The author¶

Hi, my name is Dan, and I am attempting a doctoral thesis in agent-based simulation at CRiCS under primary supervisor Terry Bossomaier and guy-i-met-once-he-seemed-nice Rod Duncan.

You might be interested in my links on Delicious and Pinboard, or my (retired) citation database on CiteULike, or my exhibitionism Twitter and LinkedIn.

The design¶

The text on this site is mostly a collection of text files on my hard drive, written in ReStructuredText/Sphinx. These files live in a mercurial repository on my laptop hard-drive or wherever else I want them, and are synchronised with another repository at my webhost, whence you see them. Mercurial handles versioning nicely if I edit various different copies of the files and later want to merge them. If you want to see all the magic that makes it go, the code is freely available under a BSD license from bitbucket. If you want to fix sundry minor bugs, even better.

This is a good setup for a grad student. This doesn’t stop me from writing when I’m offline; I spend a lot of my time in parts of the world without wireless cafes. Additionally, this thingy supports TeX equations, constantly updated entries, citation indices (some hacking was required to make that go) and generation of fully-formatted print versions of articles for journals. If none of that means anything to you, consider yourself blessed, and enjoy the words here in bright innocence of the dark shadow cast by academic publishing workflows.

Many stylistic ideas about how this site is used and presented are cribbed from the notebooks of Cosma Shalizi, which I find a pleasant format to read. The content, with all its defects, is my own, except where otherwise stated.