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. The photo was featured in the July 1994 issue of Popular Communications magazine. Somehow, I still got lots of hot chicks. 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.
Login: chipster Name: Chip (W0CHP)
Directory: /home/chipster Shell: /usr/local/bin/bash
Logged on since: Thu Apr 18 03:21 (CDT), on pts/1, (idle 16h:06m:05s) from tmux.%0
Logged on since: Thu Apr 18 03:21 (CDT), on pts/2, (idle 3h:31m:23s) from tmux.%1
Logged on since: Thu Apr 18 03:21 (CDT), on pts/3, (idle 3h:31m:19s) from tmux.%2
Logged on since: Thu Apr 18 03:21 (CDT), on pts/4, (idle 14h:23m:08s) from tmux.%3
Last Login: Tue Apr 23 04:11 (CDT), on pts/0, from [redacted]
Project:
* Continually working on, and improving <https://wpsd.radio>
and <https://m17project.org> -- I am/we are always looking for help!
Plan:
* Working on the things in my .project ;-)
finger(1)
output from one of my [many] servers; with internal network information
redacted.