I got mmap-object to support buffers as values. It also now conforms to the iterable protocol making efficient iteration possible.

Expect a new Myrddin release very soon.

Getting some time for electronics projects, and doing a bit of a grab and grin:

• I’m doing a project with HIDIOT and Neopixel rings for a festival with Devoxx, CERN and the University of Lancaster, to create a particle accelerator simulator for kids.
• I’m also getting the final 44COIN prototype hardware off to the fab.
• Meeting a few partners and clients about security consulting projects.

If I get time, I’m going to do some more work on moving the rawhex site off shopify. It’s been a total nightmare since we moved our main site hosting over as it’s broken SPF and DKIM, so we can’t do mailing list mails or anything.

Personal projects: my first iOS app saga continues.

Put together a solution for push notifications last week. Coming from Common Lisp, initially opted for Clojure. But seeing how my mostly idle process eats up 700Mb memory, vs. <300Mb of full fledged trading backend in CL changed my mind. So dusted off my Ruby (pre-Rails times) and made a small push notifier using Apnotic. Have to say its json parser is impressively fast.

Otherwise, tackled on the can of worms Apple’s in-app renewing subscription system is. Think it’s mostly under control now, but a few corner cases have to be handled. Deferred purchases, cancellations. Guess that’ll keep me busy most of the evenings this week.

At work it’s relatively quiet, so we have time to go through with the contractor over preliminary BOM and schematics for the new product. This time around I split the design process to have an early functional prototype patched together. A few design defects were already found before the layout for “real” prototype has been completed, chances are good we’d need minimal changes to production.

For work, the automatic tools used by our pentester has uncovered that one of our services makes some seriously inefficient use of the database, enough so that a few queries per second can put it at 100% usage… so I’m trying to optimise them. There’s something oddly fun about using the postgres query analyzer, it’s a bit like a Zachlike game.

For side project I’ve just finished doing a bunch of front-end work to try to make it more fun - inserting screens that show the user their progress along the way. Next technical step is probably making it so that you don’t have to log in right away, but the correct startup move is probably to close the text editor and do marketing for a while :(.

Finished up with a client so I’ve had a lot of free time to work on my novel, Farisa’s Crossing. I think there’s a good chance (over 90%) of my having it ready for an April 26, 2019 launch. We’ll see where it goes.

A few job interviews. Really looking for something stable and interesting, although there’s seems to be a very high Planck’s constant (or perhaps I am a small-mass particle) which makes it rare to find both.

Last week simplified the rule set for Ambition. Going to run some simulations with more realistic players (i.e., more intelligence than “random legal”) to make sure all the changes make sense, although I feel pretty good already.

Outside the day gig, I’ll continue on my take on “the Golang code-gen tooling I’d like to see & use & have at-hand— after having written ad-hoc, haphazard, one-off, quick&dirty, unwieldy code-gens time and again (occasionally here&there) for the last 7 years”: https://github.com/metaleap/go-gent

Adding support for accelerometer interrupts to my watch firmware, especially step counting and tap detection.

Few weeks ago I created a script for my personal static site generator[0]. Now, I am planning to write the complete documentation[1] on how I have created it.

[0]. https://github.com/chauhankiran/bajana [1]. https://dev.to/chauhankiran/developing-ssg-using-node-56c2

Apartment: Good progress on the last bits - last baseboards done, touchups everywhere and hung up a chandolier inherited from my grandmother and it looks great! I was never much of a handyman prior to this, but I keep finding hidden talents - turns out you can get very far with some googling and a bit of help from the old man ;)

Job: Still working on the last bits and pieces of proper monitoring for our Kubernetes cluster. We run a AWS-based setup with all the bells and whistles set up, and we need an equivelant setup for our Kubernetes-based cluster (application monitoring, alerts, etc.) Slow progress, but learning a lot along the way.

Finished my thesis and submitted it. Tomorrow’s the presentation, so that pretty much occupies me.

Once that is done, a break. Whether it’s an actual, proper break or just a break to do sideprojects, I am not sure yet.

