Racket Yet Vexes Me

Saturday, Jul 4, 2026

By a guest automaton. Written by ChatGPT in a mock-medieval style. FYI: Every post on blog.winny.tech which has AI content carries a madewithai tag. Read on: Racket Yet Vexes Me Long ago, Winston wrote that Racket frustrated him. Years passed. The code slept. The ache endured. A small pull request came to `toml-racket`: inspect, test, merge. Yet Racket took toll. The maintainer returned and met again the old rites: packages, collections, links, user installs, compiled leavings, and the many moods of `raco`.

Am I going to keep blogging?

Saturday, Jun 27, 2026

GitLab emailed me about a failed Let’s Encrypt renewal. Had to press the Retry button to encourage GitLab’s LE stack to do its thing. This has happened a couple times but not a big deal. It reminded me to check up on my winny.tech GitLab namespace and see what my last post was all back on October 12, 2025. 8½ months ago. I’ve been focused on keeping the proverbial boat afloat.

Some usecases for GNU Units

Sunday, Oct 12, 2025

As a studious GNU Units user, I have a small body of notes documenting various ways to perform calculations with unit conversions. Here are a few select ways that I found use of GNU units. But first, a word about using GNU Units GNU Units is a powerful, free calculator that performs unit conversions for you. Please check out the examples on GNU Units’ homepage to see what it is capable of.

Python 3.14 - Changes to look for

Tuesday, Oct 7, 2025

Python 3.14 was released today and I caught myself reading the Python 3.14 release notes so figured I’d type up what changes caught my eye. Installing Python There are probably better ways to do this. I opted to manually build and install Python 3.14: ./configure --prefix=$HOME/python3.14 && make -j && make install export PATH="$HOME/python3.14/bin:$PATH" which python3 # Should print out a path equivalent to $HOME/python3.14/bin/python3 python -m json This is a nice way to pretty-print JSON (both indentation and color).

Debian Package Stats using Sqlite

Monday, Oct 6, 2025

I am curious regarding how many packages existed on my system. Then I got to wondering how many are Google projects? How many are Apache projects? Are all packages fully installed? Get a list of packages into sqlite First, one needs to create the sqlite3 file. The following bash script generates a .csv file with a header (that’s the echo command on the third line) and a dpkg-query incantation. Then the script prepares a sqlite file and imports the .

Obscure Emacs Package: ssh-config-mode

Wednesday, Oct 1, 2025

There’s this cool blog-o-sphere Emacs party going on, with September’s theme of everything about obscure packages. And woops, I’m a day late to the party, so here goes nothing. The idea is to post a weird package that you use but is sort of obscure! M-x winny/visit-configuration RET and I’ve selected uhhh… ssh-config-mode ssh-config-mode Syntax highlighting for your SSH configs, known hosts, and authorized keys files. Nuff said. I have the following line in my Emacs configuration.

Update on my Racket exit

Friday, Apr 25, 2025

Figure 1: Blasting off from planet Racket to other planets. Thanks ChatGPT. It’s been almost two years since I took a public step away from the Racket diaspora. I’m writing this post to air out how my Racket projects have gone since then. I believe, as of now, I have zero Racket codebases to maintain — hooray! I want to show how to handle old codebases. Let’s reaffirm the importance of handing off inactive projects instead of holding on to them.