Retirement Update

I have been retired now for several months, and thought it was a good time to reflect on how things have changed for me.

When I started my retirement, I would start each day with a written list of to-dos on my computer, and work to complete all the things on the list. After about two months, I decided that I did not need to have a list. Now, I have a hand-written list to collect things/tasks as they come to mind, and I just keep adding items, not starting a new list until the page is full.

I had some planned projects for when I retired (mostly website maintenance/migration, start looking at using AI for software development). I was able to finish the migration work in a few months, and did some experiments with AI after that. Over the past few months, I have had difficulty thinking of a project where I want to invest my time. For example, I see articles/posts about apps that people have developed using AI, and I have no interest in those things. If anyone has any ideas for a good project, send them my way!

In general, I have become more relaxed in my day-to-day activities. If I don’t get a task done, there is always tomorrow to get it done, or the day after that….and I have also taken a lot of naps!

The passing of MIT/NASA pioneer Margaret Hamilton

This week, it was announced that Margaret Hamilton had died. From the MIT News article announcing her death: “Hamilton worked first on the software for the uncrewed Apollo missions and then was promoted into leading the team developing the on-board flight software for the crewed missions. By 1968 she was assistant director in charge of the Command and Service Module team, and more than 400 people were working on Apollo’s software.”

Hamilton worked for the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which was a contractor working for NASA on the Apollo program. The team she lead was developing software for the Apollo Guidance Computer. This computer had 2K words of random-access memory (RAM) and 36K words of read-only memory (ROM). Even with those constraints, and limited processor capability, NASA was able to conduct the Apollo missions. Hamilton deserves a lot of credit, and stands on par with other women at NASA such as Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughn.

Thanks to Manton Reece and Sven Dahlstrand for posting on this event.

Podcast on design engineering in software development

I am 2/3 of the way listening to this podcast, and it is giving me some insight into the (visual) design of software. In my career in the aerospace industry, this was not a topic that was included in most of the software I worked on. Maggie Appleton talks about the importance of the human input in creating user interfaces, and how most, if not all, of agent software tools (Claude, Chat-GPT, etc.) have not been successful in producing good designs from prompt input. The part that I am finding most interesting is near the end, where she talks about a prototype app her team was creating. I found this more inspiring than her stories of iterating on user interfaces with Figma, etc.

Followup on support for Drummer oldSchool blogs

Recently, I mentioned that I worked with Claude Code to add scripts and changes to the drummerCms Github repo to be able to build a local copy of an oldSchool blog from a Drummer OPML file. In conversation with Frank McPherson, he asked if the web-based outliner from Dave Winer that I modified this year could support editing a OPML file for Drummer oldSchool blog use. This morning, I was able to add outline elements matching those in an oldSchool blog OPML file and was able to build a new local copy with those changes correctly rendered.

Based on this testing, I believe my OPML outliner can support oldSchool blogging use, with some inconveniences (having to add other outline elements used within oldSchool). If anyone is interested in collaborating on updating the outliner UI to support oldSchool blogging, let me know!

Got the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress working

Today I gave the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress another try, and was successful! First, I upgraded to the latest version (from 9.0.2 to 9.3.1). I accepted the default settings, so my new ActivityPub account based on my settings would be alsylves@andysylvester.com. Next, I logged into mastodon.social (https://mastodon.social/@AndySylvester), pasted my new account in the search box, clicked “Cancel request” on the old version, then clicked “Follow”, and saw the button change to “Unfollow”. Finally, I went back to my website, created a post, and saw it appear on my Mastodon home page. After that, I marked the post as a “favorite” and I created a reply to the post in Mastodon. Within a minute, it appeared as a comment on my WordPress post. Success!

Creating a local version of a Drummer oldSchool blog

As part of migrating my main website and other sites to a new hosting service, I have also been working to create backups of sites hosted elsewhere. One of those sites was a weblog I created using Drummer (created by Dave Winer) and using the oldSchool blogging template/tool. As part of other updates made by Dave Winer, there was a problem with the template being used for the oldSchool blogs. One Drummer user (Frank McPherson) did make updates to his template and was able to restore full display of his site. After that incident, I decided it would be better for me to have a separate backup site from the Drummer-hosted sites.

Dave Winer created two repos related to publishing blogs using Drummer and oldSchool. One (oldSchoolBlog) was the code used to create the blogs. Another (drummerCms) was a shell to allow other outliners to use the oldSchoolBlog code.

I installed both of the repos locally and made some attempts to execute the code, but had some problems. I did some troubleshooting, and added a config.json file which helped somewhat. However, the design of the oldSchool logic was set up to publish files to Amazon S3, which was not my goal (I wanted a local copy that could be hosted wherever I wanted).

Eventually, I used Claude Code to create a runner for the drummerCms repo to take the weblog OPML file and create a website on the local filesystem. The updates that Frank McPherson had made to his site were helpful in reaching this goal.

I have created a Git repo (oldSchool-backup-tool) which includes build scripts to call drummerCms to build a local copy of an oldSchool blog, and instructions for running the scripts. I have uploaded my converted site to be part of my main website. If any former Drummer oldSchool bloggers have questions on use of the tool, feel free to add issues to the Github repo above or contact me directly (see my About page).