Michael W. Lucas's Blog, page 29

I Eat Salmon Ice Cream

There’s about sixty hours to go on the Prohibition Orcs kickstarter. I haven’t done the math yet, because the campaign is not over yet and I don’t have money in hand, but it appears that I’ll net about as much on this Kickstarter as I would selling the books to a midsized publisher.

The Kickstarter is undoubtedly a huge amount of work. But it’s less mental labor than selling the books to a publisher, negotiating a contract, and interfacing with that publisher’s staff to shepherd them into print....

Leather Book Covers?

Over in OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems land, I spent yesterday writing about dumpfs and how modern UFS respects disk geometry. (It doesn’t, except when it does.)

Over in Kickstarter land, I got a sample over the Orcibus’ leather cover.

It’s magnificent. Fortunately, because it’s $200.

I’m contemplating offering a leather cover when I do the OMF Kickstarter.

Gut reaction, of course, is that this would be stupid. Nobody wants a fancy tech book. But I thought nobody would want a hardcover tech book,...

Halfway Through the Orc Kickstarter

I hoped that the Prohibition Orcs Kickstarter would break $5k in thirty days. That would give me the complete custom covers, and let me publish my Dream Orc Books.

Instead, it’s over $8k in less than half that time. This is the most I have ever been paid for a work of fiction, and it’s not even out yet. (Lifetime sales on some novels are higher, I’m sure, but I don’t have the accounting software to figure that out. Nobody does.)

It’s also following the same trend as the Badgers kickstarter: busy...

Prohibition Orcs Kickstarter now live!

At long last, I’m publishing a collection of Prohibition Orcs tales and a full-length PO novel. I’m using a Kickstarter to fund the initial expenses, so that I can afford custom art and a few extras.

If you’re a Patronizer, you’ll automatically get books as per your patronage level. If you want the fancy but expensive Orcibus bound in authentic orc leather, you’ll have to get it through the Kickstarter I’m afraid.

Once the books go live, the individual chapbooks will go out of print. Grab them ...

“SSH at Scale” Talk Tonight

I’ll be giving my “OpenSSH at Scale” talk at SeMiBUG tonight, followed by a Q&A. 7PM Eastern time. Based on the second half of my book SSH Mastery.

Join at this link.

Stop by, say hi, listen to me babble about SSH principals and certificates and LDAP and stuff.

Penguicon 2022 Schedule and Books

The folks at Penguicon have released the schedule to presenters. It’s not public yet–it will be soon, promise!–but here’s my little slice of it.

Friday
4pm: DNSSEC in 2022 (presentation)
5pm: Covid and Creativity (panel)

Saturday
11am: Trad vs Indie Publishing (panel)
12pm: Writing Workshop: Setting as Characterization (workshop, 2 hours)
3pm: Self-Publishing in 2022 (panel or AMA, there’s confusion)
4pm: Reading (with GoH JD DeLuzio)
5pm: TLS in 2022 (presentation)
6pm: Writer’s Block bookstore...

Talking DNSSEC, 12 April 2022

I’ll be presenting on DNSSEC at mug.org’s online meeting, tomorrow evening at 7 PM EDT.

You can join the meeting proper, or absorb it passively through their live youtube stream.

It is, of course, based on my book DNSSEC Mastery, 2nd edition, available at all fine retailers and many mediocre ones.

Kickstarter and Blockchain

The fact that I don’t support and won’t use environmentally disastrous cryptocurrency and distributed blockchains is not a secret. I’ve also said that I plan to start using Kickstarter more often. Kickstarter has said they have a blockchain strategy. Are my stances contradictory?

Not yet, but they might be in the future.

One of the many annoying things about large companies are the busybodies who don’t really know the company’s business or how the trade works, but have leverage and demand that t...

Software Recommendations

I’ve recently gotten a spate of emails asking what software stack I recommend. I suspect someone’s attempting an argument from authority, or trying to catch me contradicting something I said decades ago, or… or who knows what. I’ll be adding this to my FAQ, but here’s the long answer. Ahem:

Use whatever you think will work.

Software is terrible. Operating systems are worse. Some are worse than others.

I tend to put databases on ZFS, because databases are even more terrible and I want automatic s...

Yet Another New Book: “Letters to ed(1)”

It’s release day! Letters to ed(1): The FreeBSD Journal Letters Column, years 1-3, is now available in ebook and paperback everywhere. Amazon hasn’t hooked the paperback and ebook together, nor have they connected the book to my bibliography, but it really is available.

And… that’s all.

No more new books for a while. At least, not until I write them.