markusfreericks

Animals belonging to the Emperor (reconstructed)

In the good old days, i had a homepage. You could find it on www.cs.tu-berlin.de/~mfx.

At that time (march 1994 - the very first widely avaiable browser, NCSA Mosaic, had just come out, and i was browsing the meager web on a monochrome sun sparcstation) people were doing homepages, to present themselves, their work, and to maintain link lists (a “home page” was the start page of your browser then, and browsers didn’t have much bookmark support).

My homepage had a name: Tiere, die dem Kaiser gehören (animals that belong to the emperor) explanation.

Somewhere in 1995, i had to abandon it when my PhD funding ran out; for a while, a copy could be found at Uni Bielefeld (where my Doktorvater had moved to). After that, the last snapshot was on mfx.dasburo.com (dasburo.com was the company i worked at, for more then 25 years), which is now also defunct.

So here is my new attempt at maintaining ancient traditions.

(For simplicity’s sake, this time everything will be in english - for a time, i did the index page in german/english, and had an embedded language toggle).

what to find here, now

• a tiny “about me” section
• my annotated list of publications, Sadly, there is nothing new since i did my PhD work. While I have written lots of documentation and some white papers, all the material is customer-related or otherwise internal.
• i have resolved my beef with a character

what to find here, eventually

(this is currently a to-do list. i am writing this in december 2025, since i have a few vacation days. no idea how much energy i can find to finish this)

• maybe a bit about the nML machine description language (strangely enough my only lasting legacy to computer science)
• some musings about ALDiSP (the language i never really finished the compiler for)
• no copy of my old “trash heap” link list (99% of which would point to nothing), or the old DHTML experiments (which would not work under modern browsers), or my rants (which have not been relevant for 20 years).
• also, no copy of the Arabian Nights (back then, i hosted a copy that i had found a copy on a gopher server, and converted from a massive text blob to manageable HTML pages)
• maybe a reading list?
• maybe the “people” list, updated?
• the quotations file, and random quotation snippet service, if i can find out how to host it - obviously, there is no chance to run a cgi-bin in github.
• maybe an updated rant collection (so much stuff i have an opinion about - not sure whether anyone would like to read it)

last update: 2025-12-15

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if anyone wants to see the homepage in its old glory, the wayback machine provides