Back Metarevisions
  • Mon Jan 30 03:26:11 2023 https-ify everything on the home page, because http youtube links seem to have stopped working? Also changed a blurb title to avoid that trigger word of mine, and more uniformly capitalized titles because titles.
  • Sat Nov 26 11:50:50 2022 Add Mastodon verification link, because why. Also ditch phone and, umm, fax. Also fixed a broken Wired link in these revisions uh oh where's the metarevisions?
  • Sun Nov 21 13:40:56 2021 Updating my CS home page after only a few years to show I still care. Latest change: Remove references to, umm, 'google+'.
  • Thu Aug 23 22:02:34 2018 Add a digital protocell blurb, and update to reflect the fact that I've, umm, retired, to work full-time on indefinite scalability, robust-first computation, and best-effort computing. Living computation now.
  • Fri Apr 20 03:25:02 2018 Hey, let's try to remember to revise the revision history every once in a while too. Which was brought mind after I used the slogan "Truth is born to die. Quality is born pregnant" during Compiler Construction class today, during an, umm, 'spirited' discussion of the relative merits of 'git merge' vs 'git rebase' and 'git squash'.

    Current status on writing is: Both an ALIFE18 paper and an NSPW18 paper are now under review. We shall see!


  • Wed Jul 30 04:39:32 2014 Put up the final ALIFE14 paper ahead of the conference, and also the author accepted version of the FTXS2014 paper.
  • Tue Jan 21 03:07:18 2014 Redo the web site build system slightly so we can make extra template dirs from 'the outside', rather than hardcoding a single outward path from inside the build system. In a likely futile attempt to survive teaching CS460 and CS341 at the same time. Gah.
  • Thu Nov 28 08:40:38 2013 Update the 'An infinite computer' links to reflect the appearance of 'A Movable Architecture for Robust Spatial Computing' in the Computer Journal. It's in the December issue; made it into 2013 right at the wire.
  • Tue Sep 24 23:31:43 2013 Update the 'Laws for gods' links to reflect the appearance of 'Bespoke Physics' in the Artificial Life Journal. Also redo the google scholar links which all seem to have rotted like google changed its arg parsing or something.
  • Sat Sep 21 10:46:13 2013 Add the 'Beyond Efficiency' video to the robust-first computing highlight. Copy the PDF and bibtex links out of the highlight trailer and make them more obvious, since the video points to the robust-first computing highlight for people to find them. Conform the other 'top highlights' to that style.
  • Wed Aug 14 08:21:22 2013 Rev the website build system to support incorporation of source dirs outside the repo, so class web sites can stay in their own trees but still reference config vars. Add the traditional class stub for 351.
  • Wed Jun 19 03:03:02 2013 Add a blurb for the Alife Journal paper, and reorganize the sections a bit.
  • Fri Feb 1 07:16:31 2013 OK, well, at long long last, a complete home page redo. Goal is to look a little more modern and provide somewhat more useful text and links—in particular, relatively understandable research blurbs, with useful links, for select work.

    The previous 'design' had lasted, what, fifteen years? Sheesh.

    Leaving this revision page plain.


  • Sun Oct 21 11:23:15 2012 Been a little while here I see ahem. Exponential revision backoff. So, finally update the blurb to mostly track the mini-bio I use for talks. Get rid of the 'free forever' hit counter that has been dead for who knows how many years — although the site and service appear to still exist; move up the ashack counter I control instead. Add the Computer Journal paper.
  • Mon Aug 21 17:21:20 2006 Oh, man, missed a whole year. Again. Now it's time for CS259.
  • Sat Jul 9 09:58:42 2005 OK, off with the CS251. Also update the pubs a little bit. Whole home page really needs a rethink, doesn't it, man, ancient. And in more signs of futile middle-aged would-be circle-slowing foot-dragging, I removed the 'in 1987' from the first sentence of the blurb (and the 'in the last n years' from the selected pubs).

    Also checked some for dead links.. Despite SGI being a penny stock now apparently about to go under for the last time, the Futurist Manifesto at sgi.com is still accessible. 'To the young programmers of the World!'. Well, if the page doesn't vanish due to bankruptcy, it'll probably just die of irony.


