I’ve had a nice quiet weekend, the first such weekend in quite a while. It’s nice to be able to relax, work on projects without deadlines, and avoid all of the editing that I ought to be doing.
Some notable accomplishments, current projects, and other events in the last few weeks:
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If you ever visit tychoish.com in your web browser (as opposed to by way of its aggregation,) you’ll note that the design has changed somewhat.
This is the design that I’ve been using for my personal wiki for months, and so I’m quite used to it, but feedback is welcome.
The design change has inspired a bit of introspection, hence this post, and perhaps some of the posts that will follow. Please bear with me.
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Months ago a friend of mine said “some of us might like to know how you’re doing every now and then, and your blog is just stuff about obscure technology.”
Guilty as charged. Recently, I’ve been much more interested in using this blog as a scratch space for projects that I don’t have quite enough time to pursue in appropriate depth.
Having said that, I think (or hoped,) that I’ve calmed down a bit in recent months and years: My career/professional identity seems a bit more stable. I’m doing a better job at focusing big projects, which means some shorter posts and more personal posts may be in order.
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I got a new computer last week. I’m working on a post that addresses this in a bit more depth. In short it’s great. So my largely unnecessary justification is:
- A smaller machine, which is better on my back when I am walking around.
- Beefier system, which means I can compile things quicker (and I’ve been doing more of this recently.)
- The ability to dedicate the older system to some stay at home things: having a working desk at home, playing music, running some buildbot stuff, and the like.
I’ve realized that even though there are little things that I might like to change about how my computer works, and things that I’d like to setup and get working for the most part, things just work. And that’s really great.
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There’s a host of stuff that I’m working on that probably isn’t apparent to the internet:
- My day job. I’m doing awesome documentation things for a neat New York City database software company/open source project that you’ve probably heard of (if you’re into this kind of thing.) It’s rewarding, interesting, and it means I can spend all most of my time day making things.
- I’ve been working on submitting documentation patches to a couple of open source projects: buildbot and MediaGoblin. I need to do more of this work.
- The editing pile. Currently on tap: a mess of blog posts, the prologue of my most recently drafted novel, and some of the last little pieces of the Cyborg Institute launch. Speaking of which that should happen in the next week or so.
Next up? More of the novel and suggestions from frist readers of the systems administration book (see next item.)
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Never to be deterred, I’m hard at work on the outline for another novel. The plan is to have something I can start drafting in earnest by the end of the summer. I feel pretty good about the project, although as I was working on an outline last night, I changed the last third of the book. Oops.
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The systems administration book. Available via git today, With general release following shortly. All feedback as well as pull or merge requests with comments and suggestions are all welcome. See the following for git repositories
(Both are identical.)
The cyborg institute listserv would be a good place for bug/issue tracking at least for now.
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On the topic of editing, I’ve recently discovered the one clause per-line formatting style.
I’ve long attempted to keep lines short to promote cleaner diffs, but in truth, if you end up reflowing paragraphs, the resulting diffs are basically useless. I’ve encountered one-sentence-per-line tactics, which seems like a good idea, except that sentences often exceed 80 characters.
I’m not yet decided on the subject, especially for writing longer sections of text, but it does make editing easier.
Onward and Upward!