When I started work on rewriting the term rewriter I thought “Here’s a fun project I can work on occasionally.” That turned into almost never, thanks to a number of factors.
- My kids became fascinated with Minecraft and I had to build complex Redstone contraptions for them, which has been fun!
- My kids became fascinated with Roblox and I had to build complex Lua scripts for them, which has been fun!
- I was running 10 (ten!) different projects at work. This was less fun, but actually, I have an awesome job and really, really love being a researcher. ORNL is a wonderful place to work.
- I decided to start teaching graduate classes for Tennessee Technological University on automated reverse engineering of compiled software because I love teaching.
So the rewriter took a back seat to everything else, and time passed.
In a surprising event, I actually lost data! This will be shocking for folks who know me because I am obsessive about backups, and backups of backups. I didn’t lose much data, but my hosting provider turned out to be… less than good. I have since switched to a new hosting provider. This meant I lost a lot of design work done in the Wiki on the old site. So ist das Leben. Anyway, that further discouraged me and I’ve been slow (over a year, man!) to pick up the thread.
I build a pathological backup system (partially detailed in articles I wrote for Medium) that sits in the corner and quietly backup up all my sites (and the kiddos Minecraft servers!) and then replicates data off-site. Everything is straight replicated, then checked into a git repo for tracking and then the repo is replicated. Spinning disks are cheap. Data isn’t.
Oh. We also bought a new house and moved. Yeah, that too. The kiddos all need their own bedrooms.
So basically no real excuse until our rescue dog got cancer. A round of chemo left him in complete remission for six months. Now he’s starting another round of chemo because the cancer is back.
So I am slowly starting back on rewriting the term rewriter. We’ll see how it goes.