Areas of Interest

Octopodial Chrome

My personal blog. Full of random musings on all sorts of stuff. Not likely to be interesting to you unless you know me—and perhaps not even then.

Italian Clothing

Pictures of my 15th century clothing.

German Branch Sword & Scabbard

Pictures of and text about an item in my mediæval weapons collection.

Classic Literature Site

Several copyright-free works, lovingly typed in and converted to HTML. My thanks to Project Gutenberg for many of them.

Tasting Notes

A database of beers, breweries & bars with notes &c. thereon. I'm quite a fan of beer, and this database may prove of use to my fellow beer geeks—I certainly hope so.

Recipes

I enjoy cooking, and have collected my recipes in one place

Latin Abbreviations & Phrases

A compendium of various useful scholarly Latin phrases and abbreviations.

Guile Documentation

Guile docs (did not used to be included on the official Guile web site). From glug.org.

travlib & travtrack

GPLed data representation library & data manipulation tool for Traveller and GURPS Traveller universes.

Tom & Emily

A simple picture of my brother and his (now) wife, taken in Florida shortly after their engagement. Both are lieutenants in the US Navy: Tom is a helicopter pilot, while Em is a nuclear engineer or somesuch.

Happy Thursday!

Pics from an outing of the Boulder Cruzer Club. Weirdness galore.

About This Site

This site has had a long and varied history. When I was a freshman, my then-roommate needed to put up a website for his JanTerm. Eager as I was then to show off the capabilities of the Macintosh platform, I installed an HTTP server, Quid Pro Quo, applied for a hostname (spectre.austinc.edu) and set up a very good server. All the more excellent for running on such a low-power machine, my server offered HTTP, FTP, SMTP as well as finger, whois and AppleShare file transfers. This site was my pride and joy for the remainder of that year. I set up accounts for many of my friends and really worked hard to provide a top-notch service.

Unfortunately, Fate was as fickle a mistress as ever, and when I returned to school that fall the Powers at IT&S decided that it really would not do for a mere student to have his own server; after all, only high-powered NT machines can serve files! I was therefore summarily denied a static IP number and a DNS entry. Since a stable IP number is a base requirement for a useful server, I was forced to use space on petra for my own site, and to turn over the appropriate files to my one-time users. No more could I run my own CGIs, play with SSI and server-parsed HTML. These little joys were denied me.

latakia.dyndns.org

I had hoped that my return to IBM in the summer of '99 might enable me to purchase a fine new Power Macintosh so that I might convert my old Mac to a PPCLinux box. Unfortunately I found that I was unable to save as much as I might have liked. All was not lost, though: I was able to purchase a used server from IBM Global Services at CoBank. It was a nice box in its day, but that day had passed well before I got ahold of it. It served me dutifully for two years.

latakia Reborn

Eventually this machine grew too small, and thus I purchased another, even better, in the late spring of '01. My new machine I have dubbed latakia. Over time, it has slowly gotten better yet (the advantage of standard hardware and a good OS). Here are the specs:

This machine is a beauty. It does not crash; in fact, the only time it is ever off is when the power to my apartment fails, or if I am making mods to it. The latter is far too common (I like to tinker), and so my record uptime is at 60-odd days, nowhere near my 112-day record with my previous machine. Still, Try That With Windows!

I have arranged with Dynamic DNS to have a DNS entry. They offer DNS services for free to all, even those with DHCP number assignment. There are clients available for many OSes (Unix, Mac OS, BeOS, OS/2, even Windows) which automatically update the DNS info when the IP number changes. I have arranged to own latakia.dyndns.org.

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