Welcome to GEONius.com

Alex Measday's Home on the Web

(since 1995)

The Name

My first choice was www.deronda.com, the name of my favorite George Eliot novel, Daniel Deronda. However, someone had already registered that domain. A second choice was www.idap.com, the initials of my favorite Beatles song, "I Dig A Pony". Again, no luck. (And, after listening to the song for decades, I finally noticed that the real song title is "Dig A Pony"—no "I"!) So I scoured the dictionary (Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary in hard-copy form) for other possibilities:

nescience, nescient

"lack of knowledge or awareness; ignorance"

meliorism, meliorist

"the belief that the world tends to become better and that humans can aid its betterment"

entelechy

"the actualization of form-giving cause as contrasted with potential existence"

methinks

short and sweet

While ruminating over www.aide-toi.com, French for "help yourself", intended by me in the sense of "help yourself to whatever you find here", I was reading The Lopsided Ape: Evolution of the Generative Mind by Michael C. Corballis:

Irving Biederman [Wikipedia] ... has proposed a set of 36 generalized cones that he calls geons [Wikipedia], which is short for "geometric ions". He suggests that this basic vocabulary is sufficient to generate virtually all of the shapes we know, at least to the point at which they can be recognized. The geons are chosen, moreover, so that they are as discriminable from one another as possible, even when rotated into different orientations.

I liked the name and geonetics.com was already taken, so GEONius it is!

I didn't actually come up with the name myself. The pair Domains (originally pairNIC) domain name registration service reported that geon.com was already taken and it suggested alternative, available domain names composed of geon with various suffixes. Geonius.com seemed clever and cute, although a little bit too cute in hindsight; to make matters worse, I now tend to misspell "genius"! I was surprised that geonius hadn't already been grabbed by a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) company, as was the case with geonetics.com.

The Logo

Our plaster ceilings at home have a repeating flower pattern made by rotating a circular brush back and forth while the plaster is wet. When the sun is at the right angle, one of the petals on one of the flowers looks like a big-beaked penguin in a Nehru jacket - or maybe that's just my Linuxishness tweaking my perception! (I added the buttons and the eyes!)

The Websites

My original website, http://vlsi19.gsfc.nasa.gov:8224/, created in 1995, ran on a webserver I wrote myself: the [incr Tcl]-based gentle program running a variation of the hope.tcl script. (One of few feathers in my cap is that gentle is listed on the [incr Tcl] Applications page!) Computer programmers of sufficient age will recognize the port number, 8224, as the decimal representation of two ASCII space characters (0x2020 in hexadecimal).

Several years later, I got a paid web account at Interlog. The Wayback Machine has an archived 1998 copy of my website, http://www.interlog.com/~calex/. I believe Interlog's web server supported server-side includes (.shtml files).

The Canadian-based Interlog provided extremely fast web access despite its distance from me; unfortunately, they had something like a 1MB limit on file storage. So I upgraded to my own domain name and a web account from Pair. The first copy archived by the Wayback Machine dates back to 2001: http://www.geonius.com/. With the new site, I began using a slightly modified copy of Gihan Perera's/Bruno Beaufils' gtml preprocessor, written in Perl, to generate my website's static web pages. (Andrew E. Schulman took over the project in 2004, but I'm still using Bruno Beaufils' older script.)

GTML-generated HTML
(Gihan Perera / Bruno Beaufils / Andrew E. Schulman)