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This page was updated on 2012-01-28 (NZST) and is tagged meta.
This site is published by Luis A. Apiolaza (about Luis) in Christchurch, New Zealand. These pages reflect only personal views and have no relationship with anybody else’s, including my employer, family members and cat. I am open to receive constructive comments and suggestions, which you can email me to Luis.Apiolaza@canterbury.ac.nz.
Most pages—including text and graphics—are my copyright (1997–2012) and some rights are reserved. Nevertheless, in some cases (most publications, for example) I have transferred the copyright to the publishers, which have their own copyright policies, as indicated where appropriate (it sucks, I know). Incidentally, this is probably the appropriate place to mention that I support the work of the Electronic Frontier Foundation defending our rights in the digital world.
This site is generated from Markdown text files using publon.py, a crummy looking python script I wrote. 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.
After five years of using a wiki (PmWiki) to run this site I decided to come back to simpler times, relying on only text files. However, writing HTML by hand gets painful really quickly, so the choice of Markdown. There are a few systems that can generate a blog from text files, but this time I rolled my—granted—very simple system, because it gives me more room to tinker.
The publon.py script has very few functions:
I manage all strings as unicode, because I can then process things like em dashes and Zúñiga (part of my full name). In a near future, or never, depending on my mood, the script will also update an RSS feed and automatically rsync the files with the server.
This site is developed using a Macbook Pro/iMac, TextMate/MacVim, Transmit and a (very) mean cappuccino. And no, Starbucks does not remotely qualify in the latter front.
This site was initially (1997) designed using Notepad; remember that cute little Windows program? Later I moved to Arachnophilia, an excellent HTML editor (under a Careware license) programed by Paul Lutus. In 2005 all pages were moved to PmWiki. Since 2010 they are simple text files (see under tools).
The site was complemented with a weblog (Quantum Forest, different from the current data analysis blog), 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 Conuco using Tumblr. I came to the conclusion 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 once I discovered that I could not add equations and other things I needed to communicate.
These pages are ‘best viewed’ with a computer. Thus, any browser that supports web standards and style sheets, which cover most modern versions of browsers (including Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, etc.) should do the job. Without this condition, you still can have a look at these pages, but with a slightly different formatting. Do not complain, just get a decent browser.