2024-March Musings
Blood, sweat, and excuses.
Hello Subscribers:
Lots to tell you this month.
Update!
I’m neck deep into writing the cryptography screenplay I mentioned in the last newsletter. It’s coming along well. Hopefully I can finish it by the next newsletter. A lot will depend on the next item.
I’ve just finished moving my site to a new host. While the move went relatively smoothly, it’s been a long time since I did any serious system admin work, and so I’m worried about what I’ve missed. I expect the next few weeks will involve putting out a bunch of fires (hopefully not literally), as I find problems.
Ultimately, I’d like to move my website away from Wordpress, and towards something written in Python, but that’s a medium to long term project. It’s likely I will need to write a bunch of code. There are solutions, but nothing straight out of the box. I’ll probably have to write something that connects to activitypub. I haven’t found a good solution there yet.
Speaking of AP, my blog is now syndicated on the Fediverse. In fact, one of the motivators for me leaving my former host was that they blocked syndication. That and the rising costs, worsening service, and constant up-selling. You can follow my blog at @skribe@skribeworks.com.
In other news, I now have a Codeberg account, which I’ll be using for my future code. I’m not planning to abandon Github just yet, but after finding some of my code listed in The Stack it has me concerned. At least it wasn’t any of my private repositories, which other users have claimed were included.
On the coding front, I’ve been spending my spare time working on a couple of tools to help with my writing.
One involves converting several small pieces of php code into python and consolidating them into web-based framework. As a result I’ve been examining various frameworks (Flask, Django, React, FastAPI, amongst others).
I’m using this as a learning platform to help me springboard into the other (much larger) project, which deals with various constructed languages.
Hopefully more to share in the next month or two.
News
Sadly, Vernor Vinge died. I wasn’t a huge fan, but I enjoyed all the books of his that I read. Apparently, he had been suffering from Parkinson’s Disease for some time.
Well, Reddit finally did their IPO and, for some reason that escapes me, the price rose about $20/share from the initial offering. It’s still hanging around there now (2024-03-28). However, I did see one analyst issuing warnings to their clients that they expected the stock to fall by as much as 50% after the initial rally.
Personally, I think the analyst is overly optimistic. I expect it will fall much lower within the next year. I also expect there will be more outrage from the user base. Let’s wait and see.
Other stuff
I planned to deliver a small(ish) rant about how bad the Three Body Problem novel is, and how the Netflix series is actually quite good. The TV writers have introduced something called ch...char...characters (I think I have that right), and it’s improved the story massively. Who knew?
I also planned on writing a huge rant on how flabbergasted I am that American Fiction won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. However, it's going to take too much time to do all the research, and I’ve really run out of time. It may end up as blog post.
That’s it! Until next month...
skribe
More inanity available at https://skribeworks.com