My list of blog entries to make is long and tedious, but they should be covered by the following major categories:
- Sysadmin-y things
- [Web] Programming (C, some C++, PHP, Lisp, Ruby, whatever else seems interesting)
- Games and emulation (programming and playing)
- Rants (various subjects)
I'll try to post around once a week, and a lot of the posts are going to be the kind of thing that I couldn't find online anywhere and wanted to have recorded so that others could find the information and save themselves some terrible pain or other.
In the sysadmin category, I'm playing around with automation tools so that I can cope with managing more machines than in the past. The most notable tool I've been using is Puppet. This has been a life-saver on multiple occasions, and saved me a great deal of time. I'll post about this in the near future with some (hopefully) convincing and simple examples.
Programming-wise, I have a few projects which are in various states of not being done, from "just thought this would be cool" to "started and got bored/distracted/ran out of time":
- This blog : writing a disaster of a blog app in Lisp (using SBCL and Hunchentoot. Isn't Hunchentoot an awesome name? :), and learning some CSS to hopefully make it not look so terrible. This will probably take forever and never work quite how I'd like, but it should be simple (despite already using 150Mb of memory... What the hell does Hunchentoot do with it all? A topic for a future post, I think :)
- Writing a ``simple'' emulator for the Pac-Man arcade machine. I've always been interested in old games, emulation and that. I've also worked on compilers and development tools for a few years, so I think I can get my head around it all enough to write a moderately-decent emulator. I intend this to become a project which I use to learn about emulation and, later, dynamic recompilation. Will probably also become a Spectrum emulator if I get it all working.
- Sysadmin tools. I keep thinking about writing a simple monitoring app with an agent on hosts (somewhat like Nagios), and JamesOff has written a simple monitor which got me pondering this again. Should be pretty straightforward and I'll do it when I get some time and get sufficiently annoyed with some of the things that Nagios does/doesn't do.
Games and some rants will also crop up from time to time. Probably more rants than anything...
Oh, and you can shout at me here if you want :)
So I thought it was about time that I started writing more in a blog. To go with this resolution, I thought it was also about time that I write a simple blogging app, mostly to get my head around writing gumph in Lisp. It will be a remarkably simple site to start with, and it might end up looking prettier as I put a bit more effort into it, but I doubt it :)
It will get images, better CSS and that "Real Soon".
RSS can be found here.
