I had my BIOS set to boot from floppy, HD and CD, in that order, when I wanted CD before HD. No wonder stuff wouldn’t install.
Your browser is out-of-date.
You’re seeing this message because your browser won’t display my pages properly.
Rather than frustrate you with a pile of junk, I’d rather tell you how to update your browser so you can come back and see what my site has to offer. . . .
You could try the new version of Netscape 6.2. – it’s pretty nice and has some neat features.
I do use 6.21 sometimes, but prefer 4.76 – despite its limitations – because 6.21’s bookmark editor is less functional and I have utterly failed to configure 6.21 for mail (it seems to lack the notion that my POP and SMTP servers may not be the same). The one feature of 6.21 that I really appreciate is the ability to change the base font size with one keystroke.
I’ve yet to see anything that was clearly worth breaking backward compatibility. (It’s not only laziness that keeps the formatting primitive on my pages.) I’m particularly unimpressed by the current fad for confining the body text to the middle third of the window.
Over several years now I have worked sporadically to catalog hypothetical fullerenes — i.e. convex closed surfaces built of pentagons and hexagons. Last year I tossed out my old work in C to start over in Python, whose list primitive and transparent memory management made it easier to extend and generalize the project, which I now describe as enumerating and classifying roughly-convex surfaces formed of roughly-equilateral triangles. The primary goal, I suppose, is to practice my programming; another is to build a database of nonspherical “geodesic dome” shapes.
I had the idea of working the search tree in horizontal bands: find all forms with up to N vertices, saving the partial solutions for the next pass, which would read them from a file and build on them the forms with up to N+8 vertices, and so on. But my programming studies never touched on file i/o beyond the crudest, so I let that aspect sit until I learned more.
Recently I learned about Python’s shelve module, a transparent database interface which seemed just the ticket . . . until the partials file ate all the free space on my disc! <voice=”Marvin the Martian”>Back to the drawing board.</voice>
It has been brought to my attention that 415 is HTTP code for “Unsupported Media Type”. I guess that would include former employees of the Industry Standard.
Did a spot of programming today: a crude script to translate Surface Evolver output into PoV-Ray input. Took me maybe an hour. Python r00lz.
a touching tale of leaving behind the familiar for a strange new world. (August 1996)