I’ve completed a rough cut of TLS Mastery, and am now looking for tech reviewers who know TLS. If you know more about TLS than the above average sysadmin and would like to review the manuscript, please drop me a note at mwl at mwl dot io with the subject “TLS Reviewer” or use the contact form. I’ll be collecting feedback until 28 February. Then I integrate everything and make a real book.

I’ve given the manuscript to sponsors, plus the Digital Reader and above Patronizers. (Thus proving you don’t need blockchain for “proof of work.”) If you’re a sponsor it’s in your account. There’s three PDFs: the one for Windows and Mac, the one with everything embedded, and the one that’s printed to PDF. One of them should work for your combination of PDF viewer and OS.

Next up, I start hammering on $ git sync murder. Plus I fix some annoying web site issues, get the Montague Portal omnibus in production, and maybe even clean my office.

No, that’s not a typo. TLS Mastery will have two covers. Eddie Sharam outdid himself this time, in more ways than one, parodying an artistic masterpiece that folks have requested for years.

Munch’s The Scream could not be used for just any book, mind you. It demands a topic of particular notoriety. A subject that drives even seasoned systems administrators to desperate shrieks for aid. Something that makes the world whirl around us all. With its classic combination X.509, ASN.1, ITU and IETF standards, and more, I’m pleased to say TLS fits this more than any other general topic.

The book will appear in two versions: the Beastie Edition, and the Tux Edition.

The hardcover dust jacket will have both.

As a unique touch, Eddie painted the Beastie version. By hand. With oil paint. You know, like real art. And if you should ever be unlucky enough to enter my office, you’ll see this.

Every day as I work, I’ll be looking at this.

That old beat-up bookcase? Once we can safely go to IKEA, that’ll be replaced by a new bookcase for my brag shelf. My current brag shelf is overflowing.

Real authors have the cover art for their books hanging on their wall. I guess I’m a real author now. It’s been a long time since one of my books had a painted cover. How long, you might ask? Well, the wall behind my desk has the previous paintings.

Those are Tom Dow’s cover paintings for the two Gatecrasher books, plus a Bradley K McDevitt original from the interior. They’re roughly 1992. Getting those paintings converted to a form suitable for printing involved going to an industrial photographer and having a photograph separated into four CMYK transparencies. Each cost several hundred dollars, and had to be shipped to the printer. If any of the transparencies got damaged, the whole set was ruined. Dealing with the interior art involved high-grade photoduplication, a light table, and a wax roller.

To prepare the Beastie Scream oil painting for printing, Eddie got out his camera. No, not the cellphone camera, a good camera.

This is truly the best time in history to be a creator. Other than, you know, plagues and long-overdue racial reckonings and political upheaval and such.

I’m gonna be self-indulgent here and show off the BKM interior illo as well. Like I need an excuse, it’s my blog.

This was one of the very first pieces Brad did for me, but once I saw the book titles I knew we were going to get along famously.

If you’re interested, you can get T-shirts and small posters with the Tux Scream and Beastie Scream at my shop. The book itself is still open for sponsorship.

Solar systems form out of vast clouds of particles and gas. Motes of dust aggregate, drawn together by their own minuscule gravity over innumerable aeons. Those aggregates creep near other aggregates, eventually colliding into heavier masses, and their combined gravity draws yet more matter. A cosmic observer with a really compressed sense of time would see nothing happen for millennia, then there would be a huge rush as all this matter sucks itself together and becomes so heavy that the innermost atoms are compressed into involuntary thermonuclear fusion. It looks quick, but most of the progress is invisible.

Writing this book is a lot like that.

I’ve used TLS and SSL for decades. I have debugged errors and battled bogus certificate chains. I have screamed the vilest obscenities at SSL Labs for daring to expose my weaknesses and, like every other sysadmin, have doused browser developers in kerosine as they slept and set them on fire. I had a good working knowledge of TLS, but writing about it demanded a deep plunge.

