Blog

Wow! I think it has been nearly two years since I last updated this blog. I have decided to change the blog a bit and port it over to hugo which is a static site generator written in Go. It is very fast compared to nanoc which I was using. I do not know if I quite agree that this is just as customizable as nanoc but it is clearly faster. I was not taking too much advantage of the previous Foundation based flexibility of the nanoc site and I believe it may had become a burden. Also, bitrot was beginning to seriously set in. Luckily, it is a static site but it does make some tears shed when you have to pin some really old gems and use a really old version of Ruby to build and deploy the site. Unless the kernel syscalls change dramatically, I will probably be able to compile with this version of hugo indefinitely.

Anyway, the nanoc versions troubles me no more. I am using a hugo version of the site now. As an improvement, I have also setup automatic deployment of my master branch to Google’s storage and configured CloudFlare to provide TLS and all the goodies that come with that. I guess I could also start using something like prose.io to write my posts as well. I doubt I will go that far! But, it is very nice to know that is possible.

I am now just using a theme called hyde-y which is off-the-shelf. Of course, I did customize it a little bit. hugo’s overriding system is plain and simple to use.

• Why would anyone want summaries on the front page? Just give the complete content.
• The titles of the posts on the front page should have the same information.

I addressed all that, and while it was a bit of a hunt, it was fairly clear what needed to be done.

I do not think I will go the full mile with customizing hugo like I did with nanoc. The complexity was hurting more than it helped. I guess I have switched over to being more minimalist since I concieved the original site. Foundation is great if you need the kitchen sink and everything but it is really overkill. It was also another maintenance burden with its rather relentless upgrade schedule. I am taking it slow from here on out.

I’m ashamed to say I’ve neglected this domain and site for 9 years. In that time I’ve gone through high school and university in that time. In each period, I’ve attempted putting up blogs, forums, another blog, and other similar nonsense. I did not follow through with whatever resolutions I may have made to keep the site maintained or write down the latest results from my last screwing around with my projects. Basically, for the past 9 years, I don’t really have much to show for it other than being able to rattle off some helpful anecdote from experiences I have never written down here and there.

Remember kids, the only difference between screwing around and Science is writing it down.

– Adam Savage, Video

I thought I was conducting Science for the past few years; in reality, I’ve only been really screwing around.

Most of my experiments in the past few years have also ended in spectacular failures. I never wrote about my failures even during the times I had a blog available. This is where my fails turned into an epic fail. I recently watched a TED talk on this and learned that this phenomenon is called research bias. I should not have withheld what I had learned from failing. My memory of my failures only fade away until someone mentioned it and I rattle off some anecdote. This obviously won’t scale and does not do much to help me demonstrate any skills when I can’t even get my foot in the door.