Hi. I've intentionally made this page somewhat bland, as the
HTML spec process and state-of-the-art support is really annoying me.
(I justify
adding the Googlebox on the right because CSS2 is almost sorta maybe kinda
standard at this point in time. Not that the rest of this site is all that
standards-compliant itself. I guess it goes to show that if you're not part
of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.)
Things I Haven't Written
- Recently (as of 7 September 2007), the GTK+ 1.2 documentation
disappeared from http://www.gtk.org/api/ without notice or
fanfare. Luckily, I had a copy of the GTK+ Reference
Manual for GTK+ 1.2 lying around, so I present it here, unmodified and
unabridged, for your reading pleasure. Relatedly, the GLib
Reference Manual (for GLIB 1.2) and the GDK Reference
Manual (for GDK 1.2) are here as well, since they too have disappeared.
Wonky Writings I've Written
- A long and tortuous journey exploring why Solaris
has various binaries littering the system multiple times. Warning: the
message may not justify the almost 10K of HTML it is encapsulated in.
- I wrote up some Contact Information for Taxicab
Regulatory Agencies, or at least for those agencies near Laurel, MD.
Use this to find out which cab companies have taxis of a given color and
registration. It might come in handy.
- Having received a cool toy for my birthday, the first
course of action was to take a huge whack of pictures and write up a web
page about it. If response is sufficiently favorable, perhaps I shall write
up excessively detailed descriptions of other objects around my house!
Update 02/2007: Response has been so positive that I am now looking idly for
things to photograph. Don't miss a minute of the excitement next week on
"What's in Ben's House!"
- I was shown an amazing PSA recently, and although there is a lot of
electromagnetic.net in my response, this site seemed to be a
better place for my commentary.
Older versions of my front page exist, in case you are so inclined:
- Summer, 1999, on UMD's Project
GLUE server, titled Ben Stern is working
for the Borg right now...
- Summer, 2000, on GLUE, titled Ben Stern
has gradjumicated. It sort of seemed like a good going-away page.
- Spring/Summer, 2001, here, untitled.
- Fall 2001 through most of Summer 2002, titled Sometimes Spoken Word Works Instead. It
didn't work as well as I had hoped, but it was worth trying.
- Summer 2002, into Winter 2002, titled Time for a Change.
- Winter 2002 to May 2003, titled The Nursery
Rhyme Makes it Work.
- May 2003 to April 2005, titled Plus que ça change, plus que
c'est la même chose.
I recently cleaned my room (it does happen occasionally, especially when
I'm planning on moving), and I found five years worth of my life from four
years ago. I hope that at some point I will stop being surprised by it.
Perhaps I should help this along by setting it on fire the next time I find
it.
However, in an effort to remove clutter from my life and put it online
instead, I took the time to transcribe a few recipes
that were littering my room. I make no claims to their quality, but at
least this way they don't need to consume physical space.
Assorted Free Software Patches and Utilities
- A toy screen-locking program I wrote called ColdSpot
is available.
- Horror of horrors, I've added something else that might be considered
useful: ll2xpm, which is even more of a toy than
ColdSpot. ll2xpm was designed to help me look at the boot logo the Linux
kernel provides for various architectures.
- Lest you think that utile code might be a trend, my latest addition
is neither original code nor useful in the least; I ported Bryan Feir's WMeyes to Solaris. Since his original page has
evaporated into the æther, you'll just have to make do with mine.
- It turns out that when one runs Solaris, basically nothing compiles from
source properly. If you also happen to be running Solaris, and you want to use
Martin A. Godisch's wmwork to track your time,
my patch to wmwork might be helpful. On the other
hand, since Martin has incorporated my patch into his version, this is probably
a lot less helpful nowadays than you might think.
- I have crossed the line from trivial to destructive. libuname lies to running programs about the OS
revision, name, and all sorts of other related information. It works under
Solaris and Linux.
Many people have asked why my web page is so awful. Well, actually, no
one has asked, but a few people I know have complained loudly and often that
it's terrible. There are two big reasons. One is that I'm
not really very good at maintaining anything all that complex. The other is
that as long
as I have this forum, I may as well amuse myself. If you have a comment on
this, send me some email. [My email address shouldn't be too hard to figure
out if you don't already know it.]
In an effort to amuse myself even further, at the expense of my
webserver, I have added a pointless brief page of
text from various people's text messages. Put something anywhere
Internet accessible once and you'll have to live with it for the rest of
your network-accessible days.
I am a proud supporter of:
Galactic Realms, webtoons.org, Microbrew Linux, and Briandot.
Unfortunately, for one reason or another, all of these sites are either down
or just plain totally lack content. Consider them even further stripped
down interpretations of this site, or something.
- Ben
media empire.