Projects
Small tools I maintain for myself and anyone with the same problems. All of them are deliberately unfinished in the sense that they do one thing and I have no roadmap for making them do eleven things.
logtidy
Compresses and rotates logs on long-lived servers without a daemon or config file. It grew out of a shared irritation with logrotate configs that only half-work, and now runs on every machine I administer, which is either an endorsement or a hostage situation. Most requested feature remains “support Solaris”, which tells you something about the user base.
crontab-doctor
Lints crontabs for the classic traps: jobs that collide on the DST skip, MAILTO pointing at a departed colleague, % signs that will be eaten by the shell. Born from the research for Cron Scheduling Gotchas. It has found real problems on every server it has been pointed at, including mine.
pocket-archive
One-shot archiver for my own reading list: pulls bookmarks, saves single-file HTML snapshots, writes a searchable index. I have no plans to make it a service. There are enough services.
dotfiles
The usual, kept boring on purpose: zsh, tmux, git, a dozen small scripts. The interesting part is what I keep deleting: every alias that automates something I did not understand yet.
Retired
- whatsup.yml (2019–2024) — a status-page generator that was a worse version of two existing tools by the time I admitted it. The README now just says “use those instead”.
- pgsplit (2017–2022) — Postgres table partitioner for a job I no longer have. Archived with notes on what I would do differently, which is: use declarative partitioning.
Colophon of this site
Hand-written HTML, one stylesheet, zero build steps. The source lives
in a git repository on the same mini-PC that serves it, and the
deploy process is rsync plus a full backup taken first.
See about for the philosophy, or the
five-years post for why the
deploy process is so conservative.