Also checked some for dead links.. Despite SGI being a penny stock now apparently about to go under for the last time, the Futurist Manifesto at sgi.com is still accessible. 'To the young programmers of the World!'. Well, if the page doesn't vanish due to bankruptcy, it'll probably just die of irony.
And since I was in there, I actually rewrote the home page research interests blurb for the first time since I don't know when -- I suspect for the first time ever. Still has pretty much weirdo-sounding entries, just some fresher ones as well.
Also faded the background image a bit further. I had been wanting to do that forever, since it really did seem a bit cluttering, but now the page does look a little drab by comparison. We'll see.
Well foo. I also, at first, moved google to the top of the search order, since google is pretty much my first choice. But then I noticed that the AltaVista netnews search option had rotted, and I just decided to get rid of AltaVista altogether.. That left me with google and FAST, but I've really pretty much forgotten about FAST as well.
Way it really comes out is that, at the moment, google is really my first and only choice in search engines for all but specialized classes of queries..
And.. sigh.. got rid of my mailto: link. Garbage's getting thicker in the in-box. Put in a dorky image-of-text instead.
Wondering if we'll ever need to consider splitting this revisions page. My goodness it spans five years already and it's still under 25K..
Also redid the search links again. Added FAST searching. Flushed Excite, because I can't get their flooping search page to work. Suspecting cookies or the like, unwilling to invest the time to investigate.. hmm.. invest/igate..
So, reorged the search stuff at the bottom of the page, added Google! since so far I've fairly much liked their searches.
Only three weeks left in the semester. How do I feel about that?
Also, hrrm, upped the counter width from four digits to five. Hey, it's already up to 4413!
Updated some of the other citations as long as I was at it. Next stop: A CS451 homepage with some content!
Put the whole mess in a table to avoid taking up a lot of linear space -- sequential FORM's seem to want to be on separate lines.
So, the old idea futures link seems to have rotted with no forwarding address. That seems fairly unusual; left me wondering if there was bad blood in the move.. I figured it was unlikely to have simply died (but I briefly wondered if anybody stood to collect on some proposal that it would..) so the only other likely scenario was that it had gone commercial. A quick sniff of Alta Vista (although I'm using HotBot more and more these days, for its reasonably unambiguous keyword matching default) turned up that `Foresight Exchange'.
Also while hunting that down, found an example of how to do a `back links' button for a page, so decided to give that a try..
No surprise, I guess, that the Cults page had moved, from the UK to the Netherlands.. Good old XS4All. Hope they can hold it together.
Amazingly, the Books link is still viable, and I'm still wondering who or what wiretap.spies.com is supposed to be about.. Wow, I finally visited the obvious, and it seems to be in fact what it seems to be --- people big on the First Amendment and doing something about it by putting up books. Good for wiretap.spies.com! (At least they took their DNS name with them when they moved last year.)
And it's looking like the Random URL/URoulette folks have died off without any obvious trace. And I'm not even bothering to see if I can hunt them down, because their `random' universe seemed to be fairly much a bore anyway.. I always got like the home page of some random sub-sub-municipality in sub-sub-nowhere when I tried it.
Also made the border around my picture narrower. Tried getting rid of it entirely but the thing started to bleed into the background. BORDER=1 looks not awful.
So. Election Day. Too soon to have any early results. Damn near took me longer to find the polling place -- due to Pershing Ave's intermittent existence combined with my inability to count -- than it did actually to vote, despite the seven NM constitutional amendments, the six hundred `Judge retention' questions, the bond issues, and so forth. We shall see.
Declared ccr wasn't new anymore.
And as long as I was into the home page, I guess it's time for Dick's
and the CS351 links not to be 
any more.
Reorged this revision history back to reverse chronological order, which means the link on the homepage doesn't have to be revised when the revision date changes, since it will now always point to the top.
Don't know what happened to the 88 hits I thought I had -- it's at 52 at the moment. It's possible that I saw a '38' in the 'festive snow-capped' font and misread it as an 88. This is more believable in any case.
Hey, the WebCounter folks are alive again! All of a sudden I've got 88 hits -- and many of them are not because I keep flushing the cache and reloading the page to see how my changes look. I think CS351 students must be dropping by or something. Speaking of which...
Made a world-readable 'cs351' directory to stick outgoing stuff for the class into. Made a link to it. There's nothing in there at present, of course.
Also, recognizing another downside of doing the revision history in forward chronological order: As this sucker bloats out over time you've got to wait longer and longer to see the text you're being referred to. With reverse chrono, you'd (1) Get the new stuff quicker, and (2) Ensure the referenced stuff appeared at the top of the window, instead of some random place in the middle like it does now.
Didn't do anything about it.
Well, jeez! I tried changing the font and the fill colors and such, and I've been utterly unable to get the count server to respond. Not even going back to the original parameters, not even trying to create another counter to use instead. Like the sucker crashed. Starts to make me think that the caption for these counters ought to be less like 'Visitors to this page' and more like 'Times the count server was alive'.
Poop.
. It's 860 bytes instead of 116, mainly because I
antialiased the text against the yellow and the yellow against a grey
background (before dropping out the primary grey with Transparency) so
I ended up with seventy some colors.
viral image to
stick in.. If URNs
actually existed we could probably shave a measurable fraction of Web
traffic just with that tiny image, not to mention countless 116 byte disk
files all over the place.
Also, tossed Letterman's link. What the heck was he doing in there?
And, unrotted the link to the Cool Site of the Day, whose days on my page seem severely limited at this point, considering.. Back in the 'old days' -- call it 1995, to be generous -- the CSotD was doubly cool: Not only did it point at plausibly/perhaps/sometimes cool stuff, but the very fact of its something-from-nothing existence and success was cool in itself. But now it's just another commercial venue, fundamentally. How long can Suck avoid the same fate?
And finally, sigh, made the first revision to, rather than just extension of, this revision page -- an act which, viewed from the perspective of truth rather than quality, is an unethical thing to do. Added a link to the archive of Esther's gingRICH interview, since it was easy to find and made the page 'more useful'.
Ah well. My own fault. In the cards from the start: Creators seek truth. Consumers seek quality.
Example: The whole reason for creating this revision page was so that the 'truth', in the form of the evolutionary history of the home page, would be preserved while allowing the home page itself to be rewritten for 'quality', in the form of topicality, at liberty. Fine. But this page is public too and 'quality' pressures to rewrite the revision page grew as I started sticking all this sort of marginalia in here.
Truth is born to die. Quality is born pregnant
So, tossed the seal of UNM, and inlined that old caricature I got way back when, at the Three Rivers Arts Festival in Pittsburgh, now scanned, cropped, diffused to black and white, and GIFfed into 2118 bytes! Tight! (By contrast, the home page itself, sans pictures, takes over 4K bytes..)
Makes me think of the television show Brunner made up in, what was it, Stand On Zanzibar? The TV had hardware so you could scan in pictures of yourself, and they'd get computo-pasted onto the actors in the show, so you could watch 'yourself' in all the romantic places doing all the amazing things you'd never see or do in your hum-drum moo-cow actual life. The twist was that the viewers never bothered to update their scans as they aged, so not only did they see themselves making love to some beautiful star or whatever, they always saw their younger selves so engaged..
Also, did a first cut at an Emacs macro to update the revision times between the home page and this baby. It's still pretty crufty.
Also, went back to forward chronological order, although that's backwards for revision histories. Justified it by making the revision times be anchors and pointing at the latest from the home page.