One of the best collections of links to homepages of people working in non-commutative algebra and/or geometry is maintained by Paul Smith. At regular intervals I use it to check up on some people, usually in vain as nobody seems to update their homepage… So, today I wrote a simple spider to check for updates in this list. The idea is simple : it tries to get the link (and when this fails it reports that the link seems to be broken), it saves a text-copy of the page (using lynx) on disc which it will check on a future check-up for changes with diff. Btw. for OS X-people I got lynx from the Fink Project. It then collects all data (broken links, time of last visit and time of last change and recent updates) in RSS-feeds for which an HTML-version is maintained at the geoMetry-site, again using server side includes. If you see a 1970-date this means that I have never detected a change since I let this spider loose (today). Also, the list of pages is not alphabetic, even to me it is a surprise how the next list will look. As I check for changes with diff the claimed number of changed lines is by far accurate (the total of lines from the first change made to the end of the file might be a better approximation of reality… I will change this soon).
Clearly, all of this is still experimental so please give me feedback if you notice something wrong with these lists. Also I plan to extend this list substantially over the next weeks (for example, Paul Smith himself is not present in his own list…). So, if you want your pages to be included, let me know at lieven.lebruyn@ua.ac.be.
For those on Paul\’s list, if you looked at your log-files today you may have noticed a lot of traffic from www.matrix.ua.ac.be as I was testing the script. I\’ll keep my further visits down to once a day, at most…

geometry, non-commutative