[Toybox] Blog?

[Rob Landley]

On 1/14/21 2:09 AM, scsijon wrote:
> I can't seem to find any entries for 2021.
> Last listed from what i can see is https://landley.net/notes.html#31-12-2020.

Of course somebody tried to load it during the ~20 second gap between "rm
notes.html" and "ln -s notes-2021.html notes.html". I break everything. :)

To get the december 31 2020 entry, try:

  https://landley.net/notes-2020.html#31-12-2020

I finally got around to uploading some 2021 entries last night, which meant
replacing the notes.html symlink to point to the 2021 file, and (unlike previous
years) didn't copy the last month into the end of the new file so the rss feed
could find a full 30 entries.

The name notes.html is just a symlink to the current year, the _stable_ anchors
use the full filename. (Yeah, I should do something better about that, it's been
on the todo list forever. Yes the link #anchor has the year in it but the file
also has the year in it and they have to match or it can't find the entry.
Wasn't exactly designed, it just sort of happened. I've been keeping a blog in
this format on and off since 1997, inspired by Alan Cox's old blog.)

> Or has rob shut it down as I can't expect that he would have forgotten about it.

Keeping it up to date was a patreon goal. (For a definition of up to date that
still has a bit of publication delay.) Externally imposed deadlines are
motivating, even when I'm just imagining the puppy eyes.

Since then https://patreon.com/landley has changed its UI and I'm not entirely
sure how to see goals that have already been met... ah, there's a small link.
(Ok, I lowered the goal so it would be met, but still. If it hits the "podcast"
level, yes I intend to find time to podcast. Probably recording my desktop with
a voice over to show programming stuff. To start I need to do a code walkthrough
series on every command; how to use it and how it's designed/implemented both.
Plus a series on lib/ and scripts/)

> I do love the blog, both for toybox stuff and the irreverant other stuff, it
> really clears my head after dealing with some 'people' (idiots).

I'm glad you like it. I used to write a lot more, but without externally imposed
deadlines... Yesterday I sent one of my co-workers links to an old series I
wrote about microprocessor design (with the caveat that it's 21 years old and
was originally for a non-technical audience):

https://landley.net/writing/mirror/fool/todo/rulemaker000222.htm
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.fool.com/amp/archive/portfolios/rulemaker/2000/02/23/inside-intel-again-cold-hard-cache.aspx
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.fool.com/amp/archive/portfolios/rulemaker/2000/02/24/inside-intel-again-riscing-the-pentium.aspx
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.fool.com/amp/archive/portfolios/rulemaker/2000/02/25/inside-intel-again-merced-vs-crusoe.aspx
https://www.fool.com/archive/portfolios/rulemaker/2000/09/01/hammering-away-at-intels-itanium.aspx

And yes that was a follow up to the "what Intel does for a living"
microprocessor fabrication series at:

https://landley.net/writing/#intel

And he was wondering why I don't write more these days, and... I do? I literally
have slack conversations that can be trivially cleaned up into research articles:

  https://landley.net/notes-2020.html#02-12-2020

I just don't have writing for an audience as part of my job anymore. And I _do_
sometimes do a longer edited/researched piece, just...

  https://landley.net/notes-2020.html#19-11-2020

Not on particularly fun topics recently. I still do technical writeups too:

  https://landley.net/notes-2020.html#27-10-2020

Not quite an article but could easily be turned into an article in half an hour
or so. But the topics are "whatever I happen to be working on"?

Then again the motley fool articles were too. I would sometimes make a game out
of writing on some random topic I felt about, and then tying it back into
investing at the last minute with a light editing pass. The most ridiculous was
probably:

https://www.fool.com/archive/portfolios/rulemaker/2000/04/06/investment-lessons-from-hollywood.aspx

Unfortunately these days I regularly want to grab somebody and shake them and go
"evil people are doing evil things and it's a PROBLEM", and I used to vent that
into twitter and now I vent it into my blog. (On odd numbered days, anyway. I
try to keep it out of even numbered days.) Doubt it's much fun to read, sorry
'bout that. I have "<span id=programming>" and "<span id=politics>" tags in the
file (and occasional span=energy and such) and I keep meaning to update
mkrobfeed.py to make multiple rss feeds, but... my todo list runneth over. :)

(No, I don't know why https://landley.net/mkrobfeed.py throws an internal server
error instead of showing the file. Dreamhost! I have an ssh login to my server
but not sudo, and "ls /var/log/apache2" says permission denied because dreamhost.)

Rob

P.S. The above email explains why I blog, doesn't it? I type fast and it's
venting. The hard (time consuming) part is editing the result to seem intentional.