I may, but the authors I discussed with already use several platforms to sell their books (and I can’t really compete with these platforms). This is why I prefer offering a way to put links to them instead.
For ${DAYJOB}, I’m getting my feet wet with Windows-centric C++ development.
For ${REAL_LIFE}, I’m volunteering as an election judge for the Maryland gubernatorial elections. The primaries are tomorrow (Tuesday), so I’ll be at my assigned polling place from 5:30am to at least 11pm. This is the first time I’ve served as an election judge. I’m excited for the experience and am hoping to learn a bit more about our democratic process.
Last week, the missus stepped on a nail, so taking care of our new puppy is going to take a lot more time out of my day. Other than the election judge work, I just plan on working and taking care of the missus, our puppy, and our three-and-a-half-year-old dog.
Ick. Stepping on a nail has been a low-key ~nightmare of mine since I was about 9, stepped on a board while wearing sandals, and had a long rusty nail come up right between my toes. Sorry she’s lived it!
Finally getting around to finishing my rewrite of Osmosis.
It went through several rounds of potential rewrites, in a few different languages, with varying degrees of added complexity. I’ve been trying to solve two problems: portability (it should run on just about any platform) and flexibility (how to define a CRDT that can do enough things for every use case).
What I finally settled on was to edit the existing Typescript version into something much more like Redux. Get rid of the Actions listed in the current README, and instead allow users to write their own reducers for their own actions. An embeddable version based on QuickJS (or JavaScriptCore) could be used in other languages, and it could even support writing reducers in the host language!
This neatly sidesteps the “how many features should my CRDT support” problem, because the CRDT is now just a list of actions, garbage-collected once all nodes have seen all actions up to a point, which is easy to keep in sync.
Working through Python Testing with Pytest because it’s WAY past time I dragged my total lack of unit testing competence kicking and screaming into the light and defeated it once and for all :)
Really enjoying the book so far. It’s really excellent at showing you what you need to know in very functional terms rather than being windy windbag and making me churn through 40 pages of theory to get to the HOW DO I DO IT? :)
You’re probably way more of a code monster already than I am, but I’ve been working through Python Testing With Pytest and finding it immensely helpful.
My ten year old has asked for a server of his own to run Minecraft, Starbound, and Wesnoth servers for his friends, so I’ll be sourcing an old refurbished ProLiant to add to my home cabinet.
Repairing a Slurpee-damaged ThinkPad ( gemini://duncan.bayne.id.au/gemlog/2022-07-18-trackpad-replacement.gmi ).
He’s done a very little Scheme, and a very little Game Maker Studio. Programming in and of itself doesn’t seem to delight him (like it did me at a similar age; I started at 8 with Locomotive BASIC on an Amstrad CPC). Rather it’s the outcome - running / building / creating things. Hence wanting to run a Minecraft server, as opposed to learning to code.
One of the things I’ve learned with kids is to treat parenting like Agile product development (or maneuver warfare; same same). Try a bunch of experiments; double down on those that bring results.
Edited to add: I try to teach kids that computers are tools, not just appliances for consuming media. So when you turn three, you get your “big boy / big girl’s bed” (i.e. an upgrade from a cot), and your first ThinkPad running Linux. This leads to a bit of home fleet maintenance (e.g. Slurpee-destroyed trackpads) but sets them up IMO the right way.
Relatedly: it’s easier to type than write. I’ve noticed all our kids were able to type intelligibly before they were able to write as well on paper. I think that separating out the skill of literacy from the skill of handwriting helps. Likewise our five year old really started trying to read when playing Starbound, where the dialog is all in text.
Programming in and of itself doesn’t seem to delight him (like it did me at a similar age; I started at 8 with Locomotive BASIC on an Amstrad CPC). Rather it’s the outcome - running / building / creating things. Hence wanting to run a Minecraft server, as opposed to learning to code.
Aha, future sysadmin material! :P
Only half joking – I have a good friend who is a sysadmin and we both started out as IT techs in the same job. She enjoys building things by putting pieces together, I enjoy building things by making the pieces from scratch or at least understanding how they work down to the metal. She likes having a finished product, I like solving the problems in the coding process.
I’m 16 and even with that small difference I have no idea how he might think. Programming got me much in the same way as it did you. Maybe it’s just all the abstractions today and not being able to do what you want as easily. At that age I was piecing shareware together on windows to make stuff.
(Also, maybe you can show him how extensive the command system is and what people have made with it. It’s a pretty good gateway drug to Real Programming.)
