Why did I start this blog? It all stemmed from the movie The Social Network, where Mark Zuckerberg is shown to be blogging frequently about his thoughts. So, I decided to make a blog where I will write about my random musings.
But the thing with random musings is that one cannot remember and write about them later. I had to create some method by which I can almost instantaneously switch back and forth between work and blogging. So, I stitched bash, C and PHP together, and now I just have to hit the tilda(~) key to show/hide a window, where I directly start typing a post, and it gets published when I’m done!
There were problems, of course. Initially, the blog window was just a C input stream.. unidirectional and offering no way of editing/reordering the text; being behind a proxy is painful; plus, special characters did not get published properly. Eventually, after days of testing and debugging, I now have a proper system; I use “emacs -nw” in the blog window; I pseudo-tunnel the post through the proxy to an external server, from where the WordPress XMLRPC is called, and I use proper character encoding.
Even though the above was my initial idea; I realized very quickly that it is better to write a few, full length posts than just many random ‘tweets’.
Why did I choose this name for the blog? Actually, it’s a phrase from the lyrics of High Hopes, a song by Pink Floyd that I happen to particularly like. Also, I consider magnets to be one of the most fascinating and miraculous objects that man has historically encountered.