Remember to save to disk, and do so very often

oday in the evening (or earlier tonight) I was typing up a rather long article in Techrights, where I am the main editor.

As usual, what typically happens is, strands (or trains) of thoughts quickly become streams of words, and words add up to sentences, paragraphs, then a draft of an article. Then I go through the article, which tends to be coherent as it was typed in one go (after planning, having had some time to condition myself to put together a topic to write about in the ‘correct’ sequence), I correct typos, improve the wordings, add some more links etc. (where suitable and readily available)

I do this on a remote laptop connected over the LAN with Barrier, so if there’s a network glitch it can result in lost keystrokes and long repeated keystrokes.

Not for the first time, the latter happened when I pressed “undo” (ctrl+z), so it began undoing things I edited, in effect deleting amendments made for several minutes (far worse than when it happens with backspace as the cursor goes all over the place). Typically I’d be “hands-off” when that happens, then re-do what was omitted. This time, however, two things went wrong: 1) I did not keep “hands-off”, not long enough anyway; so I could not re-do all the way. 2) I did not press ctrl+s (save) for quite some time, so reverting back to the file on disk wasn’t a possibility either. I tried, I even did so from another laptop.

Shit!

I lost some work.

On the bright side: 1) I remembered more or less 80% or more of the changes that I made and could reconstruct a lot (with slight variation, imperfect replication, maybe even better the second time around). 2) not much was lost (either words or time). 3) it was only the editing/correcting pass, not the writing pass. 4) there was a lesson or wake-up call here. I should take advantage of it.

I will probably still take the risk of writing over Barrier, but I need to save to disk more often and be vastly more prudent/careful when undoing gets ‘jammed’. There should be a way to re-do (ctrl+shift+z) everything and, failing that, there’s a file on disk that maintains a recent copy, not what’s on the screen/buffer.

My editing skills typically use past experience (incidents) to reduce chance of loss/error, so my wife was surprised that it happened to me. Writing this blog post probably takes a lot more time than the time the incident ‘cost’ me.

I wonder if other people can relate to this.

I’ve had a lot of time to think about this (over an hour already), so documenting to myself – and maybe to others too -what happened can be hopefully prove useful.

There is no perfect (error-proof) way to edit text, but there are ways to reduce the risk and the cost of mistakes/crashes.

We strive to cover what the media will not

was very serious when I said we’d take it up another notch after our long vacation. Right now I watch back as there are about 20 new blog posts since midnight (it’s only 5AM here). The headsup was based on the devotion of time, or based on the general allocation of resources. We now put foot on the metal/pedal, or push the pedal to the metal throughout the day today, as we expect more tactical intimidation and bullying from hired guns who are extremely rude. Yesterday tuxmachines.org served 665,042 Web requests and techrights.org served 479,275 (not the same as visits).

The sites’ reach only grew since the lawfare began 3 years ago (it was always Americans, it’s still only Americans).

still remember when this site was new more than 2 decades ago. In the summer of 2004 I think I was in London for a sort of “summer school” focused on computer vision. I’d log in to check AWStat after ‘classes’ (lectures rather) and be happy if this site got like 100 visitors in a day whilst I was away from home. To me, 100 people were already a good accomplishment and back then bots were easier to tell apart, hence estimating the number of daily visitors (real human visitors) was feasible.

Fast-forward many years and now I speak to millions, not hundreds. With exposure comes envy, however, and envy leads to litigiousness.

I’d rather choose the latter (with the price of litigiousness) than remain an obscure Ph.D. student who attends lectures.

Things that media is not covering or no longer covering

ONE is the summer, I guess.

September is here and I’ve published 10 Techrights pages in 3 hours, with plenty more to come.

I recognise that many news sites died. Many that used to cover Microsoft layoffs, for instance, no longer do. That leave a a gap for all of us bloggers to fill.

What if the product is misinformation?

atekeeping is the art of hiding particular news, at least in the context of reporting.

These days a lot of the media that we assume exists to inform us is trying to do the exact opposite. It has clients, not audiences, and those clients are typically very rich clients and companies.

We need to ensure more people understand that.

ROSS distortion of facts is possible when the media is not functioning.

It tells us stories like “jobs replaced by AI”.

It says that layoffs are something to do with “AI”, not a failing economy.

It sometimes tells us that people who oppose datacentres aren’t really concerned but are just gullible.

When the media does not function only the liars stand to gain.

Tidying up things ahead of another productive year

reat times come to an end and our vacation is nearly over. Tuesday it’s back to normal.

Yesterday I tidied up around the home and this weekend I’ll prepare stories for September. I still have some physical notebooks with potential future stories. For now they’re in the cabinet.