So: the book is about a quarter written.

Most of my time has been spent aggregating tiny details into facts, building those facts into knowledge, and fitting my experience into that knowledge. I’m not going to jinx myself by publicly declaring that I expect the mere writing to go quickly, of course, but I feel I have some decent aggregate chunks and am ready to start throwing them together.

The Princess Bride motif I was considering seems to be a natural fit. Which is good, because if a motif doesn’t fit naturally it’s the wrong motif. My subconscious brain recognized the suitability before my conscious mind did. (Weirdly, John Carpenter films would have also fit well. I did cosmic horror for the SNMP book, however, so my beloved Carpenter must wait for another suitable title.)

Some bits, of course, won’t fit. A stray comment from Ray Percival reminded me that this book doesn’t mention my personal favorite Great Evil: Oracle. You might not have noticed, but Oracle has exerted great efforts to earn my personal loathing. The conversation ed1conf and I had on the Great Beast is irrelevant to TLS.

“You’ve heard of Informix? DB/2? SQL Server 2019?”

“Yes.”

“Morons.”

“In that case I challenge you to a battle of integrity.”

“For the database?”

“Yes.”

“To the death?”

(nods)

“I accept!”

“Good. Then open your console. Read this, but do not click «agree».”

“I comprehend nothing.”

“What you do not comprehend is called a EULA. It is odorless, tasteless, devolves instantly into legalese, and is among the more deadlier poisons known to man.”

(deploys system)

“All right: where is the liability? The battle of wits has begun. It ends when you decide and we both click «agree», and find out who is right and who is sued.”

(much later)

“They all had a EULA. I spent the last several years building up a mastery of Postgres.”

You can still sponsor TLS Mastery either at the print level or ebook level. Don’t wait too long if you’re interested. The dust cloud is coming together faster and faster, and once fusion hits it’s all over.

Today, this happened.

This is a Sudo Mastery, 2nd Edition print sponsor’s gift. I shipped this book out just after I got the hardcovers, back in late 2019. It went to Russia. Months later, it came back with a tag saying “No such person at this address.” In the months between purchasing the sponsorship and me finishing the book, the sponsor had moved to Estonia. I shipped the book out the second time with the Networknomicon sponsorship shipments, just before the United States Postal Service to suspend all shipments to Estonia.

Today, I checked my PO Box for the first time since sending those books. I don’t get much mail there, and I’ve avoided leaving the house because of the plague. The length of this delay is 100% my fault. Fortunately, mail service to Estonia has been restored. I can now reship this package. AGAIN. The good news is I’m entitled to a refund on postage, so I don’t have to pay postage a third time.

The sponsor (who I’m not going to name for privacy reasons, though he’s welcome to chime in here to call me an idiot) has been beyond patient. I’m going to add some extras to his package, to show my gratitude.

But if you’re considering book sponsorships, or Kickstarters, or anything that involves physical goods, this is the sort of headache you’ll be dealing with. If (when) the plague is still going on when I finish TLS Mastery and start the next tech book, I might decide to not offer print sponsorships. Don’t get me wrong, I’m utterly grateful for people’s support–but I must not make promises I cannot reliably keep.

Stupid plague.

Anyway, that’s enough annoyance for today. I need to go make the words. Stay home, wash your hands, and wear a mask. And be kind to those around you–they’re just as stressed out as you are.

Mark Leslie Lefebvre hosts Stark Reflections, an essential podcast for writers. He was kind enough to interview me on my new book, Cash Flow for Creators. If you have any interest in managing money in a creative business, check it out. We also talked about the Networknomicon and other special editions, as well as many other options open to today’s creators.

Mark knows the publishing business cold, and his thoughts are well worth listening to. Plus, Mark is giving away a copy of the book. Listen to learn how to win.

