I've started a new blog, Entropy Pump, hosted on my own colo server.

I'm not sure yet what the division of labor is going to be between Entropy Pump and this LinuxQuestions blog. The current notion is to make the LQ blog mostly about software (and Linux in particular) and Entropy Pump about everything else.

If that pans out, I will update the description of the LQ blog accordingly.

The other day I thought, not for the first time, that it was kind of dumb to be manually building my stripped-down Slackware install tarball, and having to remember the tweaks I like having done to the system after "setup" but before the first system boot. I end up forgetting things, getting frustrated at the minimalist busybox-based setup environment, and going back and making some changes after first boot instead of before (and as often as not sneakernetting files to the new system...

Some years ago, I wrote a little utility called "sel", short for "select" (to avoid confusion with bash's "select" builtin).

It's more or less SQL's "select" statement for the command line, reading structured data on stdin and writing structured data on stdout, optionally filtering rows (like a structured-data-savvy grep) and creating / removing / reordering columns and changing the format. For instance, it could read CSV in and write tab-delimited...

It's been more than two years since I wrote something about the General Purpose Cartridge for military rifles http://ciar.org/ttk/mbt/guns/gpc.2012-10-23.html

I wanted to hold off so I could improve my ballistic analysis software, collect more empirical evidence, and learn something about the GPC candidates and legacy cartridge upgrades under development by various military institutions, but these developments have been slow in the coming.

When I've had time to spare...

I finally got around to hanging a couple of shelves in the Datashack, and I don't think the crazy person who constructed the building used proper 2x4 studs. The shelf brackets had holes on either side, about an inch apart, and I had to toe-in the screws pretty hard to get both of them to bite into stud. They must have used 1x4's or 1x2's or some other wacky thing.

Anyway, two shelves are in, and the equipment on that side of the building is on them (though I need to figure out something...