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This site is published by Luis A. Apiolaza in Christchurch, New Zealand. These pages reflect only personal views and have no relationship with anybody else’s, including my family members, friends, pets, and employer.

Most pages—including text and graphics—are my copyright (1997–2025) and some rights are reserved. In summary, you have to credit me, and you can distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, for noncommercial purposes only. If you modify or adapt the material, you must license the modified material under identical terms. (BY-NC-SA).

Exceptions: for many journal articles I have transferred the copyright to the publishers. Other articles use a CC-BY-NC-ND license, so you can share the articles without commercial purposes BUT you must give me credit, and can’t produce derivative works from them. In summary, carefully check the license for my journal articles.

Privacy and Tracking #

  • This site does not collect any personal data. There are no cookies, no trackers, no visitors’ statistics, no affiliate links, etc.
  • There are no social buttons (Facebook, Twitter, whatever) tracking you from/to other sites either.
  • I use no URL shorteners. They started as kind-of-a-good-idea, but these days they are mostly tracking mechanisms.
  • I removed comments from the site: tired of fighting spammers.

Tools #

Right now, Hugo hosted in Gitlab with continuous integration.

At the dawn of time—well, 1997—I wrote this site directly in HTML using Windows Notepad. Around 1999 I moved to the Arachnophilia editor. By 2005 all pages ended up in PmWiki, a text back-end wiki. After 5 years I went back to simpler times, relying only on text files. However, writing HTML by hand becomes painful really quickly; instead I started writing in Markdown.

There are a few systems that can generate a blog from text files, but I wrote publon.py, a crummy-looking python script based around the markdown and pygments modules. By the way, a publon is the minimum publishable unit, a tongue-in-cheek definition that I first found in ‘A Ph.D. is not enough’ by Peter Feibelman. In early 2016 I plugged my Markdown pages with almost no changes into Hugo.

Starting in 2003, my site was complemented with a weblog (‘Quantum Forest’, run using TextPattern). TextPattern gave place to WordPress in 2008. In early 2010 I got really bored of the hassle of maintaining server software and started using Tumblr. I thought that the ephemeral nature of blog posts did not warrant fretting about putting the content in someone else’s servers. This idea was short-lived, and I went back to WordPress a year later once I discovered that I could not easily add equations.

In January 2023 I got sick of Hugo and put both site and blog under the same domain using WordPress. However, in November 2024 I decided to downsize my internet endeavours, moving down to a static site powered by Jekyll, because I could use all the markdown files and host them directly in Github. Unfortunately, I could never get used to the complexities of Jekyll and found it too clunky. Continuing with the downsizing spirit, I went back to Hugo but hosted in Gitlab at the end of June 2025.

Reading again this description I sound insane, but it has been a great learning exercise for this non-digital native human.