The parser causes extensive suffering as a primary side effect… (:
But yeah, mentors and docs are very accessible and the only limitations I have are time and not having enough general attention span (so I’ve gotten pretty good at simulating the underlying state machine, being able to see what it’s doing without adding a bunch of println!s)
Just wanna say it’s awesome that you’d even be interested in a technical community like this.
I’d say I wouldn’t have been at 16, but it was 1984 and I think I was on my second Atari 80 bit by then. An 800XL I think, much like the one sitting behind me in my office today :)
This is vacation week three of six; finishing the outside of the sun room we’ve built and having guests over. May find time to finish some work tasks that have been nagging my subconsciousness though.
Ideally, I’ll finally get back around to starting a post/series on markup colors. I started it a couple months back but it kept trying to go down rabbit-holes, so I took some time out to explore those (in the 4-post series that I mentioned in several previous weekly/weekend threads).
That will, however, depend on my ability to dribble out tweets about various ~markup projects in the Twitter thread I mentioned in the weekend thread without letting it wreck my focus…
@work I’m (still) working through lingering bugs with our Catia importer. It feels like whack-a-mole trying to get hide/show states in views and captures working, but it’s getting there. On the bright side, Catia import is roughly 30% faster than before.
@home I’m going to install Linux on my Macbook, but first I need to back up important files, and I really need to go through and organize my backups and come up with a better system than the ad-hoc system I’ve been using.
Also, my Comm Lisp GDAL bindings seem to have bit-rotted and no longer load, so I need to fix that. While I’m at it, I may look at wrapping the C++ API instead of the C API.
You’re triggering a bit of PTSD there from my days as a sysadmin decades ago. I worked for a company called ICAD that sold common lisp based CAD systems, and we had a Catia integration.
It ran on AIX, and all I can remember is sitting there watching the little AIX “SMIT” (their graphical admin tool - Hates them I do :) ) the little SMIT ‘running man’ signifying that the install was working.
If the running man fell down, you were sad and had to start over. My running man fell down a LOT as those installs from tape were super persnickety.
I wish I could just hang out on statebox.tv and watch the applied category theory conf but I am going to the countryside to hang out with family and I doubt much internet will be going on tbh.
I just finished participating in the GMTK 2022 game jam, where the theme was “Roll of the Dice”. I ended up finding a professional pixel artist on a chance message to work with, and they did an excellent job with the art.
We built a game like Plants vs Zombies, but where you have to distribute dice between the towers to make them work.
The end result was, I think, more game than I’ve ever finished in a jam, week-long or weekend. It has some bugs, as often happens when doing something that ambitious, but I’m happy with what we got done, overall.
This is still a very much half baked idea at the moment…..
I’m wondering about setting up a team to create Not A Newspaper.
It would be pretty much everything a newspaper is not.
If it’s not still important a month later, we won’t report it.
If we report it, it’s placed in context (this is where the open government data comes in) and from the readers perspective (that data reads differently if you’re renting vs own a couple of houses, if you’re a twenty something vs a 60+).
If we report stuff, we also enumerate the actions you can take with your vote, your pocket book, your feet, your behaviour to improve the world for all.
I believe we do not have a problem with disinformation.
The problem is a vacuum of useful information. The news media is filled with useless out of context hyped up fluff and undigested press releases.
Going to be continuing on the web interface for the data analytics tool for my company, I’m going to try making a web management interface for a separate backend application, something I’ve never done before. I’ll probably use HTMX to do the interactive elements.
The frontend is made with Django, themed with Bulma, interactive elements in HTMX, it makes calls to OpenSearch for historical information, and a specialised Python Klein/Twisted app for live information, which keeps track of online identities in Redis.
There is a discord ingester, and the above app acts as the IRC ingester. I’m probably going to merge them together which is going to be interesting given I’ve not touched the code for a while and this was my pre-docstring phase -.-
There’s also a research module that does sentiment analysis as the data comes in.
I think the coolest aspect that I’d like to keep is that the data is 100% live, messages appear within half a second of being posted, correctly annotated with sentiment.
(Would link to screenshots instead of the main page but the main page is actually nothing but screenshots right now: https://app.pathogen.is/ – don’t navigate to the actual domain, the website there is quite shit, and will be replaced by this)
Access given for free on request :)
Heading for May Contain Hackers in the Netherlands on Thursday :) Packing and hoping Schiphol is not going to be super painfull.
I’m rediscovering React and Next.js while working on my new project https://1link.st :)
Is this like Goodreads, or more intended for authors?
It is primarily intended for authors so that they can showcase their books :)
Will you provide options for authors to sell their book?
I may, but the authors I discussed with already use several platforms to sell their books (and I can’t really compete with these platforms). This is why I prefer offering a way to put links to them instead.
