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diff --git a/build/blog/2015-06-23-all-problems-solved.html b/build/blog/2015-06-23-all-problems-solved.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..003b2655 --- /dev/null +++ b/build/blog/2015-06-23-all-problems-solved.html @@ -0,0 +1,56 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html> +<head> +<meta charset="utf-8"/> +<meta content="pandoc" name="generator"/> +<meta content="Zhiming Wang" name="author"/> +<meta content="2015-06-23T21:47:07-07:00" name="date"/> +<title>All problems solved!?</title> +<link href="/img/apple-touch-icon-152.png" rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed"/> +<meta content="#FFFFFF" name="msapplication-TileColor"/> +<meta content="/img/favicon-144.png" name="msapplication-TileImage"/> +<meta content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" name="viewport"/> +<link href="/css/normalize.min.css" media="all" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/> +<link href="/css/theme.css" media="all" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/> +</head> +<body> +<div id="archival-notice">This blog has been archived.<br/>Visit my home page at <a href="https://zhimingwang.org">zhimingwang.org</a>.</div> +<nav class="nav"> +<a class="nav-icon" href="/" title="Home"><!--blog icon--></a> +<a class="nav-title" href="/"><!--blog title--></a> +<a class="nav-author" href="https://github.com/zmwangx" target="_blank"><!--blog author--></a> +</nav> +<article class="content"> +<header class="article-header"> +<h1 class="article-title">All problems solved!?</h1> +<div class="article-metadata"> +<time class="article-timestamp" datetime="2015-06-23T21:47:07-07:00">June 23, 2015</time> +</div> +</header> +<p>The project I've been working on intermittently over the past month, <a href="https://github.com/zmwangx/pyonedrive"><code>pyonedrive</code></a>, a OneDrive API v1.0 API/CLI client, is now quite satisfactory in terms of its feature set<a class="footnoteRef" href="#fn1" id="fnref1"><sup>1</sup></a>, so today I'm thinking about what I should work on next. Of course there's <a href="https://github.com/zmwangx/pyonedrive/labels/enhancement">a lot more I can do</a>, but what is done already encapsulates 95%+ of my daily usage; moreover, as everyone knows, refining an existing project is not as exciting as starting a new one and making something happen that is previously tedious or impossible.</p> +<p>To my surprise, <em>I can't think of anything</em>. I now realized that I don't have many peculiar computing needs. I needed a storyboard generator which I couldn't find anywhere, <a href="https://github.com/zmwangx/storyboard">so I wrote one</a>, and got an <a href="https://storyboard.readthedocs.org/en/latest/metadata-cli.html">elegant FFprobe wrapper</a> for free. I hated the crappy CLI shipped with <a href="https://github.com/mk-fg/python-onedrive"><code>python-onedrive</code></a><a class="footnoteRef" href="#fn2" id="fnref2"><sup>2</sup></a> that constantly fails and dumps, so I <a href="https://github.com/zmwangx/pyonedrive">rolled my own</a> around the new API. In the process of coding up these two things, I learned quite a bit of Python — the kind of things I would never learn by reading tutorials or references alone. Other than these two, I need to interact with a few Web services and scrape a few Web sites, which are easily taken care of in bash/zsh/python (node might better serve some, but they ain't broke, so why rewrite). I also need some other CLI tools but those have been solved by existing projects, probably started by people with similar needs. Some of them need some clean-up and feature boost, e.g., <a href="https://github.com/soimort/you-get"><code>you-get</code></a>, but I'm not inclined to refactor or submit substantial PRs to other people's projects, so I usually just write my own wrappers to bypass their limitations.<a class="footnoteRef" href="#fn3" id="fnref3"><sup>3</sup></a> What else? Basically nothing.</p> +<p>So I'm in a strange situation that I feel like writing software for fun and profit, but don't have anything exciting to lay my hands upon (other than improving existing things). Of course I could learn my next language, but language learning without real world usage is likely to be futile. For instance, I would like to learn some Go or Rust, but why do I need a compiled, C/C++ replacement these days, when scripting takes care of all my personal needs? Not clear. Maybe it's a good time to concentrate on the real important things in my career.</p> +<hr/> +<p>Update: Whilst writing this post, I came up with a project after all. I always had the idea of keeping an encrypted journal — real encryption, not the fake "password protection" of DayOne.<a class="footnoteRef" href="#fn4" id="fnref4"><sup>4</sup></a> The journal should be decrypted — probably only into memory — upon entry (after securely typing in password), and each text/image object should be encrypted separately to ease syncing (so using an encrypted sparseimage won't work).</p> +<p>In principle an Emacs package should be able to do this, but going forward Elisp is a pretty horrible choice of language for anything substantial (think of, for example, threading, which there is none). Therefore, I'm inclined to write this in ObjC/Swift with Cocoa. This will be my first attempt at Cocoa programming, and my first serious involvement with Xcode (other than CLT, of course) after quite a few years<a class="footnoteRef" href="#fn5" id="fnref5"><sup>5</sup></a>. Actually I've always been looking for an excuse to learn some Swift.</p> +<p>Oops, am I falling into <a href="https://sivers.org/zipit">prematurely announcing my plans</a>? Hopefully not.</p> +<div class="footnotes"> +<hr/> +<ol> +<li id="fn1"><p>In fact it already exceeded my original expectations — <code>pyonedrive</code> started out as a <a href="https://github.com/zmwangx/pyonedrive/blob/4d21308545ec1462c3892b9ca25300042f1ccb81/README.rst">bare bones batch uploader</a>.<a class="footnotes-backlink" href="#fnref1">↩︎</a></p></li> +<li id="fn2"><p>I never bothered to look at the API.<a class="footnotes-backlink" href="#fnref2">↩︎</a></p></li> +<li id="fn3"><p>E.g., for <code>you-get</code>, I wrote a wrapper with concurrency support and much more surrounding <code>you-get</code>'s <code>--url</code> option. (But honestly, for whatever reason, links provided by <code>flvcd.com</code> for Chinese video streaming sites are much better than those parsed by <code>you-get</code> in terms of download speed, so these days I almost use <code>flvcd.com</code>'s <code>BigRats</code> exclusively, except when it similarly can't pick up a reasonable speed, in which case I would grind with my <code>you-get</code> wrapper, which was designed exactly for grinding.)<a class="footnotes-backlink" href="#fnref3">↩︎</a></p></li> +<li id="fn4"><p>And DayOne's Markdown engine sucks, among other limitations, like the ridiculous one-image-per-entry.<a class="footnotes-backlink" href="#fnref4">↩︎</a></p></li> +<li id="fn5"><p>I used to use Xcode as a C++ IDE before I was introduced to the brave new world of command line wizardry.<a class="footnotes-backlink" href="#fnref5">↩︎</a></p></li> +</ol> +</div> +</article> +<hr class="content-separator"/> +<footer class="footer"> +<span class="rfooter"> +<a class="rss-icon" href="/rss.xml" target="_blank" title="RSS feed"><!--RSS feed icon--></a><a class="atom-icon" href="/atom.xml" target="_blank" title="Atom feed"><!--Atom feed icon--></a><a class="cc-icon" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" target="_blank" title="Released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license."><!--CC icon--></a> +<a href="https://github.com/zmwangx" target="_blank">Zhiming Wang</a> +</span> +</footer> +</body> +</html> |