Every once in a while I need to make sure I can still post to this blog. What prompted this post attempt was the desire to get “verified” on Mastodon. This turns out to be just adding a link to the page you have in your Mastodon profile, but since that page was this blog, and not simply https://blacka.com (which is a very plain ancient style website), I had to figure out how to do that.

I have a common fear: that I’ve left my garage door open without realizing it. This is partly because I’ve absolutely done this, although only when I’m at home. Based on my fear, I’ve successfully trained myself to check the state of the garage door as I leave. However, even with this training, I still harbor this nagging fear. The pandemic and the subsequent work-from-home stance made this general fear less of an issue, at least in the sense that I wasn’t leaving the garage door open while I wasn’t at home, because I was always at home.

If anyone still had my long dormant blog in their RSS reader, they might have noticed my first post in five years (and my first post with actual content in even longer than that.) Looking at my posts, it is clear that I started this blog using wordpress in 2004. In 2011, I decided that a local wordpress installation was too insecure, and switched to octopress. In 2015, I figured out how to post with octopress again.

I went to OARC 32 last weekend. I’m not really going to summarize the event, since you should be able to view the presentions yourself. The most gratifying session for me was an early one: Brian Somers’ talk on implementing DNSSEC for Cisco OpenDNS (“Recursive Resolution From the Ground Up”.) I enjoyed this talk both because it is always fun to hear about other’s development experiences, and because he was basically describing challenges that I’d gone through myself, albeit 15 years earlier.

…And another two years has past without updating the blog. Mostly this is because I’ve been having a hard time thinking of suitable topics to actually blog about, but also because I let my blogging setup fall into disarray. A few things have changed since the last time I tried this. At the moment, I’m somewhat inspired to write this because I’ve upgraded my venerable 6 year old iMac to a fancy 5k iMac, and working on this screen is very nice.

I saw something about an application named “Marked”. Is it a markdown editor? Would it help me stop forgetting to convert angle brackets into html entities? Like <this>? First answer: No. Second answer: Maybe. Marked is a markdown previewer. Instead of being the editor, it watches the file you are working on, and updates whenever it changes. Presumably this is quite nice if you are using an editor which auto-saves. It claims that the easiest way to get your document into Marked is to drag the icon from the toolbar.