Table of Contents
1. I have been stupid. This is a blog.
Hello readers, and thank you for your patience. Someone out there has been paying me money to think about and work on this, and I have produced little.
1.1. What’s going on
I’m writing a blog post, and I’m going to write more blog posts. That’s not all this blog post is about, but I kind of suddenly realized a while ago that it’s dumb of me to try to use wordpress for a not-a-blog kind of thing, and that if I’m doing a blog thing I should do a dang blog.
1.2. What’s been going on.
1.2.1. Technical problems
I have been thinking and doing work, but the net result as of a week ago was catastrophic data loss after I destroyed the storage device by closing the hinged part of the case on it.
This is a Dell mini-tower case I acquired from a municipal auction. It came with 8gb RAM and an Intel i7-8700 CPU which seems adequate for lots of gcc’ing in parallel with its multiple cores. I’m confused about how many distinct processes Intel chips can do at a time because of “hyperthreading” and the ability of some single “cores” to execute multiple instructions at once (albeit not necessarily distinct ones). This particular unit also came with a goofy case with a hinged front part comprising the front face and the entire gallery behind where drive bays usually go, hinged at the front corner so that the whole business swings outward, provided you don’t close the cover. I can’t close the cover because of the first time I dropped it, carrying it on to the bus back from Olympia to Seattle.
1.3. What’s going to be going on
1.3.1. Hardware / software next steps
Since destroying that drive I purchased 2 Netac 1TB solid state drives from ebay, they are installed in the machine now, cinched side-by-each sideways in a 5.25 inch drive bay with their umbilici poking out the side, Nice and pretty!
The next step is to re-install Guix. I’m writing this from the device out of my old laptop, running Debian with the Guix package manager. The way forward is to write a system-configuration.scm file describing the setup of the desired system, and then have guix build, test, and deploy it.
1.3.2. Semi-regular posts on “How do you trust $this-particular-machine”
I have taken a brief break from the first one of these to write this. It is about a very large and complex machine indeed.
There may be complaints. Hopefully there will be comments! I’m not going to mess with comments on the blog directly, because wordpress is a pain and I don’t want to deal with it. I am in the process of setting up an account on a local mastodon instance in order to foster discussion about this blog or the project or my odious personal characteristics or other topics of delight or detection. When the account is ready I will add it here.
Also there will be more posts about computer things I’m working on in this context.