About the Gymnasion

Welcome to the gymnasion! This is the personal website and weblog of Christoph Nahr. Use the Google-powered search box if you’re looking for anything in particular – it searches both website and weblog. You can also contact me by email or on Twitter.

Curious visitors may consult my historical note on the website’s peculiar name and twin domains. The header image shows Leo von Klenze’s beautiful 1846 reconstruction of the Athenian Akropolis since I haven’t found any pictures of the Kynosarges itself.

Kynosarges Website

The original website is composed of static pages, with comments powered by Disqus. Here you can find my open source projects, longer technical articles, and book review archives. Use the drop-down menus in the sidebar to access content pages directly (requires JavaScript), or visit the following index pages for categorized lists of all content pages:

This website is accessible through two domains, kynosarges.org and kynosarges.de. Both point to the same files and can be used interchangeably. See below for the history behind these twin domains.

Several pages contain tables wrapped in automatically resizing scroll boxes. This feature requires JavaScript and is described here. Mobile browsers won’t show scroll bars on tables that don’t fit the viewport, but you can still scroll them by swiping left and right.

Kynosarges Weblog

The companion weblog is a self-hosted WordPress installation. All news and plans for my articles and projects appear there, along with any other ramblings that strike my fancy. Copy the RSS feed into your news reader to subscribe to the weblog. Alternatively, receive post notifications by email using the subscription feature in the weblog’s sidebar.

Aside from programming and software & hardware reviews, I fairly regularly blog about science & history as well as photography. The latter includes my reviews of camera equipment and Google Photos galleries from my excursions.

Historical Note

The Κυνοσαργες (Kynosarges) was an ancient Greek gymnasion dedicated to Herakles, situated in the demos Diomeia outside the walls of Athens. It was the place of education for those Athenian boys who did not enjoy full citizenship. Antisthenes (445–360 BC), student of Socrates and founder of the cynic school of philosophy, taught at the Kynosarges. The most famous cynic was Diogenes of Sinope (412–323 BC), allegedly residing in an empty barrel and subject of countless anecdotes.

Addendum 1 June 2004: I am pleased to discover that Kynosarges was also the title of a short-lived literary magazine whose only issue was published in Berlin anno 1802. Otherwise the name appears to have seen little use since ancient times, at least with the “K” spelling.

About the Author

I’ve been fascinated with computers ever since I loaned a friend’s Sinclair ZX81 in the early 1980s. That was followed by the amazing Commodore 64 (with a floppy drive!) and some bulky CP/M contraptions, until the rising tide of IBM PC clones with Microsoft Windows swept all else away.

On the programming side, I naturally started out with BASIC and machine language since that’s what the old “home computers” offered. Although I wrote some C at university, the teaching languages in my time (1988–94) were still Ada, Pascal, and Modula-2. Eventually I taught myself various popular modern languages – C++, C#, Java, and a smattering of others.

Computers are also my favorite platform for electronic games, especially strategy and role-playing. Lately I discovered Apple’s iPad as another excellent device for board game adaptations. You’ll find occasional news & reviews on the weblog, and my own strategy game projects on the website.

About the Website

The Kynosarges website was established in 1999 – not quite so ancient as its namesake but still pretty old compared to most of the Internet! I wanted a distinctive domain name to host my first small game project, Star Chess. Since then the website has grown organically with all kinds of code, links, and articles which I found interesting or useful enough to share.

The Kynosarges companion weblog was added in March 2012 – first on Blogger, then on WordPress.com, and since April 2013 as a self-hosted WordPress installation. Originally I had been posting all website news directly on this page, deleting old news periodically when the list got too long, and even writing my own XSLT to produce an RSS feed. Needless to say I don’t recommend this method…

About the Domains

As a German resident I got a free .de domain from my ISP, so that’s where Kynosarges started out. However, this website is neither written in German nor specific to Germany, and it quickly acquired a global audience (however small). So I registered the kynosarges.org alias in June 2011 and have been using it in public URLs ever since, although the .de variant will remain valid as well.

An amusing incident in June 2011 provided additional incentive for the .org alias. Chinese domain hunters were evidently targeting foreign website names at random – including mine! They had only squatted on local domains such as kynosarges.cn at that point, but I decided to take preemptive action before anyone else could grab kynosarges.org.