What Happened at OakRoadSystems.com?
Copyright © 2002–2022 by Stan Brown, BrownMath.com
This page lists the significant changes to the Oak
Road Systems Web site, as a matter of historical interest.
For changes beginning December 2021, please see What’s New at BrownMath.com.
December 2021
All of the content at OakRoadSystems.com, except what’s noted under
November 2021,
below, has been moved to my other site, BrownMath.com. You can access
it under Free Software
Utilities and General
Articles.
November 2021
Math Sites and Software got pared down and moved to my
other site,
BrownMath.com, in
somewhat different form.
The following articles, which are seriously outdated, were
removed entirely. Most of them I wrote when I was learning the
topics, but my interest has changed or the technology has moved on,
and I don’t really want to start over with them. Some have been
archived, and in that case I give the link.
- How to Find FAQ Lists, last revised 7 Oct 2010:
http://web.archive.org/web/20150315080351/https://oakroadsystems.com/genl/faqget.htm
- Web Resources for Web Authors, last revised 30 April 2009:
http://web.archive.org/web/20100122013303/http://oakroadsystems.com/tech/webauthr.htm
- Windows XP Tips and Tweaks, last revised 16 April 2016:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170708232555/https://oakroadsystems.com/tech/winxptip.htm
- ‘Make Money Fast’ and Other Chain Letters, last revised 5 July 2000:
http://web.archive.org/web/20021021022538/http://www.oakroadsystems.com/genl/nommf.htm
- Play Nice in Email, last revised 16 Apr 2016:
http://web.archive.org/web/20191231214625/http://oakroadsystems.com/genl/enice.htm
- Play Nice on Usenet, last revised 26 Jan 2012:
http://web.archive.org/web/20150930013328/http://oakroadsystems.com/genl/unice.htm
- Hard Disk Partitioning, last revised 20 April 2002:
http://web.archive.org/web/20031211015433/http://oakroadsystems.com/tech/hd-partn.htm
- C Reserved Identifiers, last revised 15 Sept 2003:
http://web.archive.org/web/20040802235318/http://oakroadsystems.com/tech/c-predef.htm
- C++ Reserved Identifiers, last revised 28 Oct 2003:
http://web.archive.org/web/20031204190038/http://oakroadsystems.com/tech/cppredef.htm
- MSVC++ = Microsoft vs. C++, last revised 15 Sept 2003
Finally, I scrubbed the link rot from the articles that
remain. (Those will migrate to BrownMath.com at some point.)
January 2021
Added
List Users and GUIDs
to Windows 7 Tips and Tweaks.
November 2020
Released v8.1.4 of GENER8.
Converted all pages from HTML 4.01 to HTML5, and cleaned up the
HTML errors revealed by the W3C’s
HTML5 validator.
July 2020
In the GREP documentation, brought the
Quick Reference Card and the
full release notes on line,
added some clarifications to the
reference manual, and
converted the interative tour (in the
download file) to use static
data files rather than the program documentation. Removed the
documentation from the download file, since it’s all on the Web
now and the tour no longer needs it. [Docs were restored to the
download file in December 2021, because I had forgotten the people who
can’t conveniently read docs on the Internet.]
June 2020
In the FAQ of the Rings,
updated the answer about Wagner and Tolkien to make it clear that
Tolkien’s rejection of parallels apply to some of
Wagner’s source material, not to Wagner, but explain why
it’s still appropriate to discuss parallels with Wagner.
May 2020
- Images were showing up through http:// but not https://. The
site should now work completely in https://.
- Updated Stan Brown’s Personal Page, for the first time in four years.
- The article How to Find FAQ Lists [later withdrawn] has been withdrawn.
Too much of its advice has been stultified by Google’s
repeatedly
breaking newsgroup search.
- The articles Play Nice in Email and
Play Nice on Usenet
have been withdrawn. No one was ever persuaded by
reasoned arguments on these topics, and everyone thinks his or her
practice is the One True Way.
March 2020
A busy year, with selling my house and moving across the
United States in the middle of a pandemic.
I’m finally getting to the site updates that have been
on my to-do list for so long. This month: added
Control Panel Direct Links
to Windows 7 Tips and Tweaks.
June 2019
Updates to Relationship Terms,
particularly in the “grand” and “great”
terms.
February 2019
All of the software utilities are now
freeware.
January 2019
Withdrew the resumes. They’re out of date, and I
don’t plan on changing jobs.
June 2018
New release v8.1 of GENER8, and
major improvements in the user
manual [later renamed the GENER8 Scripting Manual].
October 2016
Several new sections in Windows 7 Tips and Tweaks.
July 2016
Use similar “donate” links to
BrownMath.com. Add a
landing page for people working from
printed copies who want to donate.
