This week got off to a slow start; causes coming to mind are my struggle towards a Laufrichtungsanderung on reviews and plans, as well as pondering what was happening with Robinson and what I might do about it.
After publishing the plan there was some feeling of “why did I go writing all that stuff, sure I wanted to do it but now I have to!” By that evening though I was getting back to productivity, starting by continuing on my TRB direction, then mixing the momentarily unsexier items back in.
1. Research health insurance: 4h.
Not started; I’ll make this the focus for Saturday.
2. Basic backup scripting for newly upgraded Thinkpad. This is just to adapt my existing tar+gpg based full backup script, with excludes for large datasets that don’t fit this treatment (bitcoin database, local software & web archives). 2h.
Done in 1.2h, which involved tweaking my script for Busybox tar, running, verifying, and some data pruning. Explicitly breaking the backups problem into this and the following part was helpful in getting started.
3. Investigate options for efficient differential backups on Gales. In the past I’ve used rsync and unison but the prospect of committing these to my own V-tree gives me pause. The Gales mirror sync scripts I wrote prove it can be done quite simply; one option would be to expand these to handle metadata and soft/hard links. Minimum 3h.
Not started; this could be a good one for the rest of today.
4. Streamline time tracking tools or usage – no more manual aggregation: 3h.
I also wanted to lose the clunky Ledger format, so ended up taking 4.3h for a pure sh/awk rewrite, in which I learned a bit about calendar date processing where in my Python days I’d just “import time”. It doesn’t do multi-level aggregation yet but should at least beat what I was doing before; I’ll cut over for the upcoming week, see how it goes and budget some time for tweaks.
5. Blog: definitely don’t write anything about TRB patches, Gales Scheme, Gales Bitcoin Wallet, or router setup! 10h.
So far the anti-plan prevails. I spent 4.8h refining and further testing my TRB build system simplification patch, further cutting down on the proliferation of makefiles and build directories, discovering parallel build was broken (and was before the change, no thanks to openssl) and fixing that. Then 2.7h reviewing and signing the whole vpatch set, with my main key where I was confident in my grasp of the patch and my “unchecked” key otherwise.
10h actual writing probably isn’t happening by Sunday but I’ll go for at least one article on those patches.
6. Assist Robinson as requested, or otherwise unexpected tasks: 5h.
This being eaten by the above patch refinement, I’ll need to allow for some more as it looks like there’s at least a phone meeting with a prospect coming up.
7. Chat in #ossasepia, or otherwise engage blogs: 5h.
Around 4h, but I haven’t kept up with blogs too well, such as billymg’s survey.
8. Weekly review: 1h at 18:00 UTC Friday. Not expecting to be done with all the above by then but I can look at how it’s gone so far.
Started late (I got recruited for a morning shopping run and didn’t get moving soon enough on that), and wound up at 2.5h with some distractions.
9. Next week’s plan: 1h. Efficiency can be improved later but priority is to get the plans more meaningful/useful.
I’ll go for this on Saturday.
10. Keep in touch with past students + remote friends and family: 1h.
Not seeing this as “work” really so leaving it for Sunday.
Time permitting:
11. Investigate TRB sync and peering logic. My new node has made very little progress, with intervals of nothing but “bastard blocks” alternating with silence, a behavior I’ve observed many times before but is really starting to bug me.
I spent 3h thinking on this and writing some node monitoring scripts. One of these confirms that it spends most of its sync time doing nothing useful whatsoever (presently 13 hours since last accepted block) but works briefly on restart.
Total here is 23.5h for the 3.5 days. It’s looking feasible to hit the remaining targets, except the 10h writing, in the remaining 1.5 days, as long as I stay on track. One change for next week will be bringing JWRD discussions and sales assistance back to the front and center.