  • Tue Jan 18 11:07:42 2005 Time for CS251. Really need to put a few fresher citations on the home page too, sheesh; not doing it now, of course..
  • Mon May 10 10:26:28 2004 Yikes, had a space in the 'link: ' thing on the google form.. Changes the results a lot.
  • Tue Jan 20 11:45:39 2004 Uh oh, missed a whole year in revision land. So much for automated revision tracking. Clean up class links: Out with the CS591, in with the CS454/554. Now it's compiler construction time.
  • Fri Dec 13 11:52:36 2002 CS351 link goes back on hiatus for a month or so.. Freshen up Michael's link.
  • Wed Aug 21 10:09:12 2002 Time for the CS351 link to return! Also posted the tech report link for the GECCO paper.
  • Thu Apr 11 12:11:18 2002 Added the GECCO evolvability paper. Once again didn't put a link to the TR version... I actually did rehack the TR cgi script enough to support a not-great-but-not-completely-ugly link-per-TR approach. Sent it in to CS Support a couple weeks ago; hopefully it'll get vetted as needed and installed some time soon...
  • Sun Jan 13 13:17:25 2002 Added the USM paper. Didn't put a link to the TR version because it currently seems like our TR system isn't designed to provide a link-per-TR. Let's check into seeing how hard that would be to provide..

    And since I was in there, I actually rewrote the home page research interests blurb for the first time since I don't know when -- I suspect for the first time ever. Still has pretty much weirdo-sounding entries, just some fresher ones as well.

    Also faded the background image a bit further. I had been wanting to do that forever, since it really did seem a bit cluttering, but now the page does look a little drab by comparison. We'll see.


  • Sat Jun 2 22:33:41 2001 Clearing the CS341 link. Now, it's sabbatical time.

    Well foo. I also, at first, moved google to the top of the search order, since google is pretty much my first choice. But then I noticed that the AltaVista netnews search option had rotted, and I just decided to get rid of AltaVista altogether.. That left me with google and FAST, but I've really pretty much forgotten about FAST as well.

    Way it really comes out is that, at the moment, google is really my first and only choice in search engines for all but specialized classes of queries..

    And.. sigh.. got rid of my mailto: link. Garbage's getting thicker in the in-box. Put in a dorky image-of-text instead.


  • Wed Jan 10 23:36:24 2001 And now the new millenium. Time for a CS341 link. Commented out the LCDC link; will bring it back when we get the retrospective site put together.
  • Wed Aug 16 10:56:48 2000 OK, here we go, up with a CS491/CS591 link. It does start to feel like putting up the link to the class home page is the real beginning of school for me, these days.. Also, update the ReAL citation since it's for real and not `to appear' any longer. Also, rolled the Littman, M.L. and Ackley, D.H., "Adaptation in constant utility non-stationary environments." In J. Grefenstette (ed.), Proceedings of the International Conference on Genetic Algorithms, San Diego, CA: Morgan Kaufman (1991), pp. 136-142. ref off the bottom of the pub listing, judging it too old considering the limited impact it's had (so far as I know). That means it's all alife papers now! Should probably include some of the newer other stuff, too, hunh?

    Wondering if we'll ever need to consider splitting this revisions page. My goodness it spans five years already and it's still under 25K..


  • Wed Jul 26 12:14:25 2000 Time for a freshen-up. Taking down CS251, cleaning up the bottom links a bit; it'll be school before we know it. Leaving Michael at Duke since don't see a personal page for him at AT&T. Dick's pipeline.com URL seem's to've rotted also; ditto Adam; ditto Neal.
  • Tue Apr 11 00:26:22 2000 Adding the AL7 paper reference, such as I know it so far, along with a link to its living version. Also updated the Google back links button since I finally noticed they support 'link: '.
  • Tue Aug 17 10:22:54 1999 Linking the currently-empty CS251 URL. Here comes school again!

    Also redid the search links again. Added FAST searching. Flushed Excite, because I can't get their flooping search page to work. Suspecting cookies or the like, unwilling to invest the time to investigate.. hmm.. invest/igate..


  • Sat May 8 13:02:01 1999 Hmm, seems I've missed a few revisions here.. Certainly have bashed the page several times since 1/98..

    So, reorged the search stuff at the bottom of the page, added Google! since so far I've fairly much liked their searches.


  • Wed Jan 21 09:15:33 1998 Started up a home page for CS351. Here we go!
  • Mon Dec 1 03:34:00 1997 Was searching for a quote-of-the-day for class tomorrow and ended up at a site (don't ask me how I got there, if it isn't obvious to you..) with one of those embedded AltaVista search sections, and decided to rip it off. As long as I was into the home page I added a backlinks-from-Excite button. I wanted to do the same for the good ol' boys at Lycos.. but.. umm.. http://www.lycos.com/ reliably coredumps my installation of Netscape 4.03 for Linux.. Way to grab for market share!