For ${DAYJOB}, I’m getting my feet wet with Windows-centric C++ development.
For ${REAL_LIFE}, I’m volunteering as an election judge for the Maryland gubernatorial elections. The primaries are tomorrow (Tuesday), so I’ll be at my assigned polling place from 5:30am to at least 11pm. This is the first time I’ve served as an election judge. I’m excited for the experience and am hoping to learn a bit more about our democratic process.
Last week, the missus stepped on a nail, so taking care of our new puppy is going to take a lot more time out of my day. Other than the election judge work, I just plan on working and taking care of the missus, our puppy, and our three-and-a-half-year-old dog.
Ick. Stepping on a nail has been a low-key ~nightmare of mine since I was about 9, stepped on a board while wearing sandals, and had a long rusty nail come up right between my toes. Sorry she’s lived it!
Sorry to hear about the nail.
I’m so out of date with Win32 C++ dev - are you using any kind of a framework at all? Or is the state of the art still message crackers ?
No framework (yet?) We’re using native Windows APIs. We’re working on old code that was hacked up in the weirdest of ways.
Wow that sounds deeply unpleasant!
Admittedly this was in the Win16 days but I remember memory corruption being a TERRIBLE bear to get around when working with low level Windows APIs.
Back in the 90s I had to write a “Thunking layer” to proxy between WIN16 Visual Basic and Win32 DLLs.
I’ll spare you the viewing of the scars :)
Finally getting around to finishing my rewrite of Osmosis.
It went through several rounds of potential rewrites, in a few different languages, with varying degrees of added complexity. I’ve been trying to solve two problems: portability (it should run on just about any platform) and flexibility (how to define a CRDT that can do enough things for every use case).
What I finally settled on was to edit the existing Typescript version into something much more like Redux. Get rid of the Actions listed in the current README, and instead allow users to write their own reducers for their own actions. An embeddable version based on QuickJS (or JavaScriptCore) could be used in other languages, and it could even support writing reducers in the host language!
This neatly sidesteps the “how many features should my CRDT support” problem, because the CRDT is now just a list of actions, garbage-collected once all nodes have seen all actions up to a point, which is easy to keep in sync.
Working through Python Testing with Pytest because it’s WAY past time I dragged my total lack of unit testing competence kicking and screaming into the light and defeated it once and for all :)
Really enjoying the book so far. It’s really excellent at showing you what you need to know in very functional terms rather than being windy windbag and making me churn through 40 pages of theory to get to the HOW DO I DO IT? :)
This week I have to do multithreaded tests with Zmq and feed the results into Pytest.
‘feed the results into’ ?
The tests aren’t written in pytest?
Written in Python, but with (as yet) no Pytest anything.
You’re probably way more of a code monster already than I am, but I’ve been working through Python Testing With Pytest and finding it immensely helpful.
that sounds like a pretty sweet 10yo. does he program?
He’s done a very little Scheme, and a very little Game Maker Studio. Programming in and of itself doesn’t seem to delight him (like it did me at a similar age; I started at 8 with Locomotive BASIC on an Amstrad CPC). Rather it’s the outcome - running / building / creating things. Hence wanting to run a Minecraft server, as opposed to learning to code.
One of the things I’ve learned with kids is to treat parenting like Agile product development (or maneuver warfare; same same). Try a bunch of experiments; double down on those that bring results.
Edited to add: I try to teach kids that computers are tools, not just appliances for consuming media. So when you turn three, you get your “big boy / big girl’s bed” (i.e. an upgrade from a cot), and your first ThinkPad running Linux. This leads to a bit of home fleet maintenance (e.g. Slurpee-destroyed trackpads) but sets them up IMO the right way.
Relatedly: it’s easier to type than write. I’ve noticed all our kids were able to type intelligibly before they were able to write as well on paper. I think that separating out the skill of literacy from the skill of handwriting helps. Likewise our five year old really started trying to read when playing Starbound, where the dialog is all in text.
Aha, future sysadmin material! :P
Only half joking – I have a good friend who is a sysadmin and we both started out as IT techs in the same job. She enjoys building things by putting pieces together, I enjoy building things by making the pieces from scratch or at least understanding how they work down to the metal. She likes having a finished product, I like solving the problems in the coding process.
I’m 16 and even with that small difference I have no idea how he might think. Programming got me much in the same way as it did you. Maybe it’s just all the abstractions today and not being able to do what you want as easily. At that age I was piecing shareware together on windows to make stuff.
(Also, maybe you can show him how extensive the command system is and what people have made with it. It’s a pretty good gateway drug to Real Programming.)
