Last year, my new year's resolution was to write in my journal every day. That actually stuck, I wrote 262 journal entries in 2011. While I've been keeping a journal intermittently since 1998, last year I doubled the number of entries in it. And wrote a novel's worth of entries -- 53 thousand words!

Most of it is of course banal and mundane stuff. Not good compared with Lars, who does something with his journal where he goes into some detail about code he's working on, and other work. The excerpts I've seen are quite nice. But after I've written code, written a commit message, documentation, perhaps bug reports etc, I often can't find much to say about it in my journal, beyond the bare bones that I worked on $foo today or faced a particularly hard bug. I also worry that the journal, and my reluctance to repeat myself, often tips the balance away from me blogging, if I write down something in the journal first.

Here's my journal for today:

Compare what jokes are funny now with those in 1982. The 1982 ones from net.jokes on olduse.net seem juvenile. Now compare what Unix joke man pages are funny now with those I'm reading from 1982. They seem basically the same. What would Biella make of this?

Liw noticed ikiwiki OOM on pell. Tracked down to a perl markdown bug with long lines. Had quite enough of perl markdown; ikiwiki will be moving to a different engine. Added discount support to it today, still needs Debian package tho.

[censored]

Really gorgeous sunset, with a high wind, moon, puffy low, fast moving clouds. Enjoyed it ecstaticly. It's going to get cold soon. Very rainy early, but then got intermittently sunny; power is holding out ok.

Was going to roast a chicken today, but got distracted and had a large lunch besides. Need to find some quick food for supper.

I need to start a new book, should it be the River Cottage book about meat that I stole from Anna, or some SF?

Blogged about journaling, and put this journal entry in it, so also journaled about blogging. Wrote it somewhat self-conciously.

The benefits for me have ranged from being able to go back and work out dates of events, to forwarding the odd excerpts to others. The best thing though is certianly having a regular time of introspection, to look back over my the day.

If you've not got a new year's resolution yet, I recommend this one. (Learning Haskell would be another good one, if you haven't yet.)

Just write something, anything, down in your journal every day.

Today I released two entirely different pieces of software with the identical version number 3.20120115. Debian developers also will be soon noticing a piece of software I released with the version number 9.20120115.

I expect to move more of my software to this version number scheme over time, unless I find something badly wrong with it. It reflects how I think about versions for my software; there's a kind of continual "now" that development progresses through, in which individual releases have little discrete meaning and at the same time, there can also be significant discontinuities, that require the user to do something to deal with (such as a new debhelper compat version, or a new git-annex repository format).

Those two things are really all that I need a version number for my software to communicate. I can do without the rest of the things that version numbers are used for:

• The marketing of version 1.0 and 2.0.
• The comparative nuances such as whether 1.0 to 1.1 is a relatively big change, and 1.0 to 1.0.1 is a relatively small change
• The implication that 0.99 is almost 1.0 ready, and 1.1a is some kind of alpha release.

There is so much software, with so many version numbers that any signal encoded in such version numbers is swamped in the noise. Even on projects that I develop a version number like 2.88 is meaningless to me. All I care about is, how long ago was that version? Has there been a major change breaking compatibility since that version? "2.88" doesn't answer these questions well; "3.20111111" does.

It is a little wordy to have the full year in there, and it can be annoying to remember to set the version to the right date on release day (TODO: automate). This is balanced with the version not being so wordy as to include the time of day, which means I might have to do a 3.20120115.1 if I goof up. These minor problems are worth it to instantly know how old a version is when a user pastes it into a bug report.

And that is probably all I will ever have to say about version numbers. :)

Hard to believe I've consumed all of 1981's Usenet posts now on olduse.net, and it's been running for 7 months already.

Last night, there was a "very long" post, describing nearly every node on usenet in 1982. There had been a warning about this post the day before, since it would take many sites half an hour to download at 300 baud. It was handily formatted as a shell script, which created per-node files.

So, I ran this code nobody has run since 1982. It worked. I got files. I tossed them on the olduse.net wiki, and used some ikiwiki code TOVA contracted me to write just a few months ago, to make clickable links on my usenet map.

The map data was contributed in another post a while back. By 1982, usenet is getting nearly impossible to map with 1982 technology of ascii art. I enjoyed throwing graphviz, git, wikis, and the web at it.

So, we have a collaboration across time, me and "Mark" and a lot of people who described their usenet nodes and piles of technology that make creating a mashup easy. Awesome!

I blog about stuff I find on the olduse.net blog. It's an open blog; Koldfront also blogs there, and we welcome other bloggers.

Some of the highlights for me have included:

As the space shuttle program is winding down, reading the excitement about the first shuttle flights, and the play-by-play coverage of a launch, posted to net.columbia by a high school student borrowing his dad's account. (A usegroup name that's hard to read without remembering its fate).

The announcements of the Motorola M68k, the IBM PC, and the CD-ROM.

Reading the TCP-IP digest, and Postel's plans for launching IPv4 soon, while the world IPv6 launch is being planned now. (The nay-sayers are especially fun to read. Including the guy who was concerned about the address space size, in 1981!)

Learning that nethack ascention tales have a history streching back 30 years, to rogue, and that the stories back then had much the same flavor as they do today.

Various celebrity sightings. Dennis Ritchie teaching C and Unix. Bill Joy talking vi. RMS talking .. nuclear politics?

The general development of usenet. B-news being rolled out, groups proliferating, many first inklings of what will be major problems and developments in 5 or 10 years. A shift in tone is already apparent, by now usenet is not only about announcements, there are already some flames.

Still 9 years to go!

Partly as a followup to a Github survey, and partly because I had a free evening and the need to write more haskell code, any haskell code, I present to you, github-backup.

github-backup is a simple tool you run in a git repository you cloned from Github. It backs up everything Github knows about the repository, including other forks, issues, comments, milestones, pull requests, and watchers.

This is all stored in the repository, as regular files, on a "github" branch.

Available in Cabal now, in Debian maybe if someone packages haskell-github.