What is νnu?

It's a bunch of rambling thoughts about being a member of a minority that considers itself to be elite, but is considered by everyone else to be weird and possibly smelly (unix users) and how this group paradoxically overlaps with another minority that considers itself elite, but is often thought of as cool and possibly really nice-smelling (Apple users).

How do you pronounce νnu?

"nu-nu." (That's a ν, not a v.)

What does νnu mean?

It is an acronym for nu's not unix. It is a doubly-recursive acronym that is therefore not recursive at all.

Any relation to GNU, or XNU, or XINU?

No.  I mean, yes. The "nu" in "nu-nu" stands for the "nu" in *nu. Obviously.

So it's a unix in-joke?

A very old and not very funny one.

What flavours of unix do you write about?

Ones that I use, and get annoyed about, mostly. Today, that means mostly OS X and Linux, oocasionally one of the obscure BSDs. Some days I may wax nostalgic about Irix or Ultrix.

Ultrix? How long have you been a unix guy, anyway?

Since the 1980s.

What were you doing with unix way back then?

Running the computing operations of a subatomic physics research group. Porting stuff from VMS. Writing lots of FORTRAN code.

What do you do now?

Web stuff. The web was invented by physics guys, and now we have to clean up the mess we made.

How frequently are these questions really asked?

I try to ask them every day, myself.