Meanwhile, over at Writing Slices, Alex Kourvo reads books about writing. Now, I’m not saying that Kourvo calls her blog that because when she finds a bad book she slices it to ribbons. I wouldn’t dare. Alex turned her experienced and incisive eye to C4C. While I’ve given up soliciting long-form reviews, I’m always pleased when they happen. I expected her to leave my book a heap of ribbons, but was pleasantly surprised.

If you’re a writer and you have any interest in learning your craft, you should subscribe to Writing Slices. She really will save you a whole world of frustration with lousy books, freeing you to discover your own personal, entirely unique realms of frustration. I rarely buy writing books any more, but when I do it’s because she recommended them.

You can get C4C in all the usual places, including at my ebookstore and my print bookstore.

That’s enough resting on past successes. The electricity has returned after a 51-hour outage. The fridge has been sanitized and restocked. It’s time for me to descend into the Word Mines and drag out a bucket of high-carat verbs, not all of them obscene.

I make my living writing books. I don’t consult. I don’t teach, except for occasional talks at user groups and conferences–and cynics might call those talks “one hour commercials for a book.” It caused a problem I didn’t predict. People keep asking me how I do it. Some of these querents are making enough at their writing or other creative endeavor that they could make a living with their writing. I find my way of life immensely satisfying, and I believe similarly inclined folks should enjoy the same pleasure.

The answer comes down to: learn business.

Most business books are irrelevant to creators. Business books are aimed at franchises or stores or family factories, and contain chapter after chapter of stuff that’s utterly irrelevant to creators. I know. I read the books. Plus, the artistic stereotype includes “bad with business.” This is a pernicious myth that hampers many creators. A creator that dives into a business book filled with irrelevancies can be forgiven for buying into the myth, though.

This myth supports an entire industry. Any number of people will agree that creators have no head for business. It’s genetic. It’s not in their nature. That’s just how it is. They will soberly agree to handle your business affairs for a meager cut of the take. These people have an unparalleled skill at looking serious while their inner child is cackling and counting up the money. They profit by feeding the myth. These folks take the “no head for business” myth from a handicap and escalate it to utter pernicious fallacy.

A creative business isn’t hard, once you know how to do it. It might be the simplest kind of business there is, specifically because you don’t have to worry about so many of the things that make a store or a factory complicated. It might also be the most complicated, because being a full-time creator changes your whole life.

So I wrote a book about it. A small book. A cheap book. Cash Flow for Creators is about how to create, run, and build a creative business from the ground up. It explains how business works, and how to convert the irregular flow of creative income into rent payments without getting in trouble with the tax man.

It’s available my ebookstore and my brand new print bookstore. Or lots of other places shown in the book listing. (Still waiting on Apple, dagnabit.)

There it is. That’s how I do it. No secrets, no evasions.

The rest is up to you.

My next book will be TLS Mastery, all about Transport Layer Encryption, Let’s Encrypt, OCSP, and so on.

This should be a shorter book, more like my DNSSEC or Tarsnap titles, or the first edition of Sudo Mastery. I would like a break from writing doorstops like the SNMP and jails books.

You can sponsor in print or ebook. Remember, the print sponsorship includes everything in the ebook sponsorship, so you don’t need to buy both unless you want your name to appear twice in the ebook.

As we’re in a pandemic: take care of you and yours first! I’m conflicted on offering sponsorships, as so many people have lost their jobs. Several folks said they were going to send me money anyway, so I’ve opened these up. Do NOT send me money if you have any doubts about your financial stability.

Bit by bit, site by site, SNMP Mastery is escaping into the world. I’ll keep the SNMP Mastery entry on my web page updated as it appears in more stores.

The various store databases are still synching everything up. You can get both paperback and Kindle on Amazon, but the entries aren’t connected. IngramSpark, the non-Amazon paper distributor and the sole source for hardcovers, is still processing. It’ll appear in other stores soon.

Now to go do my taxes, and get more work on git sync murder.