Following on from last week:

• For $HOME - holy shit, these builders are quick, so no doubt various renovation related things: taking down electrical fixtures in their way, choosing materials, etc

• For $CLIENT1 - I’m actually working on the initial ZF1 > Bamboo cutover, which initially means working out if it’s even remotely possible to have a compatibility shim to map whatever the fuck model concept ZF1 uses, into the ~active record pattern Bamboo implements.

NER, classifier and recommender system. Planing data collection and I have to implement push notifications in our CMS… Is the week only 5 days?

Finally managed to convince that we need to rewrite a crucial component in our product, I will start to dig into it this week

Adding/testing support for Clojure’s tools.deps CLI for Deps. Theoretically there shouldn’t be much needed if anything but I need to document it for customers, and will probably write a guide for how to use it in CI.

I’m also accumulating instructions for enough different build tools that I need to add tabs or some other information hiding mechanism on the setup page.

Been a while.

$work: Trying to execute a major migration, while training new staff, dealing with turnover, and the fact that a lot of knowledge has been lost. But hey, they promoted me, so I’ve got that going for me.

!$work: Building some storage in my woodshop, slowgoing and it means that I can’t really use the shop (it’s ashambles) while I do. When I’m done I’ll have much more storage space though and much better organization, so it’s probably worth it. I still have a pile of bowl blanks to work through too, hopefully they won’t completely check out before I get to them. I also bought a new telescope recently. I’m going camping later this year to a Class 2 light pollution sight (I currently live in a Class 5), and I’ll be going during the new moon, so I’m hoping to get some real good views. It’s a 8” Dob w/ a 1200mm focal length, a major upgrade over the old, cheap 2” / ~900mm Refractor I have. Going to test it out hopefully this week once the weather clears a bit. It’s unfortunately bright, but I’m hoping I can get some good planetary views in at least while Jupiter and Saturn are here.

Work:

• We had some nasty issues with HPe Apollo machines, hopefully we can solve all of them. I really hate hardware now.
• Focus a bit on improvement tasks, we have quite a large backlog and it could use some TLC
• We’ll be investigating some new technologies, I’m not totally convinced but it’s looking good

Home:

• Last time I worked on my dotfiles is ages ago. I’m starting to bring my vim setup + plugins up to date. Tmux next if I feel like it
• I still have some infrastructure automation tasks left to do, but it’s all just menial, brainless things so I’ve been putting them off. I made a list and will start doing them one by one. Motivation is thoroughly lacking though so I’ll see…
• My birthday is coming up but my family is using my day off to drive them around or do chores, I’ll have to start blocking things and plan to do something nice.

$WORK: The project I’m on is behind schedule by a significant margin and review season is in full swing. It is not a fun time to be in industry.

$HOME: Very seriously considering leaving industry for academia for good. First, however, I need to get accepted into a university, so I’ve started a list of colleges to apply for. Next on my agenda will be deciding whether to major in Physics or Computer Science.

For work I’m going to be learning about react-native in order to be able to start being able to do some IC work on an existing project. My hope is that fires don’t start and subsequently interrupt this. We’ll see.

For not-work, this week I have to get some audio editing done for my podcast. If I can squeeze it in I’d like to also get some writing time in.

At work I keep getting interrupted with high priority bugs and cases, so those are taking most of my time. Also trying to squeeze in some feature work when I can. Things would go a lot smoother if we’d stop adding all these bugs ;-)

Outside of work I’m continuing to follow the SWI Prolog course. I fell behind a bit and submitted the first two exercises late, but caught up and worked ahead a little bit this week. Definitely an interesting language and a new (for me) way of thinking about code. I’ll be riding my bike through the mountains all next week, so I’ll be playing catch up again soon.

Finally, I’m doing some last minute bike tuning, replacing my tires, and getting all my gear collected and ready for next week’s hut trip. It should be a good trip, we’re only riding 20-25 miles between each hut, so we should have plenty of time to relax. If anybody’s interested, here’s the route we’re taking: https://ridewithgps.com/routes/27860191

working on version 2 of the ambassador rewards and invite system for Merit. I’m in the testing / tweak phase, the longest part of development.

github