It must be hor­ri­ble to have said some­thing smart, maybe even in­sight­ful, on­ce, and be la­beled for life as a vi­sion­ary, or a pun­dit, or some oth­er sim­i­lar in­sult.

Con­sid­er Clay Shirky's com­ments on this ar­ti­cle. It's ab­so­lute non­sense, based on ran­dom guess­ing.

I prom­ise this: this blog will have no in­sight on any­thing as long as I write it. I could­n't han­dle the pres­sure.

In­ter­est­ing thing about writ­ing a post ev­ery day: I did­n't get blocked yet. Sure, this is on­ly the 9th post, but con­sid­er­ing my pre­vi­ous post-a-­month ca­dence, and that I would just have noth­ing to write about, it's clear to me that writ­ing leads to writ­ing.

That is per­haps the most ob­vi­ous thing that not ev­ery­one no­tices: the way to do things is to do things. The way to write free soft­ware is to write soft­ware that is free. To go to Alas­ka you have to go. To Alas­ka. To write, you have to write. To do mu­sic, you have to do mu­sic. To make bread, you have to make bread.

Will ev­ery piece of bread you make be good? Will ev­ery­thing you write be good? Will you get to Alaska? No. You will fail.

But if you don't do failed crap first, then there is no way to do any­thing de­cent lat­er. I think it was Amadeo Car­ri­zo (fa­mous, old, goal­keep­er) who said about a (not so fa­mous, young, goal­keep­er) "He's not bad, but he needs to be scored on a few hun­dred times more be­fore he's good".

I have a long his­to­ry of fail­ure. I have a short sto­ry of suc­cess­es. I am work­ing on it.

Of all the corpses of my pro­ject­s, there is one thatI feel worse about, which is rst2pdf. I feel bad about aband­non­ing sev­er­al, but rst2pdf was ac­tu­al­ly a use­ful tool, used by a bunch of peo­ple, and that it has nev­er gath­ered enough mo­men­tum with oth­er de­vel­op­ers is sad.

So, I will pick it up. I will spend about 4 hours a week on it. The plan is to:

1. Gath­­er some patch­es that are lin­ger­ing on the is­­sue track­­er

2. Fix some sim­­ple-ish bugs

3. Make an­oth­er re­lease with 1) and 2)

And of course:

4. Not let it fall in dis­­re­­pair again

In the meantime, here is a nice thing I just heard about. Dimitri Christodoulou has hacked rst2pdf so that it can handle the raw:: html directive.

This, dear friends is com­plete­ly nut­s, ab­so­lute­ly out of scope for any giv­en do­cu­tils tool, and just too cool :-)

I will try to hi­jack his code (prop­er cred­it and so on), and in­cor­po­rate it in­to rst2pdf.

And Dim­itri, or any­one else who wants to do cool stuff with rst2pdf: let me know! I will give you com­mit rights im­me­di­ate­ly!