Long ago, I wrote a post about a small program to calculate the probabilities of a sign test. A lot has happened since then. The sign test is still useful to me on occasion, but the application framework used to write the original program is now unsupported. Too, the original program used Java’s Swing framework for the GUI. The new official GUI framework for Java is JavaFX. So I’ve updated the program a bit.
Often, when reading blogs, I am struck by the number of misspellings, incorrect word usages, bad grammar, and so on. But the experience of transferring this blog from other systems to it’s current home has been an eye opener. I proofread my posts, usually multiple times. However, in doing so I was struck by the number of misspellings, incorrect word usages, bad grammar, and so on. I am humbled (in the real sense of the word.
As part of the work of transferring old blog posts from other systems (mostly WordPress) to Hexo, I hit a bump when trying to use images in the new posts. There are basically two recommended ways to access images in Hexo. Put a new sub-directory, say images in your Hexo source directory. Put your images in your new directory. In your posts, use the usual Markdown method of linking to images, that is something like !
Way back in 2014, I wrote a post asking whether my new hosting company, CloudAtCost was a scam. Back then, I concluded that they were not. Fast forward to now, and it turns out they were a scam after all. Back in June they started sending me notices about not having paid a fee for “Maintenance”. They threatened to shut down and erase all my stuff at some unspecified time in the near future if I didn’t pay up.
First light with a new blogging platform. My hosting vendors have been playing games with me. They offer terrific prices to new customers to start using them. But the loyal folks who have been using them for years get nothing – except maybe a price increase. Not cool. So, I’m looking into hosting my blog for free on GitHub Pages. It even provides HTTPS out of the box. No configuring certificates or any of that stuff.
Last time, I wrote about some of the really nice note-taking apps available nowadays. Since then, I’ve come across another great one I just had to tell you about: Collate. It has just about everything I could want. I’ll let you read about all of its features on its web site, but some of the things I like most include: It’s cross-platform, capable of running on Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
Just a note about some weirdness in my work process and it’s solution. A few weeks ago, I started noticing some weirdness in trying to use some tools with Leiningen while developing a program in Clojure. When running tools like kibit, lein would fail with an error from javac about an invalid flag. Initially these flags were for attempts to set the file encoding. And the file encoding kept changing.
Feeling a bit frustrated today, so I thought I would just vent a bit. I’ve been working on some personal tools. I see some things in other tools that I would like to include in my own. I keep finding that those features that I like are written in JavaScript with that whole mess of an ecosystem. When I look for something similar in Java/JavaFX I find next to nothing.
Ever since dumping Evernote, I’ve been looking at alternative note-taking apps. I’ve been usingtiddlywiki, but, surprisingly, it has grown a bit slow. Probably from the sheer volume of notes that I’ve imported from Evernote. Maybe time to look some more? I’ve also been writing a lot of program documentation in Markdown. I like the wiki format just fine, but it seems like Markdown can do more. Both markup languages have a plethora of dialects, usually incompatible.
I have subscriptions to a number of services, not just magazines. These include things like computer programs, hosting services, home supplies, groceries and so on. I’m sure vendors love this. Within the past two weeks though, I have canceled three subscriptions when the vendor started playing games at renewal time. It usually went down like this: I get notification of a renewal at an (often substantially) increased price. Increases of 30%+ are not uncommon.