Brian C. Wells' Homepage – bcwells.net
Hi. I am Brian C. Wells, and this is my personal website. I intend to publish software and articles about whatever interests me: mostly computer science, mathematics, and economics/politics.
Since January of 2016, I have been an Associate Member of the Free Software Foundation, which simply means I donate $10/month to help them develop all their great software (and advocate for software freedom!). Until recently, I used a 100% free software Operating System (OS): Trisquel GNU/Linux. However Trisquel has not been updated for a long time (according to the website, which I have no reason to doubt, the last major version was released in November 2014). Therefore I have switched back to Debian GNU/Linux, which I used before learning about Trisquel.
I still think the Libreboot FAQ is well worth a read, and do own an older computer which runs Libreboot, but I have to concede that I don't use it often, and I more regularly use a modern computer from ThinkPenguin. Hopefully we can eventually have a computer that both respects our freedom and is modern/stylish, but I am not going to suggest that people abandon modern PCs any more. My cell phone still runs Replicant, another fully free OS based on Android.
News
June 13, 2017: Migrating to a VPS
I got tired of not being able to run a server as I see fit, so I am migrating my website from shared hosting to virtual private server (VPS) provider Linode. I have taken the opportunity to update some of this page to reflect changes made recently, but otherwise I am not changing anything on the site yet. It will still be a static site for a while, though I may eventually replace it with something else.
Software
org-tex-define
A simple literate program that uses an (apparently) undocumented feature of Org mode to make all varieties of (La)TeX definitions work in both HTML and PDF output.
Articles
rotation
A purely algebraic derivation of the 2-D rotation matrix. First article that uses org-tex-define.
Contact
You can send email to my first name (Brian) at this domain.
Colophon
This site was made using the Org mode of GNU Emacs, together with an Emacs Lisp file which sets up the corresponding Org mode projects and a Makefile which is used by GNU Make to run the publishing functions. Rather than publishing directly to the server, however, I prefer to first "publish" locally so I can review the output. The Makefile and zip utility also generate a compressed file with all the output. Once I am satisfied, I upload site.zip manually and decompress it. (I also leave it there, so if you want a copy of the final product only, that is one option for you.) Another advantage of this somewhat convoluted process is that I do not need an SSH account on the web server (for my webhost, getting that requires to jump through some hoops I can't be bothered to do yet).
If you want the Org mode source for a single webpage, I also include
that in my publishing configuration. So just replace the .html with
.org in any of the URLs (index.org for URLs that end in a slash).
If you would like a copy of the whole source code, including the
Emacs Lisp configuration and Makefile I mentioned above, then you can
find it in this GitHub repository. I hereby license it under GNU
AGPLv3+, so you can copy and modify it in any way and for any reason,
as long as you (1) give credit (acknowledgement for work) where due
and (2) let others do all the same things you can do.