    Only three weeks left in the semester. How do I feel about that?

    Also, hrrm, upped the counter width from four digits to five. Hey, it's already up to 4413!


  • Mon Sep 29 01:46:35 1997 Time for a new slogif, eh what?
  • Tue Jul 15 19:58:06 1997 Yay! AL5 finally actually came out! ccr is finally in print for real!

    Updated some of the other citations as long as I was at it. Next stop: A CS451 homepage with some content!


  • Fri Jun 27 11:22:49 1997 HTML corrections to make the page view better in ccr! Also, get links in for all the core groups members that have home pages.
  • Mon Jun 23 01:38:20 1997 Added a links-from HotBot button, just to see if I could. If you say `no' to HotBot's cookie monster it seems to cough up URL's with embedded cookie dough, and I just copied what I got and stuck it in the form. God knows what that means for their report generation if people ever actually start clicking on the damn thing.

    Put the whole mess in a table to avoid taking up a lot of linear space -- sequential FORM's seem to want to be on separate lines.


  • Tue May 27 15:20:56 1997 Flushed CS538. Added a mostly-empty stub for CS451 next fall. Tried a new slogif.
  • Sat Mar 29 18:29:56 1997 Swung the ccr anchors over to point at keys.ccrcentral.net, where the central key server now lives. Of course at present keys.ccrcentral.net is just an alias, and `keys.cs.unm.edu' is the CNAME, so the latter shows up in the browser returns, but, it's a start.
  • Fri Jan 24 12:52:25 1997 So yow I've gone and made an animated gif of one of my little slogans, as per the relaxation-inspiration of last Tuesday! Funny how it worked: At first my `back links' button wasn't finding anything, because I'd specced it all the way down to begin.html, but nobody refers to that directly, just stopping at ~ackley. Once I got it fixed Alta Vista turned up hits, including the expected ones and a few unexpected ones. One of the unexpected ones was Terry Jones' bookmarks page, and from there I found GifMerge, which did exactly the job I was looking for, in combination with Gimp to make the individual gifs. The results are pretty sucky but they're a start.
  • Fri Jan 24 10:35:14 1997 Just a little cleanup triggered by the dept's reorg of its website, which had rotted a couple of my links. Time to flush the CS351 link again, and create a CS538 link, as long as I'm here. Also updated Michael's link now that he's moved to Duke. Also updated and then commented out Adam's link -- haven't heard from him since forever, in internetime anyway. It seems Nelson's still using SFI as his web-PoP even though he's at the Media Lab, so I left that one alone.

    So, the old idea futures link seems to have rotted with no forwarding address. That seems fairly unusual; left me wondering if there was bad blood in the move.. I figured it was unlikely to have simply died (but I briefly wondered if anybody stood to collect on some proposal that it would..) so the only other likely scenario was that it had gone commercial. A quick sniff of Alta Vista (although I'm using HotBot more and more these days, for its reasonably unambiguous keyword matching default) turned up that `Foresight Exchange'.

    Also while hunting that down, found an example of how to do a `back links' button for a page, so decided to give that a try..

    No surprise, I guess, that the Cults page had moved, from the UK to the Netherlands.. Good old XS4All. Hope they can hold it together.

    Amazingly, the Books link is still viable, and I'm still wondering who or what wiretap.spies.com is supposed to be about.. Wow, I finally visited the obvious, and it seems to be in fact what it seems to be --- people big on the First Amendment and doing something about it by putting up books. Good for wiretap.spies.com! (At least they took their DNS name with them when they moved last year.)

    And it's looking like the Random URL/URoulette folks have died off without any obvious trace. And I'm not even bothering to see if I can hunt them down, because their `random' universe seemed to be fairly much a bore anyway.. I always got like the home page of some random sub-sub-municipality in sub-sub-nowhere when I tried it.


  • Tue Nov 5 17:25:12 1996 Been ages since I've been in to the home page. Time for the CS351 link not to be new anymore. Added a link to Elena's home page -- likely its first link, so now the crawlers will descend upon her. (I asked first).

    Also made the border around my picture narrower. Tried getting rid of it entirely but the thing started to bleed into the background. BORDER=1 looks not awful.

    So. Election Day. Too soon to have any early results. Damn near took me longer to find the polling place -- due to Pershing Ave's intermittent existence combined with my inability to count -- than it did actually to vote, despite the seven NM constitutional amendments, the six hundred `Judge retention' questions, the bond issues, and so forth. We shall see.


