Day 4

“Occasional reports on what in the world I’m doing. You can read here to find out what I’ve been working on and how it’s going. There might be clues about what I’m thinking. New things learned will also appear.”

I’m really not going to make all of these posts about blogging, I promise. However, I thought I should note this blog is now in it’s 12th year. I always miss the anniversary but it was this past month. The first post was on Mon 2002-09-16 00:29 -0400.

In the beginning the posts were nearly all work-related reports on what I was working on. Then I began to include other topics I found interesting such as astronomy and computing.

The first posts were written on Blogger, then still owned by Pyra Labs, co-founded by Ev Williams who later was a co-founder of Twitter. Google eventually bought Blogger. I wrote the posts on Blogger but used it’s ftp publishing feature to push the generated pages back to my desktop workstation, Monolith.

Monolith had an Apache web server running on it, upgraded from the original NCSA HTTP server software at some point. The computer had originally been a NeXTstation then later it’s soul had been migrated to a Sun SPARC 5 workstation. By this time, when the blog began in 2002, I think it might have been upgraded to a Sun Ultra 5 but I don’t recall the models and timeline precisely.

From Blogger, I migrated to Bloxom, then back to Blogger, fully hosted at Blogspot, then recently to Octopress. The pre-Octopress blog is still on-line.

Nine Years Ago
Ten Years of Blogging

Image credit: Thomas Kaiser CC BY-SA 3.0

Day 3.1

From Hacker News @newsycombinator

A Homebrew Cray-1A by chrisfenton.com!

Image credit: by Wolfgang Stief CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. (No this is not the home brew Cray from the article).

Day 3

I’m not going to make all of these posts about blogging but, while still on the subject, here’s a simple blogging tip. I use Gmail for spell checking.

The fact is that I do this just about any time I need good spell checking. Ironically, Google documents’ spell checking is lacking so I even use this approach for them. (At least that used to be the case).

First, open a new message in a Compose window but don’t add any recipients. After all, you don’t want to accidentally send your text to someone. Next, just past the text, say a whole document into the window and check. As you find misspelled words, go back and edit the original. When finished, just click the trash can icon in the compose window to discard the message.

For anyone who points out that Gmail spell checking isn’t perfect either, yeah, I know. It’s been the best I’ve found over the years, though.

Day 2

Well, I was supposed to report back in on how it’s been going with Octopress after using it a while. It’s now been 512 days, or one year and 147 days, or about 17 months which is about one year and five months.

It’s basically been going okay. The process isn’t bad. I put up posts now and then with varying frequency. Some are “full” posts with picture and permission, some are occasionally long, and some are short, ~tweet-length updates.

I like Octopress a lot. The best part is writing in Markdown which means my source files are all plain text and I have a copy of all of them, so the blog is already in my possession and easily read without any software or publishing.

The Octopress scripts are easy to use. Right now I run a new_post command to create a file, edit the file with Emacs, then re-generate the blog and finally push the changes up to Github which is where I publish it.

Adding an image is hardly more difficult than it was with Blogger. I have to download the image and get it into the machine I’m writing on. Then it’s just copying the image to a source directory in the blog tree and adding one line to the Markdown file.

Yesterday, on Saturday I wrote the beginning of a Python script to automate running those commands. So far it handles it all up to running Emacs on the created file. Next will come updating the git repo locally then pushing up the changes.

The biggest down side at the moment is that the archives are organized in the single page view by date and year, but they aren’t physically organized in the real file tree. Also there’s no way to segment the blog into archive pieces. Generate, I think, rebuilds the whole site basically and, as the site grows, it’s taking a while to do a generate now. Okay, it takes 25 seconds but it seems like a long while.

As the archive grows to be years long, I believe it will become a big unweildy. It would be better if there was a way to segment off pieces of the archive, e.g., each year, so you don’t end up regenerating it all every time.

I’m actually pretty sure there is a way to do this, I’ll just have to dig it up when there’s time.

See Leaping to a New Blogging Platform

Day 1

I heard it mentioned by Gina Trapani on This Week in Google on Twit.tv. There’s a challenge going around to blog for 30 days straight but not on weekends. She credited it to Om Malik. He credited the idea to Matt Mullenweg and he credited it to a challenge from Colin Devroe, ironically on Twitter.

I’ve blogged off and on for over 12 years now and I’ve really slacked off lately so the thought of posting more has already been on my mind. I’m already not following the challenge because, well, it’s the weekend. But I’ll see what I can do for 30 days.

Just minutes ago, I sat down and almost instantly brainstormed about 20 topics that were already on my mind. If there’s nothing new on my mind for a particular day I’ll have those to fall back on.

The next thing I’ll do, I think, is write a script.

This Week in Google #270
Om Malik – 30 Days of Blogging
Matt Mullenweg – Streak
Colin Devroe on Twitter

The Huffington Post actually published an article on how to diagram sentences. Yes, we did learn this in school and it was a lot of fun.

This Old Grammar Trick Still Works! How To Diagram A Sentence

History of the Internet at InetDaemon.com is a brief and nice account of how the Internet began.

Image credit: CC BY-SA 3.0 Merit Network, Inc.

Happy autumnal equinox at 22:29 EDT on Mon 2014-09-22!

Mon 2014-09-22 22:29:00 -0400
Tue 2014-09-23 02:29:00 +0000

Tomorrow morning Mon 2014-08-18, the two brightest planets, Jupiter and Venus, will be about 1/3 of a degree apart. That’s 20 arc minutes. This is extremely “close” on the sky for two planets and will be a spectacular sight to see.

Not only will they be close together but they will also be near M44 the Beehive Cluster open cluster of stars.

Sky and Telescope Article: Close Venus-Jupiter Conjunction on August 18th by Bob King from August 13, 2014.

Image: Jupiter and Venus from Atlanta at Mon 2014-08-18 05:54:00 -0400 (5:54 EDT). The planets are below Castor and Pollux in Gemini. Image from Stellarium.

I received an email from Google, well it says from Orkut, last night with the subject line “A Farewell to Orkut.”

After ten years of sparking conversations and forging connections, we have decided it’s time for us to start saying goodbye to Orkut. Over the past decade, YouTube, Blogger and Google+ have taken off, with communities springing up in every corner of the world. Because the growth of these communities has outpaced Orkut’s growth, we’ve decided to focus our energy and resources on making these other social platforms as amazing as possible for everyone who uses them.

The anecdotal evidence I’ve heard from friends with connections in Brazil is that most Orkut users have abandoned it for the dreaded Facebook. Somehow I don’t expect they’ve all moved over to Blogger and Google plus.

In my case, I never used Orkut other than to set up an account and log on a couple of times.