Back in March I wrote this piece on the whole RMS debacle and how we have to stop worshiping and coddling idols. I came to that conclusion long before the RMS debacle. I experienced my own idol worship experience in my early years. My most intensive idol worship was around Steve Jobs. I’ve read many biographies on him, watched all the movies, documentaries, etc. I could find. The biography and history story of NeXT chronicled in the 1993 book Steve Jobs & The NeXT Big Thing by Randall E. Stross though is something quite different. Most Jobs biographies are fawning with a hint of mild criticism in a few choice places. Some like The Second Coming of Steve Jobs by Alan Deutschman and Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson provided a more nuanced picture that showed a bunch of Steve’s warts, and not in a “well akshully that was a good thing” rationalization sort of way. They were written after Job’s had his redemption with the return to Apple though. Stross’s book on the other hand is a very one sided scathing critique of Jobs with very little if any positive things to say. It was written in 1993 at the trough of NeXT the hardware company and before they “successfully” converted to a software company. While it is scathing and solely/mostly negative I believe it is fair and accurate.

In this era of new idol worship I’m finding myself rethinking my own prior positions in the context of the now-known reality. Beyond my prior worship of Jobs I absolutely love NeXT computers, the hardware and the software. I obsess about the design aesthetic and think it is peak computer design. I collect them along with other classic computers. I spend way too much time reading about them. I love the fact that modern macOS and iOS are built on them. I still need to look at the dark history of the company revealed in this book and confront it. So the TL;DR are that I love this book for bringing this harsh reality of this thing and person I paid too much deference.

This is an update on my monthly blog stats generated with my non-tracking The BlogStatViewer program. I followed the same steps as in last month’s post for refining the updates to make sure that bots/spiders/etc aren’t in the statistics. This month it took a grand total of ten minutes cleaning up about a dozen new bot type accesses. Below are the updated stats for the month of April.

As I wrote in my previous post two months ago I deployed my own custom made blog/static site statistics generation tool. March was the first month that I have full statistics on since the Nginx logs that were processed in the early part of March, when I finally deployed it, go back into late February. With this first month down I decided to review my blog’s statistics and share them with the internet as well. I don’t think I’ll necessarily be doing monthly updates of my blog statistics but at the very least I could see doing annual ones. The ultimate schedule is TBD but let’s look at this first month’s statistics. All of these statistics have the bots/spiders/automated systems excluded from them. This includes things like Fediverse servers hitting a post as it federates across the network and it hits the link to generate OpenGraph information, RSS feed reader systems, etc.

A couple months ago in this blog post I debuted a home grown blog/static website statistics generator that used nothing but the Nginx log data. I’ve been letting it run since then to see if it is really getting the job done for what I need: basic information about traffic to my various posts, the referrers that they came from, and maybe some information about browsers/OS’s. I was hoping that it would be lightweight, efficient, and easy to use. I’m very happy to say that I have found it to be exactly that. There are rough edges of course, this is a 1.0 release of software that is intentionally hobbled by not being able to use tracking JavaScript code etc., but it is something I’m proud of and am glad I wrote. Below I’ll be exploring how I use it and what improvements I can see making.

My desire to always experiment with operating systems and the drumbeat of OpenSUSE updates on The Coder Radio Podcast had me give OpenSUSE for a whirl. It’d been awhile since I’d experimented with my one and only foray into rolling releases, Solus , so I decided to go with their Tumbleweed rolling release. Overall I’m pretty happy but I keep complaining about the time it takes to run updates. I’ve been told that’s pretty par for the course for a rolling release but I didn’t recall Solus having that sort of issue but memory is a funny thing. I figured the best thing to do would be to run the two head to head to see if it’s just a rolling release thing or an OpenSUSE thing. Then I figured why stop there. Thus the Linux Rolling Releases Head to Head Competition was born.

At the Free Software Foundation’s (FSF) open source conference LibrePlanet 2021 there was a bit of a controversial coming out when Richard Stallman (RMS) announced that he was back on the board of the organization he founded after resigning from it and the FSF’s presidency in 2019. I’m trying to process this information productively and honestly I am struggling. I hear lots of paeans for paths of redemption or “not canceling over one faux pas” type responses. I hear lots of “just lets bury the hatchet” response too. I am so far very unsympathetic to those at this point though because I haven’t seen any attempts by RMS to seek actual redemption nor do I think this is “just one minor incident” that deserves being buried. For too long we’ve allowed our idols and celebrities way too large a divergence from acceptable behaviors we expect from everyone else. We hear countless stories of abusive, belligerent, and completely inappropriate behavior being at the very least tolerated if not implicitly or explicitly supported by those around them. For much of RMS’s history he got this exact treatment. The events of 2019 pushed everyone past the point of putting up with it any longer and at that point, finally, people stood up to him. In response he temporarily resigned and went into a communications black hole. What has come out the other side 1.5 years later though seems to be right where we left off though. It’s bad for FSF, bad for the free and open source (FOSS) community, and bad for our culture in general.

The one thing I missed about my old WordPress blog when I switched to a static Jekyll site is having statistics about my blog. I could have solved that by using Google Analytics or other tracking tools but a big part of what I was trying to do was get rid of all the trackers, JavaScript injection, and what I may overly aggressively label “spyware.” Looking at the Nginx log I thought there was enough in there to let me recreate a lot of those statics once I worked through all the bot traffic. This also gave me the opportunity to create a Kotlin Multiplatform project that I could potentially one day migrate to a pure Kotlin Native application. I’m sure that using existing log processing tools out there that may have hit my requirements but I decided to do the usual programmer thing of just write my own. It’s running live on my blog now and generating the annual and monthly statistics I was looking for. The source code is up on Gitlab for others that may want to use it as well. Now on to the details of the project.

As I perused my social media timeline this morning I saw post after post with some level of outrage over some level of minutia. Among those posts were some legitimate concerns about legitimate issues but the signal to noise ratio was complete crap. While I mentally knew that I could tell that my brain was emotionally reacting to this stream of drama. It was at that point I decided I needed to clean up my social media experience to avoid potentially succumbing to the effects of such a barrage.

When I wrote my 2019 open source contributions annual review I had high hopes for my open source contributions in 2020. As I wrote in my 2020 health annual review I allowed the political upheaval in my home country, the US, to distract me way too much. Sure there was some COVID distraction in March/April but if anything I was actually hoping the lack of travel would give me time to focus more on code generation. It was not to be. That excuse aside, I still managed to put in 698 hours into open source projects. That’s a slight uptick from 2019’s 653 hours but short of the 1000 hours I was hoping to contribute. The distribution looks very different as well, with most of it concentrated around my work with The B612 foundation . The five projects I contributed to the most fall into a relatively broad range of software (from highest to lowest number of hours contributed):

The year 2020 started off on an epic high note for me but quickly devolved into the same insanity as everyone else. Between COVID-19 and the political upheaval in my country (the US) and around the world it was a very stressful time. I mostly got through it with good spirits but being a stress eater and not one to naturally enjoy exercise means that while I started off on the right foot things quickly devolved. To say there were extenuating circumstances is an understatement. It’s not a legitimate excuse but it is what happened. Like the rest of us I want to forget 2020 but the cummulative health effects on my body from this year happened whether I like it or not. Let’s explore how this year held up in terms of my grades and metrics on the health and longevity front.