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                           Cleaning up the cobwebs

As a holiday project [1], I decided to make a few changes to the old website
[2] (why yes, I have an actual website in addition to the blog, in case you
didn't know), as it has been a few years since the last major update. The big
changes were redirecting the “Software” section to my github page [3],
removing the merchandising link (yes, there was one—and no, I never made any
money from that) and cleaning up the “Projects [4]” section.

I also went over the entire site (excluding the blog [5]) and either removed
or updated any links. It was amazing at just how many of them were dead [6]
(actually, the domains still existed, but were now owned by squatters wanting
to sell the domain at an exorbitant prices). Especially in the “Metasearch
Engine Years [7]” section. Yes, I probably could have made links to The
Wayback Machine [8] (like Armigeron [9]) but the issue there is when current
owners of the domain put up a restrictive robots.txt [10]— The Wayback
Machine will then make the archive of said domain unavailable.

Why take the risk of potentially breaking the site? It's probably best to
just remove the links and let the past be the past.

It was also a bit sobering to think that “Project: Brainstorm [11]” (aka
“Project: Brainstem” as it was called around The Office at the time) is far
enough in the past that, if it were alive, it could legally drink! I still
recall writing the software, using a text editor written in 1982 for MS-DOS
(Microsoft Disk Operating System) 1.0 and a version of make from Microsoft.
This was pretty much about six months after Java was officially released and
there were no IDE (Integrated Development Environment)s for it (not that I
use IDEs as I'm a language maven [12], but the one time I tried using one, it
crashed hard [13]). The one problem I had not mentioned was writing myself
into a circular dependency with the Java classes where you couldn't compile
the code solely from source—class A required class B to be compiled first,
and class B required class A to be compiled first. It's all too easy to fall
into that trap with incremental development, and not quite so easy to break
the cycle once one finds out.

There were some other minor changes I made, but they will probably go
unnoticed by most people.

What can I say?

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2010/12/06.1
[2] http://www.conman.org/
[3] https://github.com/spc476
[4] http://www.conman.org/projects/
[5] https://boston.conman.org/
[6] https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html
[7] http://www.conman.org/people/spc/refs/search/
[8] http://web.archive.org/
[9] http://web.archive.org/web/19980113202018/http://www.armigeron.com:80/
[10] http://www.robotstxt.org/
[11] http://www.conman.org/people/spc/refs/search/search.hp1.html
[12] http://blog.osteele.com/2004/11/ides
[13] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2012/01/12.1

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