April 2016
Post the GENER8 script v8.0,
which I use to generate all these Web pages.
Remove system dependencies so that the code should now work in UNIX as
well as Windows; see all
change details.
February 2016
October 2015
Update the Link Exchange Policy.
All my current math pages are at
BrownMath.com,
but Math Sites and Software won’t move there. [It did,
late in 2021, though in somewhat different form.] With
Internet search engines so good, a static page of links seems so 20th
century. I’ll leave it in place for anyone who has bookmarked
it, but I’m not going to update it any further.
September 2015
Add <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width">
to every page, to make Google happy.
August 2015
Move the
algebra
and
trig
pages from OakRoadSystems.com to
BrownMath.com.
June 2015
Replace 54 pages, which simply framed pages at
BrownMath.com,
with direct links to those pages.
May 2015
BrownMath.com
launched on 10 May. All math articles from OakRoadSystems.com
will eventually move there, but for now I’ve added links from
the site map,
home page, and
main math page, plus a
BrownMath.com option on the
Google search page.
February 2015
January 2015
July 2014
May 2014
September 2013
August 2013
- First public release of Stats without Tears.
This is a full textbook, covering a first course in
statistics, with exercises, and it’s a free resource, at least for
now. [It was still free at the end of 2021, and I have every intention
of keeping it free.]
August 2012
July 2012
June 2012
February 2012
After surgery in summer 2011 and a long aftermath of
recovery, I wasn’t able to do any significant
updates. But now I’m starting to catch up with the backlog:
June 2011
May 2011
April 2011
January 2011
December 2010
- More tips in Windows 7 Tips and Tweaks.
- New links, and correction or removal of dead links, in
Math Sites and Software [later withdrawn].
- Finally! Tables of contents no longer have <table> tags, or
<br> and for layout, but are now all lists with CSS
styling.
November 2010
October 2010
- Clear out all the link-rot in
How to Find FAQ Lists [later withdrawn]and
Play Nice on Usenet [later withdrawn].
February 2010
- Withdraw Web Resources for Web Authors, which was
horribly out of date.
- Withdraw the WHISTLE shareware program, which used the PC speaker to
play a tune with no need for a sound card, because hardware and OSes
prevent it from working.
December 2009
October 2009
September 2009
July 2009
- Replace the separate print and screen style sheets (31 K in
aggregate) with a unified style sheet
(13 K). You may not notice the performance improvement, but it
will cut the site’s bandwidth significantly.
May 2009
March 2009
February 2009
December 2008
November 2008
- Consolidate separate TI-83/84 programs for several inferential
statistics procedures into a single
MATH200I program, adding a new option for computing sample
size.
October 2008
September 2008
July 2008
June 2008
May 2008
April 2008
February 2008
- Add “Shorten the ‘Open With’ List” to
Windows XP Tips and Tweaks [later withdrawn].
January 2008
- Add Skewness and Kurtosis on the TI-83/84 and a
TI-83/84 program (but see Dec 2008 for later history).
- Add Frequency Polygons on the TI-83/84 and a TI-83/84 program
that makes frequency polygons and histograms.
- Consolidate the page on making a histogram for a list of numbers
and the page on making a histogram for a grouped frequency
distribution into a single page “Histograms of Numeric Data on
the TI-83/84”.
- Update the tip on sorting files numerically in
Windows XP Tips and Tweaks [later withdrawn].
December 2007
November 2007
September 2007
August 2007
New math pages:
Updated the titles of several more pages to match changed
content.
July 2007
June 2007
May 2007
- Add “Don’t Shout” to
Play Nice on Usenet [later withdrawn].
March 2007
February 2007
- Donations are now tracked by which page’s
“donate” link you clicked.
January 2007
December 2006
November 2006
October 2006
May 2006
- Converting CDs to iTunes Audiobooks is now complete, after being published in
March as just
an outline.
- Another ten pages for
mathematics students at Tompkins Cortland
Community College (TC3) are now incorporated in this site.
- The new page Play Nice in Email [later withdrawn], adapted and expanded from
my TC3 site, explains why HTML is bad in e-mail and how to set your
mailer to deliver plain text.
April 2006
- Forty-two pages for mathematics students at Tompkins Cortland
Community College are now incorporated in this site.
- Add “Sort File and Folder
Names Numerically (or not)” to
Windows XP Tips and Tweaks [later withdrawn].
- "Straight quotes" have all been converted to “curly
quotes”, with invaluable assistance from Stephen Poley’s
sed
script.
March 2006
February 2006
January 2006
- Release 5.23 of CMP handles
path\filenames of any length, even those longer than the documented
259-character Windows limit.
- Play Nice on Usenet [later withdrawn] now
starts with some links for people who aren’t quite sure what this whole
Usenet thing is.
