Old School Times Two

Oh how sophisticated we have become in our old age. There used to be a time when just about every web page that was hip and up-to-date had a silly "hit counter" on it. It counted the number of times the page was viewed in a very simple-minded way. It didn't care about unique hosts or anything useful like that, it just incremented its count every time the page was accessed.


Hit counter!

Well, the good old days are back! In an effort to beat the nixie tube theme to death I offer you, free to use, your very own nixie tube hit counter. It will remember any page you stick it in, it will increment every time the page is displayed (of course, actually, every time the image is displayed), and it will impress your visitors with old-timey geek power. Or not. Either way feel free to stick it on your page and have a go.

(NOTE: The program is, as I said above, simple-minded. It just looks at the referrer and bases the count on that. This means that "http://www.yoursite.com/" and "http://yoursite.com/" and "http://yoursite.com/index.html" will all have accurate but different counts. I might improve this in the future but probably not.)

To use the super-cool nixie page counter, just use it like an image, so:

   <img src="http://kovaya.com/nixie-count.cgi"
       alt="Nixie Hit Counter!" width=210 height=77>

That's all there is to it. Now there is no guarantee that it will continue to operate so don't base a business model on it, but if you think its fun and want to try it out, please do. Thoroughly tested but bug reports should go to the email address in the sidebar over there.

Happy counting!

Absolute Confusion

A fundamental error among people looking for Truth (with a big T) is to imagine that is is a nothing but a bigger version of "truth" (the little T kind). Small truths are simply things about which we agree. We say "that is true" to mean just that. "I agree with you" or, " you should agree with me" are equivalent and work everywhere "it is true" is used. Because the same word is used we take big Truth to be a bigger version of small truth.

The reality is that small truths don't actually resemble what people imagine big Truth to be. Small truths are descriptions of things that use words we understand from their context. The entire web of meaning that leads to small truths is based on a context of assumptions. People believe that Truth is "absolute" by which they mean there is no contextual component, but we can see that small truths are entirely dependent on the context in which the occur. So, what we call "truth" cannot be the same thing as the idea of big Truth.

If there is something like big Truth it must be something other then contextless small truth. Small truths are products of this big Truth, not a different sort of the same thing. There is no occult version of Truth in them. They are just what they are, no more. The confusion arises because they share a name.

From the Ashes (but still a bit sooty...)

Miscellany's previous home became suddenly unavailable. As you can see, it's back online but it is not yet completely status quo ante. Please excuse any funny behavior, or missing functionality as I scramble to restore things to normal.

On a positive note, I am now using Linode and I am very pleased and impressed. Low cost, slick as a Linux-geek's forehead and cheaper than his wardrobe. I can unhesitatingly recommend that you check them out, if you want to have high quality hosting and root.