feb 22, 1995

My first imagemap! I am so proud.

Feb 20, 1995

My phone number has changed. The Book Stack is coming along nicely; it now contains 11 entries (8k).

Feb 11, 1995

The Book Stack has opened. Doesn't yet contain a lot, but should grow rather speedily.

Feb 7, 1995

The trash page now contains a disclaimer. There are now 25 book reviews.

Jan 31, 1995

Installed the new htmlchek HTML syntax and cross-reference checker and used it to verify that my most important pages are utterly, absurdly syntactically correct (according to both HTML 2.0 and the preliminary 3.0 spec!).

Jan 19, 1995

Created the separate page on Markup Languages to hold all those links related to HTML and SGML.
Re-named, re-ordered and generally tidied up on Feb 9, 1995.

Jan 14, 1995

Added some internal indexing to the Linkpage. It's simply gotten too large.

Dec 30, 1994

I finally wrote down a description of my standard cheese cake receipt. Sorry for the language (it's German-only), but my culinary English borders on the non-existent.

Snarfed from the Net: Vaughan R. Pratt's Pentum chain reaction, an exercise in experimental computer science.

Tidied up the trash page, somewhat.

Dec 29, 1994

Cleaned up parts of the Software Collection page. Moved some stuff (including the TECO link!) from the trash page to a newly installed Squick Page (Motto: Nothing for the Feint of Heart).

Dec 13, 1994

Updated the page on AL-2.

Dec 12, 1994

Introduced the German version of the home page.

Dec 8, 1994

Added a link to a TECO manual to the trash page. It won't be moved to any more illustrious place in the foreseeable future.
Note to local readers: an executable is installed under ~mfx/bin/te. (The executable comes from the retrocomputing museum; the doc from the teco archieve ftp site.) Using teco is a singularly strange experience. Wasn't it Heinlein who said one should try anything once in life, except TECO and folk-dancing?

Dec 6, 1994

For some days now, www.cs.tu-berlin.de has been connected to the world with a 2Mbit line. The immediate need for local copies of WWW pages ``out there'' is thus largely gone. I will gradually remove most of these copies, except those I heavily use.

Nov 25, 1994

There is now a link to the Arabian Nights in the Diverse Links page. I also changed the layout of my home page slightly, and opened the big "name the home page" contest.

Nov 18, 1994

Added graphics to my address.

Nov 16, 1994

Nov 15, 1994

Restyled the what's new page. It now follows an italics-as-comments convention. While this looks good under both Mosaic and chimera, it loses under lynx: lynx's text terminal output can't handle italics and produces underscored text instead!

Nov 11, 1994

Nov 10, 1994

Nov 8, 1994

Nov 7, 1994

Nov 5, 1994

Somewhen in October, 1994

Somewhen in March, 1994

This page was last changed on Mar 28 1995, 20:55 by mfx@pobox.com Comments and corrections welcome.