Oops My Bad

I was hosting this site with a company that might have gone kaput recently. I was waiting for them to resolve their issues but the server never came back up so I have switched services (note that I have lost a bit of content...it is somewhere on a backup drive...).

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Beginning...Again

This weblog is about learning by doing. I'm using a tool to build this site that automatically creates RSS feeds (not that anybody uses RSS anymore) for the individual folders. If you are interested in what I've written about PHP for instance you'll find an RSS file under php/index.rss. The same will hold true for every path endpoint. Another place to look would be @joellimardo on Twitter (Mastodon and other accounts forthcoming).

This site is not new. In fact it was originally posted over seven years ago. A few things have changed cosmetically but the most notable is that the paths have changed. I used to allow mixed case in the URIs and now I have reduced that all to lower case. So if you have a very old link it will no longer work. I could go back an write a bunch of rewrite rules on my server for handle this but that content is so out of date that you probably should not be relying upon it anyway as-is.

Why..Why...Why...

I started this log after following the recommendations given in a talk by Burton Rast for self-education: create a project with a deadline, commit to teach the subject to others (similarly with a deadline), [I'm presuming use what you've learned] and solve a real-world problem you're passionate about.

A Word About Originality

The previous version of this site confused some people. They would e-mail trying to figure out how it all worked and why I was posting these things. In one instance a reader thought I was copying online material and reposting it here. That is not the case. However, I may find some topic online that I may want to write something about. That is not copying. It is an essential component of discussion and is generally needed in order to further knowledge and understanding.

Like Lots and Lots of CliffsNotes®

Learning computing science topics means that you sometimes are exposed to information out of order, that is out of date, or that is contestable. This is why some posts here are terse and there is typically heavy emphasis on REPL (read, evaluate, print, and loop) interactive tools. The motto here is 'get it, try it, log it, and review it again later on.' Every effort is made to make material clearer upon review but during the upstream (explained below) process there is no time for that.

Upstream and Downstream

I borrowed some terminology from my days in petrochemicals -- upstream means raw materials; downstream means finished products. This site's technical content is broken down into those categories which means you should expect things in upstream to be particularly 'gritty.' You have been warned.

A lot of older content from the previous site was of the 'upstream' variety so it will now go under that folder from now on.

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Where to put research

In addition to the core goals of this site I'm going to switch to using two different types of files -- projects and info files -- to denote projects versus raw research materials. I tried to keep things in books but it is difficult to map what I've read to projects I'm working on, so I hope that this will work a bit better.

Info files will not show up in the projects drop down at the top of the page. In order to find these you'll have to refer to the site map.

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