Howdy, and Welcome to my Maze of Twisty Little Passages, all Different (Do you remember PLUGH or XYZZY from Willie Crowther's Adventure?). This here's my home page. I maintain a separate work page, which has a real mugshot of me (so does the page behind my name above). Here you are likely to find some links and some content (gasp!) mostly related to things or people I know something about. That might be something to do with Linux, Ireland, Dogs, Astronomy, or something else.
As you may have noticed, this page is hosted on a friend's server named goof.com. Goof is an Intel
system (a PC) running FreeBSD, an Open Source Unix operating system
(as open as Linux, just a
little different). FreeBSD also runs on the world's busiest FTP
server, the Walnut Creek ftp.cdrom.com server.
Till recently it was supporting up to 5000 users simultaneously on a
single pentium pro 200!
The image of Comet Hale-Bopp that some of you can see in the top left corner of your browser was taken by yours truly back in 1997; I have a larger version of this picture and another one. These are all subject to my copyright (free for non-commercial and educational use but contact me before using them).
Here's some info on the KludgeMeisters logo on the background of this page. Little did I realise when I first saw it (on Cliff Stoll's office door at the Space Telescope Science Institute) how fitting it would be for the work I've been doing since then!
Back when the web was young, this page was written in one of the truly ancient versions of HTML (2.0 or 1.0; I don't remember which; whatever people were using in 1993 [yes, 1993!]). Then it got "enhanced" for netscape 0.9 (not to be confused with Mozilla, which I now use as my main browser; full circle!), got un-netscaped when I was using Arena (HTML 3.0, while it lasted; I wish math mode had survived...) and is now HTML 3.2 compliant. I'm mulling over the HTML 4.0 and XHTML specs in my (hah!) free time. This page is completely free from frames, cookies, blinking text, java, javascript and active-x (and likely to stay that way). But PHP looks promising...
Want to send me e-mail? I've been spammed, list-bombed, cursed, insulted, etc., so you'll forgive me if I ask you to jump through a hoop first. If you prefer, you can use snail mail, phone or fax to contact me; the address and phone numbers are on my work page). I used to have a version of WebPoison hidden away here somewhere for naughty spam robots, but it died in a http/apache upgrade years ago. One of these days I'll resuscitate it with a modern version.