  • Mon Aug 26 10:30:34 1996 School starts again. Put up a new CS351 link. Going with three categories of lecture stuff this time: Notes, just for me; Handouts, available before class; Slides, available after class.

    Declared ccr wasn't new anymore.


  • Thu Jul 4 14:41:02 1996 Released the beginnings of a ccr site, so finally updated the old comment about there perhaps being such a thing on the home page. Also, left the test scan of the nice paper in as the background of this revision page. It's 7.5K but what the hell, nobody comes down this way anyway.
  • Wed May 22 15:38:59 1996 Unrotted the URoulette link. Deleted the Suck link -- hello, Frames+ads, goodbye Suck. Deleted the CS351 link. Added a preliminary citationish sort of thing to the AL5 ccr paper. Deleted the oldest two references (Ackley, D.H., and Littman, M.L. "Generalization and scaling in reinforcement learning"; and Ackley, D.H., and Littman, M.S. "Learning from natural selection in an artificial environment.") since they're no longer in the last five years. Jeez!
  • Sat Apr 20 15:12:22 1996 Finally upgraded my picture (the picture, off there to the left, not the sketch, up top) to something that doesn't make me instantly heave! Used #51 from dsmith's series! I must say "Yes!"
  • Mon Feb 12 12:20:43 1996 Unblackened my home page, my front door. Unblackened it, and nothing more.
  • Thu Feb 8 20:32:11 1996 Blackened my home page background to get with the eff thing. Since the caricature was going to end up black-on-black, stuck in the eff blue ribbon gif instead.

    And as long as I was into the home page, I guess it's time for Dick's and the CS351 links not to be New! any more.


  • Sat Jan 20 15:08:28 1996 Updated George's link. Got rid of the unhappy nerd link.

    Reorged this revision history back to reverse chronological order, which means the link on the homepage doesn't have to be revised when the revision date changes, since it will now always point to the top.

    Don't know what happened to the 88 hits I thought I had -- it's at 52 at the moment. It's possible that I saw a '38' in the 'festive snow-capped' font and misread it as an 88. This is more believable in any case.


  • Wed Jan 17 19:35:30 1996 Made a new caricature gif with transparent background, just because I could, basically.

    Hey, the WebCounter folks are alive again! All of a sudden I've got 88 hits -- and many of them are not because I keep flushing the cache and reloading the page to see how my changes look. I think CS351 students must be dropping by or something. Speaking of which...

    Made a world-readable 'cs351' directory to stick outgoing stuff for the class into. Made a link to it. There's nothing in there at present, of course.

    Also, recognizing another downside of doing the revision history in forward chronological order: As this sucker bloats out over time you've got to wait longer and longer to see the text you're being referred to. With reverse chrono, you'd (1) Get the new stuff quicker, and (2) Ensure the referenced stuff appeared at the top of the window, instead of some random place in the middle like it does now.

    Didn't do anything about it.


  • Fri Jan 12 20:10:01 1996 Finally realized that all those page counters weren't being done as cgi scripts! Realized anybody could do it! Made one for me! Thanks to the WebCounter folks for making it free to the small fry. Of course, out of four or five load attempts so far, their server's only responded twice. Still.

    Well, jeez! I tried changing the font and the fill colors and such, and I've been utterly unable to get the count server to respond. Not even going back to the original parameters, not even trying to create another counter to use instead. Like the sucker crashed. Starts to make me think that the caption for these counters ought to be less like 'Visitors to this page' and more like 'Times the count server was alive'.

    Poop.


  • Tue Jan 9 04:09:58 1996 Yow! Actually figured out how to make a transparent gif with Photoshop and Transparency, following the instructions in H's FAQ. So I got rid of the viral NEW! pic and stuck in one of my own. It's big and ugly but it's New!. It's 860 bytes instead of 116, mainly because I antialiased the text against the yellow and the yellow against a grey background (before dropping out the primary grey with Transparency) so I ended up with seventy some colors.
  • Mon Jan 8 23:29:37 1996 - Added a link to Dick's first home page. The first of my non-geek friends to join the home paged! Hunted down a copy of the canonical New! viral image to stick in.. If URNs actually existed we could probably shave a measurable fraction of Web traffic just with that tiny image, not to mention countless 116 byte disk files all over the place.

    Also, tossed Letterman's link. What the heck was he doing in there?

