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Posts published in “Webworks”

The practice of working with the most important invention since agriculture.

it’s late and i’m tired …

centaur 0

...but I'm still going to try to get at least one thing done before I go to bed.

Because, even though it's been a rough few years, and sometimes I want to give up ...

I still believe you just need to work slightly harder than you want to in order to really get things done, and if you do, you'll often find that your efforts are more greatly rewarded than you might have imagined.

I'll go further: if you work just a little bit less than you need to, it's often a net negative: you expend effort without reaching the goal, so all you're left with is the cost. But if you put that slight extra effort in, right when you think you want to give up, that's when everything can flip from negative to positive.

We often think in terms of a simple linear model of effort to results - we do a little work to get a little reward, and we're often taught in economics class that there's a law of diminishing returns, so if we do even more work, we get proportionally less reward.

But that little bit of extra effort right when you want to give up flips that script: it doesn't give you a little bit of extra reward, approaching zero the more effort you put in; because it can turn a loss into a win, it effectively has an almost infinite relative payoff.

So: Don't give up. Because, when you feel you want to ... that's when you're close to victory.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Pound cake, deep learning, and art practice.

maybe back in business …

centaur 0

Had another weird uploading thing yesterday, but it seems to have resolved with a Chrome restart.

Please enjoy this picture of a cat taking a nap in the "Captain's Chair", my favorite reading area.

-the Centaur

back … in business?

centaur 0

is it ... is it WORKING now? <relieved sobs>

-the Centaur

the scientific method …

centaur 0

first, let's try to add an image that failed previously ...

yep, it fails.

now, let's add a whitelist entry for the path that failed, and try again ...

SHAZAM! it worked.

let's see if we can publish the post ... NOPE!

so let's add THAT url to the whitelist ... nope, not that one ... YESSSS

another test

centaur 0

it may have been cached data in chrome ... investigating ...

i hate heisenbugs …

centaur 0

... so, whatever was causing images not to upload on the NEW website has just stopped happening, without me ever quite being to nail down what it was.

charming.

no, well, actually, frustrating, but, i suspect we will be back in business soon.

-the centaur

pictured: the old library, posted on the new library blog

am i alive?

centaur 0

wtf bro, what be the problem

test test

centaur 0

yes just a test

am i alive?

centaur 0

Strange ... I finally upgraded the blog, but the first post after fixing the blog seems to have disappeared ... and we're back on an older version of WordPress. What's up?

test test.

-the Centaur

still not dead, but blog updates must wait …

centaur 0

Okay, so some people are worried about me since I haven't posted in a while, so I thought I'd weigh in on what's going on - and explain why this will be the last update of the blog for a while, but hopefully, not forever.

As I mentioned earlier, I unexpectedly ran out of space to upload images to the blog - my reported quota was 35 gigabytes, but in practice the system craps out at 25. (And believe you me, it took a lot of debugging to figure that out).

This charming discovery happened right around the time that I spilled water on my laptop, which was a one-and-a-half week fix; that itself came in the middle of June, where I took 5 trips (Con Carolinas, the Nebulas, a Logical Robotics trip, CVPR/EAI, and Seattle) and was followed by July, where my wife and I, after almost five months of being mostly apart, had just two short weeks to catch up before her trip to go help her mother deal with the death of her stepfather. Not to mention the Unsolved Problems in Social Navigation Workshop, and The Neurodiversiverse copyedits and sensitivity edits. And Camp Nano, of course, far behind.

Good times, good times.

So, during all that, I didn't have time to update the blog's backend. Sorry.

Now, I've got a little free time, and I've started to do that - but it involves moving to a new provider, and that, itself, comes with a wrinkle. I'm going to have to copy all the data from the old provider, which is a painstaking process, since ~25GB and +25K files is far too large a file system for any normal FTP client to download without crashing. (And believe me, I've tried). So I have done the bulk of this copy now, but still have to verify that the files have correctly downloaded, which will actually involve writing a program to compare the trees, as I haven't found anything yet that will do that on a file tree this size over a connection this flaky.

Presuming success on that ... the next step is downloading the Library of Dresan database and migrating to the new provider.

So, if I blog any more here, I'm going to have to download that again. I already need to re-download this blogpost's image, as it wasn't in my first capture; but I wanted to test whether deleting the log files would have given me space to upload more images (it did). But downloading the database multiple times just because I can't stop blogging is a bridge too far.

SO! Until the migration is complete, I'm going to blog very sparingly, if at all. Sorry about that.

Hopefully it won't take too long.

-the Centaur

Pictured: A (mostly) vegan breakfast sandwich (except for the honey bread, since my favorite vegan bread was out at the store) - toasted bread, Just Egg, black salt and pepper, and two vegan patties from a new company whose name I can't remember; the ensemble of which always looks to me like a scream. Does that sandwich look right to you?

Not Dead

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Tangled connections ...

CVPR and EAI took a lot out of me, and some unexpected stuff came up. Regular blogging will resume next week, once I return to sanity land.

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-four day one four eight]: red herrings

centaur 0

Okay, it's not a red herring, it's a grapefruit, but I am able to upload images to the site again. It appears that when my hosting provider said I had "15 gigabytes free" what they actually meant was "0 bytes free". So I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to fix permissions on the directories when the real problem was that I was out of disk space (which causes the same error).

I already knew I needed to change hosting providers. I guess it's time.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Not a red herring, which I don't eat for breakfast anyway.