Modus Operandi -- The Obligatory "About" Page
Everyone’s got an “about” page. This one is mine…
I’m Chip; W0CHP. Born and raised in the NJ/NYC area, and later migrated to
Minnesota. I received my first ham ticket in the mid-1980’s, but it eventually
lapsed due to life/work/family, etc. I got a new ham ticket in the early
2000’s.
I write a lot of code; much of which is ham radio-related. In fact, I spend more time coding for ham radio, than I do talking on ham radio. 🤷♂️ I am best known as the founder and principal developer of the WPSD project, and for my involvement in the M17 Project.
Pictured: Nerdy-ass, late-teenybopper me, in my old ham shack, circa 1993. Somehow, I still got lots of hot chicks. The photo was featured in the July 1994 issue of Popular Communications magazine. On the desk, is my old Tandy 3800HD laptop, running SLS Linux (and later Slackware Linux…fortunately).
Website Technical Colophon
Only F/OSS is used to create, edit and (self-)host this website. No proprietary nor patent-encumbered garbage is used to create, manage and present/serve this website.
The actual web site (and all my other sites/apps) is/are hosted on a cluster of FreeBSD servers in my home using the venerable FreeBSD Jails; with the jails being deployed and managed with Bastille.
However, you’re not hitting the actual servers…you’re actually viewing this site from a another pair of load-balanced and Jailed FreeBSD proxy servers in my network’s DMZ, running the Apache HTTP Server.
The site is served over a commercial 1Gbit/s synchronous fiber optic connection,
with another 100 Mbit/s backup and/or H/A commercial connection. Additionally, the
two firewalls are also redundant thanks to the wonderful
CARP. Both the
primary and secondary connections are graced with /28 and /29 blocks of static
public IP addresses (respectively).
The website is written by hand, using the venerable and awesome Vim editor; site and structure generated with Hugo; deployed with OpenSSH, git, rsync, as well as sundry Bash and GNU Make wrapper scripts.
Presentation-wise, I’m using my own custom-made design (and by no means am I a web designer) The rendered HTML should be clean, error-free and semantically-correct. The site should respond well with, and adjust to, myriad mobile devices. Lastly, the site will render quite well in most modern browsers, and will degrade perfectly in text/console-based browsers and screen readers.
The overall website color scheme (yes my site defaults to a dark color style, although you can toggle that in upper-left); is dual-influenced… 1) the colors of my terminals where I write code, and 2) one of my favorite (now-defunct) technology satire websites from the late 1990’s/early 2000’s - segfault.org.
I value my privacy, as well as yours. Ergo, this site is served over an encrypted SSL connection. I use the wonderful Let’s Encrypt to issue and sign my SSL certificates - automatically, by way of the equally-wonderful mod_md. No cookies are used on this website.