Arise Bushel, my sixth generation oxidised website / Jan 2025
This website has been through quite a few iterations over the years. The first version in 1998 was written in Perl and hosted on OpenBSD; the second was rewritten in 2000 when I got commit access to PHP; the third rewrite became a hybrid OCaml/PHP/Perl special in 2004 in Blosxom; then the forth rewrite around 2013 got turned into a unikernel in MirageOS; then the fifth in 2019 then transitioned to an OCaml static site generator hosted on a prerelease multicore OCaml webserver. So the sixth generation now needs something to continue the grand Rube Goldberg tradition of helping me learn the latest and greatest in systems technology.
And so here it is! The site is now written in a bleeding-edge unreleased variant of OCaml with extensions based around Rust-like type system features activated, including rather exciting data-race freedom work that just won a best paper award at POPL 2025. It's normally difficult to work on continuously moving compilers, but Diana Kalinichenko did a tremendous amount of work into making it usable with opam out of the box, and this post documents the journey to getting this website live. […848 words]
notesRolling out a new site design (via Recoil) / Apr 2024
I've done a redesign of my site after about 20 years since the last one back in 2003. The site design is based on my upcoming Bushel content manager, which I'll post about more once I get the data model in place and try it out properly using this site as a guinea pig.
Nick Ludlam also refreshed his website since we were chatting about how outdated our web presences were, and he also put up a main recoil.org page for the main server.
Decentralised tech on Recoil / Sep 2021
Nick Ludlam and I have self-hosted recoil.org since around 1996, typically for email and web. These days, there are a number of interesting software stacks around decentralised communication that we deploy. This note keeps track of them. […458 words]
Moving to anil.recoil.org (via) / May 2003
I've taken the opportunity to redesign my homepage and switch to its hopefully-permanent
URL on anil.recoil.org. Many thanks to Jon Parise for giving me permission to base my
HTML upon his homepage's, saving me lots of design trouble!
Chora now the production CVS viewer for PHP (via Horde) / Aug 2001
I spent a chunk of time through the year working on the Horde project. I began when I got commit to IMP webmail to fix some bugs in the MIME rendering for our Recoil deployment. You can see my code commits on the horde-cvs mailing list archive.
After getting to grips with the PHP code, I then went on to totally rewrite the Chora version control viewer so that the CVS repositories for Horde could be browsed online instead of only via the command line.
I'm extremely proud to report that the PHP project has now deployed Chora for production use to serve up cvs.php.net, making it our biggest user by far. Thanks for making my day, Rasmus!
I switched Chora over to be the default web cvs system behind cvs.php.net now. The old viewcvs site is still available at viewcvs.php.net (dns may not have updated yet) -- Rasmus Lerdorf, php.net
I'm now an OpenBSD developer / Dec 2000
I've been using OpenBSD for a few years now as the primary OS for recoil
and have been contributing fixes and ports when I get a chance. So I'm
incredibly excited to report that the project leader, Theo de Raadt, has
invited me to become an OpenBSD developer. I've registered my keys now, and
will be known as avsm@openbsd.org! […196 words]