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.
Copyright
Most pages—including text and graphics—are my copyright (1997–2024) 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. If you want to link to a post you’ll have to do it the old-fashion way, copy-pasting the link.
- 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, Jekyll.
At the dawn of time—well, 1997—I wrote this site directly in HTML using Windows Notepad. Around 1999 I moved to Arachnophilia. 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, so the choice of Markdown.
There are a few systems that can generate a blog from text files, but I initially 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.
The site was complemented with a weblog (Quantum Forest, although with a different emphasis from the current one, run using TextPattern) starting in 2003. 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 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.