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![[Pat Murphy's Maze of Twisty Little Passages]](images/pmurphy/twisty.png) |
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 Who Am I menu item over there, albeit an ancient one). 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.
This page was originally hosted on a friend's server named
goof.com
. At that time, Goof was an Intel system (a PC) running FreeBSD, an Open Source Unix operating system
(as open as Linux, just a little
different... FreeBSD also ran the world's busiest FTP server for many
years, the now defunct Walnut Creek ftp.cdrom.com server.
For a while it was supporting up to 5000 users simultaneously on a single
pentium pro 200; that's 0.2 Gigahertz!) Now the page right here on my own domain.
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). One of these days I'll use a Creative Commons license for 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! NCSA Mosaic!]). Then it got "enhanced" for the new whiz-bang netscape 0.9 (not to be confused with Mozilla — or Firefox), got un-netscaped when I was using Arena (HTML 3.0, while it lasted; I wish math mode had survived) and was for a while HTML 3.2 compliant (I started using tables like crazy then, and need to clean up the syntax). I'm mulling over 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). I suppose I can look at using PHP or AJAX, but I prefer working on CSS first.
Want to send me e-mail? I've been spammed, list-bombed, cursed, insulted, etc. over the years, 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.
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