About

Welcome to The VMUNIX Blues, a blog about software engineering, operating systems, the web, and technology. Mostly.

The vmunix blues started in 1993 as site where the documentation and notes I'd written for my BSD hacks were published. Chris Coleman and I even wrote a book (in SGML!) about FreeBSD and published it here. At some point in the 2000s I installed Wordpress and posted regularly until the whole blogging thing got kinda boring. Eventually the server that had been running the site for 20+ years (!) needed to be moved when the old datacenter it was in was being torn down. I decided that dealing with the server was annoying and told them to yank out the server and turn it into a coffee table. Just like that everything I'd ever published online, including my /home directory of 20 years was just gone. To my surprise, it felt pretty great.

Over the decade since I've written a handful of stories on Medium but left the vmunix blues in the dumpster. I'm as surprised as anyone, then, that here we are in 2023 and I've set up a nerdy statically generated blog to archive a few of the posts I could find, and am thinking of doing some writing again.

-Mark