This is a record of major changes in my web site in the course of 2007. For
more recent activity, see its successor; for
contemporary stray thoughs, see the relevant part of the
relevant page.
I've now completed a toy I've been wanting to find time to make for a while; it
facilitates applying substitution ciphers to texts and decoding the
results.
A little essay in
support of the rehabilitation of a word whose value has been corrupted by
misguided purity notions based on the alleged virtues of self-denial.
I've
written (during one of my bouts of insomnia) an account of how space-craft get
helped along their journeys by making a close pass by a planet. My page on the
Newtonian two-body problem got a bit
of a tidy-up in the process.
Local validator
I've worked out how to use .htaccess
files, exploiting the fact that the seen on
the public version of this site is a sub-directory of the one I see at home, to
have the HTML validator button on my pages redirect to the W3C's validator when
public but to a local installation of the validator when I'm at home, which
greatly simplifies my on-going program of rolling validation.
Added a
stop when boring feature (among other adjustments) to my implementation
of the finite state automaton named life by its discoverer, John Horton
Conway. Also (fixed some bugs and) flagrantly abused MAP elements
to satisfy the
validator, which didn't like my use of TABLEs in
DT elements.
An
extensive linkage upgrade; moved many links from the index page to primary
sub-topic pages, added links for everything else in the math/
directory to its index.