First off, everything in this web log is Copyright © 2004-2008 Kurt Schwehr. Linking to anywhere in this site is fine. If you want to use any text or other media beyond legal fair use, please contact me. If you will be making money off of this text, we need to negotiate.
With that legal stuff out of the way, let me get to the heart of this blog: What is my blog about? Why am I writing and releasing this stuff to the world?
I have always kept work journals for what I do for my research and engineering projects. A couple years ago, a friend showed me some tricks that she had done for a project. When she gave me the notes, she opened up this gigantic flat text file, searched on the keywords, and blasted off an email to me with how to do some neat new stuff. Wow. What a great idea to do more than just write in a journal/log book. If I did that too, then maybe I could reproduce what I had done in the past and reverse engineer my own work in much less time down the road. My log file from 2004 is over 12000 lines long. That is great and I use these log files all the time.
However, I have been running into a number of problems. First, these entries are often random pastes from xterm windows and such with no context. I often wonder, "What exactly was the reason that I did THAT!?!?!" There is missing context with quick pastes. Second, people often say, how did you do X, Y, and Z. Only a few other people can access my normal work log. There is non-public material in the log files and I maintain several different log files with differing security. I end up spending substantial amount of time passing on this knowledge or it just never gets out to anyone. This is general stuff building on open software and open/published concepts from the scientific literature. I have no need to hide (and I really would like people to know) exactly how I do things like sample a core for paleomagnetic cubes.
I figured that if I wrote my notes to a general audience and released them on a web log, then I would attack both of those problems. By writing to the general audience and knowing that people will judge my writing, there is that extra motivation to be clear, spell things correctly, and elaborate some on each topic. Also, by having a blog available, I can answer specific questions to the general population. If I explain, for example, how to install gmtplus to someone in
I will add more to this when I get a chance.