    And, unrotted the link to the Cool Site of the Day, whose days on my page seem severely limited at this point, considering.. Back in the 'old days' -- call it 1995, to be generous -- the CSotD was doubly cool: Not only did it point at plausibly/perhaps/sometimes cool stuff, but the very fact of its something-from-nothing existence and success was cool in itself. But now it's just another commercial venue, fundamentally. How long can Suck avoid the same fate?

    And finally, sigh, made the first revision to, rather than just extension of, this revision page -- an act which, viewed from the perspective of truth rather than quality, is an unethical thing to do. Added a link to the archive of Esther's gingRICH interview, since it was easy to find and made the page 'more useful'.

    Ah well. My own fault. In the cards from the start: Creators seek truth. Consumers seek quality.

    Example: The whole reason for creating this revision page was so that the 'truth', in the form of the evolutionary history of the home page, would be preserved while allowing the home page itself to be rewritten for 'quality', in the form of topicality, at liberty. Fine. But this page is public too and 'quality' pressures to rewrite the revision page grew as I started sticking all this sort of marginalia in here.

    Truth is born to die. Quality is born pregnant


  • Sun Aug 6 19:31:35 1995 - Started making changes reflecting the dual existence of the department-maintained page for me, and my own self-maintained page. At the moment the two in the main duplicate each other; thought it was time to personalize the personal one a bit more.

    So, tossed the seal of UNM, and inlined that old caricature I got way back when, at the Three Rivers Arts Festival in Pittsburgh, now scanned, cropped, diffused to black and white, and GIFfed into 2118 bytes! Tight! (By contrast, the home page itself, sans pictures, takes over 4K bytes..)

    Makes me think of the television show Brunner made up in, what was it, Stand On Zanzibar? The TV had hardware so you could scan in pictures of yourself, and they'd get computo-pasted onto the actors in the show, so you could watch 'yourself' in all the romantic places doing all the amazing things you'd never see or do in your hum-drum moo-cow actual life. The twist was that the viewers never bothered to update their scans as they aged, so not only did they see themselves making love to some beautiful star or whatever, they always saw their younger selves so engaged..


  • Mon Jul 17 19:57:19 1995 - Updated the ideas futures link, which had also rotted. (The frigging URouLosers still have something screwed up -- can't even get in through the front door, now. It's become a subscription service?! Give me a random break!

    Also, did a first cut at an Emacs macro to update the revision times between the home page and this baby. It's still pretty crufty.


  • Fri Jul 14 15:40:00 1995 - Updated the URouLette's address since the previous one seems to have rotted. Also, dropped the link to the idiot decency bill petition since we seem to have lost that one for the moment. Hey did you see Newt the Ging telling Esther, in Wired 3.08, that private strong crypto was inevitable? Doesn't mean it'll inevit easily, or that he wouldn't take cheap shots to delay or defame it, of course.
  • Fri Jun 9 13:29:27 1995 - Added a link straight to URouLette's random-url script.. I suppose that's a bad thing to do -- bypassing their front door -- but it gets me out and randomized one click quicker.
  • Fri Jun 9 11:37:43 1995 - Added a link to the lcs WWW-ified Info-Mac archive mirror.
  • Wed Jun 7 11:35:17 1995 - Added a link to an 'Ultimate Mac' page. Is 'www.freepress.com' related to The Free Press? We're betting no.
  • Sun Jun 4 21:26:58 1995 - Added a link to the online book collection at wiretap.spies.com. What kind of name is that?
  • Tue May 23 22:44:34 1995 - Added a link to the petition against the idiot decency bill.
  • Fri May 19 00:22:57 1995 - Added a link to cult stuff, always fun. But hmm. Beginning to see the problem with the revision history concept, here. Would probably just rather have auto-change-bar generation somehow. Man, just finished the Xanadu story in Wired 3.06.. The lure of perfection.. The belief in the purity of the single idea. A tough go, that. And thus the ccr slogan, Reifying reality..

    Also, went back to forward chronological order, although that's backwards for revision histories. Justified it by making the revision times be anchors and pointing at the latest from the home page.


  • Thu May 18 15:29:03 1995 - Added revision history. Noted that it's not obvious how to find the URL of a random page you happen to have saved! That damn asymmetry of links again. Had to go back to the place I'd found the URL to find it again. Put a <base=http://www.cs.unm.edu/~ackley/revision.html> into this page for the hell of it.
  • 5/17/95 Created from the page Linda Atkins built to get me going. Used various sources off the net for inspiration (including H's home page). Used Netscape 1.1N enhancements, much as I feel I shouldn't've.