Colophon

Introductions

My name is Mike Lockhart, and this is my web log. I am a support engineer for a well known Open Source web dev-ops company. I do mainly Linux/Docker and GitLab work, and dabble in some other languages and projects in my Copious Free Time.

I'm also married since 1998 and we are parents to three boys born in 2005, 2010, and 2012. We live in Tasmania, where my wife and I grew up, returning here from New South Wales in late 2013. I feel grateful to be living here, with family close at hand and an awesome, friendly and welcoming community around us.

On the Net, I go by the handle sinewalker, and while after more than 20 years I think I've outgrown it, it's still a fairly unique username in most places. A newer handle I've adopted is milohax.

What am I into?

I have eclectic tastes, you can read a list that I maintain, if it interests you.

This web

On this web site you will find posts, pages, pictures and code that are in connection with my interests. I try to keep the stuff here as general as possible — any work-specific writings live on a company website, or behind a company firewall. This means that what you see and read here is (or was) my own opinion and does not necessarily reflect the opinions or directions of my employers (past, present, or future).

This is the forth iteration of my blog. The archive has old posts that I've migrated from blogger and wordpress, though those are still online to be read in their original form. In late 2020 I migrated from GitHub Pages to GitLab Pages with Continuous Integration and Deployment.

A major reason for building my blog with a static web page generator is so that I can have fine control over type-setting. While this site is mainly a personal blog (so it's informal), I use notational conventions throughout. These are common enough in online technical writings for the computer field, but weirdly not well supported by systems such as Blogger or Wordpress (or Matrix) which you must fight against to follow:

  • computer keywords are typed inline like this,
  • terms and variables are italicised like that, and
  • code blocks use Colour Syntax Highlightng, for the posts since late 2015.

You will notice that the English on this site follows Commonwealth conventions of grammar and spelling. That's a natural consequence of where I live. You will also notice frequent spelling errors which are not attributable to Commonwealth English — that's a consequence of Rule 9. I've also adopted the Oxford Comma for its clarity and consistency.

Contacting me

This is not a "web 2.0" site: there are no comments enabled here. No-one comments anyway, and it adds a lot to the site load time and bandwidth. There's not much point in costing visitors that overhead for something which isn't used.

Instead you should feel free to toot me @milohax@hachyderm.io, follow me on GitHub, or GitLab, or by e-mail, to share your thoughts. Sensitive data may be emailed to me using my public PGP key with fingerprint 3CCA2E6EBCBE8795.

While I do have a Facebook identity, please consider following me on Keybase instead. I prefer this method over the others, as it is the easiest way I know about to share things privately for free, with PGP cipher keys that you can validate for yourself by various Net handles.

How this web site is made

Posts are typed using the Dvorak keyboard layout into emacs or VS Code on either an Apple PowerBook Mac, or a home-made computer running openSUSE. When possible I use an ErgoDox EZ Glow with a customized Dvorak layout.

Posts are generated from a mix of markup languages (typically Markdown or iPython (Jupyter) Notebooks), using the Nikola static web site and blog generator, and published to GitLab Pages on GitLab.com (via a GitLab CI/CD pipeline).

The source markup files and Nikola configuration are stored in my GitLab Project.

The repository wiki and issues log are where I keep notes about the site itself, rather than fill this site with meta-blog posts.

Copyleft

Prose and image content of all articles are copyright, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License, unless otherwise specified. Code content are a mixture of Open Source-compatible licenses, depending where the code ultimately originates or is intended to be used. If codes are inline then I usually consider them to be “prose”, and if they're original to me then readers may infer that they are copyrighted and licensed in a spirit that is intended to be shared publicly, with attribution.