Hello, world!

Welcome to Narc Dot Ro version 3.5! It's exciting! It's new! It's even awesomer than ever!

What?

This is the personal website of Octav Săndulescu, also known as "narc" or "narc0tiq" (yes, that's "narcotic" with shitty spelling. I was young once).

Who?

I have an about page with contact information, but the short version is: I'm a programmer, a naturally geeky type of person, and I have a Linode* and a domain or two. Here's my authorized_keys, if you ever want to authenticate me by SSH key, or something.

* Full disclosure: that's a referral link, but nobody's ever followed it accidentally, to the best of my knowledge.

How?

Magic! In particular, the magic of Flask (a Python WSGI micro-framework), a few Flask extensions, and some SQLite for storing the article text. Oh, and Markdown parsing, because HTML just isn't as simple as almost-plain text.

As for the style, I'm perfectly willing to agree with anyone calling it "very simple". I'm not an artist, and so I wanted first and foremost to let the content be its own thing. I understand CSS (to some extent), but I'm not the kind of wizard who could make Matthew James Taylor's 2-column liquid layout, so I just picked that up for the sidebar and called it good. It worked out pretty well, actually, in my opinion.

Why?

I'll interpret this question as "why is this here?", and the answer is simply "because I can". It's intended as a showcase of my awesomeness (ha!), and sort of proof that I really am a programmer, like I say I am. Of course, I could be lying and have had a friend write this for me, but why would I bother doing something like that when I could just get myself a Tumblr or something equally prosaic?

Where? When?

Just to complete my "major questions" theme, I live in Romania and was born Dec 20, 1984, and this version of my website is being hosted in the UK and the first of the code for it was laid down on Jun 15, 2012. It gets the occasional update as I look at it and go "that doesn't look right".

Anything else?

Sort of, sure, why not. I've got some articles lying around, including a few I saved from the oblivion of the old blog. I don't write often. I've got a MediaWiki install, as well -- it's proven handy a time or two, but nowadays it just feels less and less useful. And just recently I also created a list of projects, because there are just so damn many of them. I fully expect that to get out of date sooner rather than later.