(Old - 4) Four days, four blogs
Greetz Internet friend!
Back again, four days in a row! In what is now up to attempt #7 to properly get this site online, I’ve once again managed to get the page up and running. You might have noticed that I went back to the original theme. Changing themes totally nuked the site and I couldn’t figure out how to get it back, despite learning some stuff about using git to revert to previous versions, I decided to just kill it with fire and start over.
So far I’ve managed to spend four days learning about git, Jekyll, and markdown, and a half a day setting up an environment to port an exploit to metasploit. I (perhaps foolishly) thought that I could get a Jekyll site up and running in a day and could devote the rest of my time to porting exploits. Ha!
Anyway, so other than restoring the site, I spent some time watching old stuff from Bell Labs. As I mentioned in my first post, I have an interest in history that is not only academic. I’ve also not written about it yet, but I’m a huge GNU + Linux enthusiast and that post is coming soon. Since GNU + Linux is still relatively new (as a historian, anything less then 30 years old hasn’t been around long enough to properly look at it), and I was interested in learning more about the history of the UNIX operating system. I won’t link to the video, but if you just search YouTube for ‘AT&T Archives: The UNIX Operating System’ and you should find it. This took me down a rabbit hole of Ken Thompson talks, including ‘VCF East 2019 - Brian Kernighan interviews Ken Thompson’. This is interesting to me because Thompson famously created UNIX (according to his story in three weeks) and Brian Kernighan co-wrote what’s often referred to as the “C Bible” with Dennis Richie, who wrote C based on previous work by Thompson.
One final note before I close out this blog post. Wanna know what cost me about two hours worth of troubleshooting? To create a github pages page, you need to create a repo called $username.github.io - you know what happens if you misspell your username when you create that repo? You guessed it! Nothing works! So my tip of the day is - when you create your repository, make sure you actually spell it right! One of the things that I both love and hate about programming is that a simple typo can screw up your entire day. It just goes to show that sometimes you need to slow down and make sure you’ve done everything right, including something as simple as typing in your username right!
Cheers!