Marc Lehmann's Background

Last change: 2008-09-21

Sections like "About Me" are the ones that should be eliminated first from every homepage. Most often they are either uninteresting, wrong, or just plain boring. Mail me if you want anything (photo, curriculum...), you will be heard!

So instead of filling this page with photos/??? (which I'll probably add anyway ;), I'll start by explaining how (and with which tools!) I created this homepage (and in effect all pages on this web-server).

Ah, but before I start, here's quite an interesting excerpt from a german newspaper, the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung, together with a message: Remember: only very, very dumb hackers report themselves to the authorities. More intelligent ones simply wipe the system clean from any superflous software ;)

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What tools did I use to create these pages?

I created these pages (and the pentium compiler group pages) at a time where almost no dedicated html-authoring tools existed. Well, today some tools exist (most notably the Website Meta Language), yet I still don't use these tools. Instead, I rely on various generic tools that I describe in more detail below:

First of all, editing is done using vi, or, more specifically, VI iMproved. Well, thats not the whole truth: not long ago, I used joe (Joe's Own Editor), but apart from getting increasingly outdated, using joe does not have as much sex as using vi...
For macro processing, which is quite necessary if you edit more than a few pages, I use the good old m4 macro processor (GNU M4, to be most correct). Its macro processing capabilities are tremendously helpful once you get accustomed to its baroque quoting methods. I use a common set of m4 macros for all my pages, and a customized set for different sites.
Perl is a practical necessity for almost everything I ever do, so, naturally, perl is involved not only in creating the pages, but also in various post-processing stages.
Last not least, to update the pages on the remote web-server, I use rsync to synchronize my local tree to the remote one without using unneccessary bandwidth. I used rdist before, and, boy, I was happy when I switched...