No way, 16!? I was stumbling around Z80 assembler and Pascal at your age, not writing orgmode parsers in languages like Rust! :)
The parser causes extensive suffering as a primary side effect… (:
But yeah, mentors and docs are very accessible and the only limitations I have are time and not having enough general attention span (so I’ve gotten pretty good at simulating the underlying state machine, being able to see what it’s doing without adding a bunch of
println!s)Just wanna say it’s awesome that you’d even be interested in a technical community like this.
I’d say I wouldn’t have been at 16, but it was 1984 and I think I was on my second Atari 80 bit by then. An 800XL I think, much like the one sitting behind me in my office today :)
This is vacation week three of six; finishing the outside of the sun room we’ve built and having guests over. May find time to finish some work tasks that have been nagging my subconsciousness though.
Professionally: publishing things, working on documentation for a GitOps thing, other work things
Personally: playing with the Godot game engine and planning out a sequel to my GB Studio game
Work: Demoing stuff for potential customers after a kinda harrowing week spent prepping for this demo despite the best efforts of Management.
Nonwork: Garnet type-checker rewrite number… five?
Ideally, I’ll finally get back around to starting a post/series on markup colors. I started it a couple months back but it kept trying to go down rabbit-holes, so I took some time out to explore those (in the 4-post series that I mentioned in several previous weekly/weekend threads).
That will, however, depend on my ability to dribble out tweets about various ~markup projects in the Twitter thread I mentioned in the weekend thread without letting it wreck my focus…
@work I’m (still) working through lingering bugs with our Catia importer. It feels like whack-a-mole trying to get hide/show states in views and captures working, but it’s getting there. On the bright side, Catia import is roughly 30% faster than before.
@home I’m going to install Linux on my Macbook, but first I need to back up important files, and I really need to go through and organize my backups and come up with a better system than the ad-hoc system I’ve been using.
Also, my Comm Lisp GDAL bindings seem to have bit-rotted and no longer load, so I need to fix that. While I’m at it, I may look at wrapping the C++ API instead of the C API.
AAAAAH
Catla!
You’re triggering a bit of PTSD there from my days as a sysadmin decades ago. I worked for a company called ICAD that sold common lisp based CAD systems, and we had a Catia integration.
It ran on AIX, and all I can remember is sitting there watching the little AIX “SMIT” (their graphical admin tool - Hates them I do :) ) the little SMIT ‘running man’ signifying that the install was working.
If the running man fell down, you were sad and had to start over. My running man fell down a LOT as those installs from tape were super persnickety.
I DO NOT MISS those particular bad old days :)
I wish I could just hang out on statebox.tv and watch the applied category theory conf but I am going to the countryside to hang out with family and I doubt much internet will be going on tbh.
I just finished participating in the GMTK 2022 game jam, where the theme was “Roll of the Dice”. I ended up finding a professional pixel artist on a chance message to work with, and they did an excellent job with the art.
We built a game like Plants vs Zombies, but where you have to distribute dice between the towers to make them work.
The end result was, I think, more game than I’ve ever finished in a jam, week-long or weekend. It has some bugs, as often happens when doing something that ambitious, but I’m happy with what we got done, overall.
https://rafazcruz.itch.io/dicegeon
[Comment removed by author]
Contemplating http://govhack.org
This is still a very much half baked idea at the moment…..
I’m wondering about setting up a team to create Not A Newspaper.
It would be pretty much everything a newspaper is not.
I believe we do not have a problem with disinformation.
The problem is a vacuum of useful information. The news media is filled with useless out of context hyped up fluff and undigested press releases.
Going to be continuing on the web interface for the data analytics tool for my company, I’m going to try making a web management interface for a separate backend application, something I’ve never done before. I’ll probably use HTMX to do the interactive elements. The frontend is made with Django, themed with Bulma, interactive elements in HTMX, it makes calls to OpenSearch for historical information, and a specialised Python Klein/Twisted app for live information, which keeps track of online identities in Redis. There is a discord ingester, and the above app acts as the IRC ingester. I’m probably going to merge them together which is going to be interesting given I’ve not touched the code for a while and this was my pre-docstring phase -.- There’s also a research module that does sentiment analysis as the data comes in. I think the coolest aspect that I’d like to keep is that the data is 100% live, messages appear within half a second of being posted, correctly annotated with sentiment. (Would link to screenshots instead of the main page but the main page is actually nothing but screenshots right now: https://app.pathogen.is/ – don’t navigate to the actual domain, the website there is quite shit, and will be replaced by this) Access given for free on request :)