I studied Mathematics in Groningen (1982-1987), wrote a thesis about Graphic User Interfaces (1987-1993), worked on an Internet browser and the surrounding infrastructure for the Faculty of Arts in Groningen (among other things), and am now working for The World Wide Web Consortium on style sheets and math.
Cascading Style Sheets –
designing for the Web (3rd ed.)
Hakon Wium Lie & Bert Bos
2005
ISBN 0321193121
(See http://www.aw.com/css/)
Provence (which includes the Côte-d'Azur) is the region in Southern France that lies roughly between the Rhone river in the west, the Italian border in the east, the Mediterranean Sea in the south, and halfway into the Alps in the north.
I have a a few thousand photos of Provence: page 1, page 2 and page 3 (slow link). (The thumbnail page is generated with a small script.)
A short list of things to do if you visit the Côte d'Azur.
I've thrown together a few simple C programs that can number headings in HTML, make a table of contents, etc. They work for me, comments are welcome, but I don't promise any maintenance. They don't have enough documentation ☹
Nothing to do with HTML, but useful anyway: a little program that shuffles the lines of a file. Sort of the opposite of sort... To compile, just type make shuffle. The manual is in the form of a Unix man page.
A tiny C program that prints the artist, title, etc. tags from MP3 files, mp3tag.c (Version 1 tags only.)
Another C program, that decodes the images taken with a Mitsubishi DJ1000 digital camera to PPM format: dj1000toppm.c
I used to use this shell script to generate thumbnail pages for my photos, but since I've started using rdfpic, I've been using another shell script that gets the description from the RDF metadata.
I used to use plan to keep my appointments, but now I'm trying korganizer. I wrote a Perl program plan2vcs to convert from plan format to vCalendar (used by korganizer). (This is version 2.0. Version 1.0 had some bugs, which were fixed by Marcus Gottwald.)
XML Schemas are rather hard to write and read, so I started writing a little utility "mnbftosch.pl" that allows you to define an XML-based format using a traditional context-free (EBNF) grammar. It is a Perl script that takes a grammar and generates the equivalent XML Schema. It is by no means ready yet, but it does occasionally write correct Schemas. Two related essays ("Context-free schemas" & "Meta-grammar") give some more background. (Example input & output.)
rdjpgxmp, wrjpgxmp and xmptool: the former two are little C programs to extract and insert XMP data in JPEG (JFIF) files. The latter can query an XMP file for the value of a particular property (string-valued or URI-valued properties only for now) or can insert a property/value pair into an XMP file.
htmldiff is an HTML diff program: it compares two files and marks up the differences. (It is a quick hack, based on wdiff. Don't expect perfect results.)
I've also made two font families, Gladiator and Gladiator Sans (alternative link).
An (unfinished) essay on possible future technology for “Web applications,” simple programs that are downloaded on demand and execute inside a client program, for problems where Java applets would be overkill. Another essay focuses on requirements.
An essay on the principles of good specification design, as I'm trying to apply them in my own work: “What is a good standard?”
I've created some software for a simpler variant of XML, to see how it works.
One of the promises of the Web, and of the "semantic Web" in particular, is that data can be machine-readable and can thus be re-used. As an experiment, I've written a robot that collects the daytime temperatures in Nice, France, once per day, and creates a graph.
A list of a few of my publications.
My dissertation (497 Kb of gzipped Postscript, also as PDF), titled: Rapid user interface development with the script language Gist
The manual for Wbuild a widget builder for the X toolkit.
An explanation and overview of HTML symbol entities
A proposal (`W3A') for an API for WWW browser applets.
Wbuild and other software used to be available from the (Groningen University) Faculty of Arts's FTP server.
I contributed a number of X widgets to the FWF (Alert, Animator, Arrow, Board, Button, Canvas, Common, Frame, Group, HScrollb, Icon, IconBox, Label, MenuBar, OptButton, Pager, PieMenu, Prompt, PullDown, RadioGroup, RowCol, ScrollWin, ScrollWin3, Scrollbar, Slider2, Slider4, Tabs, TextMenu, ThumbWheel, Toggle, VScrollb). Together with Joe English, I wrote the Scrolling Widgets Interface Policy (SWIP) See the ASCII or the DVI versions.)
The FWF is no longer active. I've put the most recent sources that I have in a tar-file (fwf-4.0.tar.gz, 1.5Mb). This is basically version 4.0 with some very minor edits.
This is the current time in France (unless you have no Java implementation in your browser, or a Java that has a bug, such as Netscape 4.03 or HotJava 1.0 on Sun Solaris). See more examples and some documentation or get the source.
The color of the dial varies from yellowish (noon) to dark purple (midnight).
Maporama can give driving directions in France. (Note, this is a "data:" URL. Why? Well, just to see if your browser understands it…)
PS. My favorite radio channel is FIP (MP3 stream). A shame it is no longer in the ether at the Côte d'Azur ☹ (And they are better at making radio than Web pages. These links change every few years…)