The more I use the Kubernetes, the more I feel like this thing is shaping up as the next OpenStack (I don’t mean that in a good way). Too many players setting direction, and tooling that leaves a lot to be desired.

Still got the flu, mixed with morning internet connectivity problems. At least everything important for me is generally decentralized, so wasn’t too much of an issue.

Still sick, bleh. At least my head is on enough today to get a bunch of writing and bug fixes done.

Did a bit of thinking about why the lucky stiff’s Closure and my concerns for the longevity of the programs and documents I’ve been writing over the past few years. I can absolutely see how he got fed up with the chaos of trying to keep bitrot at bay.

My early Python programs have aged terribly, and these days I find every dependency I add to a project is another ingress point for program decay. This isn’t a language-specific problem (although some handle it better than others, eg Go interfaces), it’s a project problem. Anyhow, I don’t quite recall where I was going with all this (I blame the Nyquil ;-)

Still sick, so besides some minor fixes to some of my projects, this day was a bust. Really bummed, since I had planned on getting a lot done over the break. But if the body needs rest, there’s not much that can be done.

Cool Links

Von Neumann’s First Computer Program (by Donald Knuth)

I’ve been riding the Nyquil wave with some sort of flu, which has kind of put a crimp in getting in anything done. Guess I won’t be able to take the LPI exam until I can stay awake for longer than an hour.

Finally got around to playing with Flexbox Froggy and CSS Garden, a fun way to learn about CSS Flexbox and Gridbox. CSS has come a huge way since it was first introduced, and since I seem to use it once every 3-4 years each time I’m amazed at the jump in functionality.

Been a good day for laptop upkeep, now that my brain’s been hit a bit sideways by the LPI stuff yesterday. I purchased the LPI course voucher (I think). The purchase could be way simpler, needed to create 3 different accounts (2 with LPI, 1 with Pearson), and I’m still not really sure after shelling out the cash if I’m ready to take the test now. It really shouldn’t be so hard, and that LPI requires 2 different accounts tells me their backend is probably a shitshow.

Did a final sprint getting my LPI cert coursework done. Of course, spending 8 hours straight going through it has kind of turned my brain to mush. Just need to book the exam and call this a day (at least until re-certification rolls around).

Cool links

The Shape of PSIBER Space: PostScript Interactive Bug Eradication Routines

De-facto Closed Source

Is 2019 the year I finally grok Lisp? Man, I hope so. I feel like a lot of it is getting the built-in functions in my head, so it might make sense to do a function-a-day kind of thing. I’m reading Paul Graham’s ANSI Common Lisp, which has been good so far, but I’m thinking if I get stranded I might jump in on Peter Siebel’s Practical Common Lisp. I’ve found that I need some footing in “real” applications to appreciate the more nuanced stuff.

Good to finally have some vacation time to wind down and get some project time. Of course, the first few days I’m usually just going through checklists of work that’s been delayed until I’ve got some free time. At least I’ve managed to sneak in a few bike rides while the weather is nice.

Still cleaning up daveops.net from the move to Markdown yesterday. There’s a lot of stale markup moving from engine to engine, and for the time it takes to clean it up adequately. Pandoc butchers a lot of code markup, so I really do think this will be the last one knock on wood. If not, the next iteration will be pulling the pages out piecemeal from the old site as I need it, so that I can clean them up as I go. A lot of code snippets have a shelf life for their usefulness, so something like that would be a nice mechanism to keep them in-shape and useful.

Brought my Commodore 64 into work again this year. There’s something satisfying watching someone fresh out of university trying to figure out BASIC from experimentation and trying to do a simple fizzbuzz.

I’m migrating daveops.net to a hybrid GitHub Pages/Hugo site. For the most up-to-date files, head.daveops.net will use GitHub Pages to generate the latest stuff, and the apex will present a nicer looking version of it that’s deployed when I remember (or bother to setup a git hook). It’s a bunch of work for loose notes on ephemeral technology, but it keeps me off the streets.

Another morning where I sip my coffee and realize there’s more problems in the world than I have time to fix. CO2 emissions, browser monopoly, political and economic injustice - every once in a while I stare into space and wonder if there’s a single action I could do that would solve those problems with a decisive ’thud.’ But alas, nothing comes to mind, so I’ll just keep chipping away with my little projects.

Sorting out HSTS preloading on my websites today. I’d started the work a while back, but got distracted midway and didn’t finish. I’m a little surprised there’s not more verification in the process that the site is ready for preloading, such as a TXT record at the domain level. I imagine they want most folks’ TLS journey to be one-way.

A little sore from the first Calgary Roughnecks game of the season, so taking it easy and sharpening up my to-do lists today. Making a good list is half the battle of getting any big project done, and anyone who’s seen my lists knows they’re large, ambitious, and slightly terrifying.

Cool links

NES v3

The Hewlett Packard Archive

Spectre and the end of langsec