December 2005
- We now accept Paypal for
shareware registrations. [As of early 2019 the
shareware had become freeware, but we still accept Paypal for donations.]
- The page of Loan or Investment Formulas was substantially revised,
and now comes with a downloadable Excel workbook.
November 2005
- Release of CMP 5.2. New features
include showing just the lines from one file that weren’t in the
other, and comparing the output of a program (redirected
stdin) to a reference file.
September 2005
May 2005
- Release of GREP 8.0. It
handles all types of text files in line or paragraph mode, as well as
binary files. New output formats are available at your discretion.
- Play Nice on Usenet [later withdrawn]
gained a few suggestions and clarifications.
- Having found that an astonishing 40% of this site’s bandwidth
was the style sheets (CSS files), I squeezed out unnecessary spaces and
comments.
March 2005
- New article:
Windows XP Tips and Tweaks [later withdrawn].
- Several Web pages, mostly on C and C++, haven’t been updated
in some time and are out of date. Realistically, they probably won’t
be updated in the foreseeable future. They’ve been replaced with short pages
that explain the situation and link to the copies archived in the
Internet Wayback Machine.
December 2004
- Release 7.5 of our flagship GREP
pattern-matching utility program adds paragraph-mode searches,
presents binary results in a clear new tabular format, and
relieves you of
the need to prespecify the lengths of text lines. A new
Quick Reference Card is included, courtesy of a longtime
user.
[ more... ]
- Since groups.google.com broke
all existing archive links to articles when rolling out Groups Beta,
I implemented a temporary fix to link back to the articles. This affects
the following articles:
- FAQ of the Rings,
- Loan or Investment Formulas,
- Math Sites and Software [later withdrawn], and
- Relationship Terms.
November 2004
- Add some resources to the
Usenet section of
Web Resources for Web Authors [later withdrawn].
October 2004
September 2004
July 2004
May 2004
Hard Disk Partitioning [later withdrawn]
is now hosted at Sandy Archer’s site.
March 2004
January 2004
November 2003
September 2003
- “Recommended Sites for HTML Authors” was almost completely
rewritten and was renamed
“Web Resources for Web Authors [later withdrawn]”.
Obsolete material was removed and much new material was added,
including style sheets—and about time too!
- My screen is too light
or too dark was added to
TI-83/84 Troubleshooting,
which has since moved to BrownMath.com.
- All links on the site were checked using
the free Xenu
Link Sleuth, and corrections applied as needed.
July 2003
- New article: 10-Minute Trig
- New links to
statistics information and software were added to
Math Sites and Software [later withdrawn].
June 2003
May 2003
April 2003
- New article: Play Nice on Usenet [later withdrawn].
- How to Find FAQ Lists [later withdrawn] was
updated with several new FAQs, and a form was added to
search Google for FAQ
lists.
- The self test on distributive laws in
Combining Operations (Distributive Laws) was expanded
by 60%, and correct expansions were given for all the wrong
expansions.
- Math Sites and Software [later withdrawn] added
a link to Free Statistics on the Web.
- A special section on invisibility was added to the
FAQ of the Rings.
March 2003
January 2003
October 2002
- The lists of C Reserved Identifiers [later withdrawn] and
C++ Reserved Identifiers [later withdrawn]
now explain better why every external name that begins
is
, mem
, etc. is reserved.
- The shareware pages now make it
more clear that the registered versions contain bonus features.
[That was ended in 2019, when the programs became freeware, with
donations suggested.]
- Two entries in the FAQ of the Rings were expanded.
They have to do with Sauron’s taking the Ring to
Númenor and then getting it back to Middle-earth.
- The stylesheets were fine-tuned to try to compensate for bugs in
various browsers.
September 2002
- TI-83/84 Troubleshooting,
which has since moved to BrownMath.com, now
has five new tips.
- The FAQ of the Rings has
a couple of new Q&A and some minor revisions for clarity.
- Trig without Tears has been through a
major revision, with several sections added and several others
rewritten. You can read the details in the “What’s New?” sections of
the individual chapters. The PDF version
has been replaced by a printer-friendly HTML version.
- This “What’s New” page is new. Previously, you had to look at
all the revision dates and try to guess which pages had been
significantly revised.
- The entire site has been given a new look. As part of that,
presentational HTML has been replaced with stylesheets. Some pages
have been moved around, but the old URLs still work (of
course).
- The C++ Programming Practices pages have been
withdrawn.
- Every internal and external link on the entire site was tested
on 21 Sep 2002, and all errors were corrected. I feel so
clean!
August 2002
(intervening changes lost)
May 2000
On 3 May 2000, initial registration of the OakRoadSystems.com
domain.