Colophon

Introductions

My name is Mike Lockhart, and this is my web log. I am a web sysop for a well known Australian Open Source web content management company. I do mainly Linux and Matrix work, and dabble in some other languages and projects in my Copious Free Time.

I'm also married for 20 years and we are parents to three boys aged between 6 and 13 years. We live in Tasmania, where we 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'm adopting is milohax.

My ACIC background check is held at CVCheck.

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 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 third 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.

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. At least for the newer 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 recently 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 that isn't used.

Instead you should feel free to tweet me @milo_hax, follow me on GitHub 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. No need for the broken "web of trust".

How this web site is made

Posts are typed using the Dvorak keyboard layout into Emacs on either an Apple PowerBook Mac, or a home-made computer running openSUSE, on a Sun Type 6 keyboard (grey version, with rearranged key caps).

Posts are generated from a mix of markup languages (typically Markdown or iPython Notebooks), using the Nikola static web site and blog generator, and published to GitHub Pages (via Nikola's github_deploy command). The site is reachable via my own DNS, or the GitHub one: http://sinewalker.github.com.

The source markup files and Nikola configuration are stored in my GHP repository on the src branch.

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.