Feel free to tell what you plan on doing this weekend and even ask for help or feedback.
Please keep in mind it’s more than OK to do nothing at all too!
Feel free to tell what you plan on doing this weekend and even ask for help or feedback.
Please keep in mind it’s more than OK to do nothing at all too!
I found out about standardebooks.org, and proceeded to add 40+ books to my reading list.
Also moving. (Yes, I’ve been moving for a while. Since the beginning of February, to be exact.)
I’m reading through Crafting Interpreters on paper, currently Chapter 13 at the end of the first half’s treewalk interpreter. Partly because I like the writing, and find the material and form interesting, but mostly to build up some kind of intellectual momentum to get out of a mindless rut.
Playing new friends fest with my band terry green, looking forward to seeing lots of new bands & maybe make some new friends?!
Researching the use of Cloudflare Tunnel to safely expose select services from inside my firewall to the internet without running a DMZ or poking unnecessary holes in my firewall.
I realize I’m exposing aspects of my internal network to CloudFlare’s network and the benefits FAR outweigh the risks since I segment all my service baring Docker running VMs onto their own VLAN anyway.
I use Cloudflare tunnels for my services I need exposed and it works great! I did have some initial struggles setting up the config file, but it works well now. Hopefully the config docs are a bit better now.
I’ll let you know when I get there :) One of my ex coworkers uses them pretty extensively so worst case I can always ask him :)
Moving and working on my Itanium emulator.
Preparing for a fortnight in Greece sailing. Lots to do around the house that needs doing before I go, along with some bits and pieces for other people (computer setup mostly.)
Hopefully make it to the pub to watch the F1 qualifying and catch up with a friend I haven’t seen for a few weeks too.
Ooh, jealous of that fortnight in Greece sailing!
Spending a weekend in Austin, Texas!
Taking my little cousins to the “dinosaur museum”. Loved that place when I was their age (still do!) so I’m excited to see what they think.
I started learning SIMD last weekend and I think I’ll continue. I didn’t get too far, but I think that’s because I was too focused on optimizing code rather than just understanding the basics. So I’ll focus more on isolated simple instructions this time.
Also setting up my M2 MacBook Air that will be delivered sometime today :)
Same as last week: working on my MongoDB to PostgreSQL translation server: https://oxidedb.com or https://demo.oxidedb.com.
I have been wanting to dive deep into a Rust project and the challenge of implementing the MongoDB protocol and then translating it into some sort of SQL counterpart was the first thing that really clicked and got me excited enough to get me working on it nonstop for 3 weeks now.
I’ve failed a few times in a row now, so I may trim my sails and just try to get good sleep, binge something (probably Harley Quinn?) with my partner, and resume dribbling out tweets in this tweet thread about some markup projects I found interesting when doing a deep trawl for novel LWMLs last year.
Speaking as somebody who has a bit of a yen to create their own markup language[1], thank you for linking this.
[1] Yeah I know, the world doesn’t need another one of those, but when has that ever stopped anyone?
I am a sort of opposite. :)
I have been trying desperately not to create my own markup language, but I also really want an LWML that doesn’t eat up a bunch of the namespace and have a bunch of ~anonymous presentational markup. So I trawled through these because I was desperately hoping I’d find that someone’s made what I wanted.
I didn’t find exactly what I wanted, but I got pretty close: I found some good extensible host languages to build a prototype on. (I’ll probably do the language I’ve been using for this at the end of the set?)
It’s a tired critique :)
I understand the value in a good-enough lingua franca, and do still like Markdown and such, but I also think we could do a better job of spreading knowledge about where it breaks down, building better languages/tools for those cases, and developing some best practices or rules-of-thumb for how to tell when Markdown is veering out of its lane in ways that are likely to cause you pain later.
On Saturday, I plan to play all day with our puppy and dog. On Sunday, I’m going to head into the datacenter to perform some much-needed maintenance on the HardenedBSD build infrastructure.
Hopefully starting to code a very simple Pacman in Java with my 10yo son. I’ve tried to start him on Python, but he’s struggling to connect with that, because his ultimate goal is making Minecraft Mods and so he wants to learn Java. Any tips? I’ve never done graphics programming, so could use pointers!
Sunday I’m helping out in the rescue boat at my sailing club, which is hosting a bunch of windsurfers this weekend.
Processing is a library and IDE for making graphics, its based on Java but is a nice, curated experience and a lot more beginner friendly. Here’s a bunch of examples https://processing.org/examples/
I don’t know anything about minecraft modding, but since Processing also uses Java, it might be a gentle and fun introduction.
Tip 1: Essentially any graphics programming is done through a GPU, the days of sticking pixels directly into a frame buffer are gone. I think there’s Windows API’s that still let you do that, and I’m sure old Java GUI API’s as well, but you may well be happier not dealing with them.
Tip 2: Thus, don’t feel bad at all about using a game library that gives you some higher-level tools. Low-level GPU programming through OpenGL or Vulkan is certainly doable, but IMO is a pretty thankless task when it’s not something you’re fundamentally interested in. (DirectX 11 may be better? I don’t know.) For Java, I recommend libGDX (higher level) or LWJGL (lower level), or maybe there’s a good Java binding for Raylib out there.
LibGDX looks just about perfect for what I had in mind, thank you! I wasn’t planning to do anything more complicated than moving around some sprites we load from PNGs.
If you haven’t already, you might want to try Godot. It provides a rich set of APIs for defining scenes and lets you focus on the code for the game logic, not the boilerplate for the GUI parts.
Awesome! I remember I first got into coding when I was ~12 by modding Minecraft. I thought it was a really great (and fun!) way to learn programming. Learning programming is definitely not a one-size-fits-all kind of thing, but personally I found writing small and silly server-side mods to be a good entry point. At the time, the community made an API called Bukkit for doing this, though I’m not sure if it still exists. There was very little complexity you had to handle within each mod, because it used an event-based system with a huge amount of methods accessible through the API. For the simpler mods, you could just implement one or two functions and have something that compiled and worked, which was very important for a child looking for easy gratification. :)
I would note that the graphics programming involved in making Pacman from scratch, while fun, isn’t really a prerequisite to Minecraft (or most other game) modding. You can directly manipulate the game objects from your code while the already built engine does all of the rendering for you. If your son has the interest, you could encourage him to jump into modding directly – I learned by watching copying some tutorials on youtube and changing bits of the code until I (very) slowly figured out how it worked.
Acknowledged. I expect to be doing the lion’s share of the graphics stuff, but I thought Pacman would be a gentler introduction to Java than diving straight into Minecraft. He’s been telling me about how Pacman’s ghosts have different names and behaviours (I hesitate to call them “AIs”, though he does ;-) ) and my idea was we could try to implement those together.
It still exists, but now basically everyone I know of has their fork-distance-from-Bukkit >1 (s, ps)
+1 for this, but the ingame command blocks are also worth mentioning. They’re turing complete, mildly annoying, very easy to get started with and just require the game itself (:
(afterwards you do need some creativity to abuse the mechanisms they give you in order to create more complicated things, but for pacman they should be plenty; you can build a little “screen” out of black concrete, spawn a pig or something and add some buttons with command blocks to teleport the pig around… Later you can make the pig invisible and think of something else to use)
Ah, he’s already played with command blocks a fair bit but he’s got his heart set on creating mods in Java.
The mind boggles at creating Pac-Man inside Minecraft. That never occurred to me!
Doing the main work for my Big Data final project, which for me means some basic analysis of Google’s Open Source Insights dataset to understand the relationships between project popularity and vulnerability rates and severity. Should be fun!
Just finished working on a hackathon project. Excited, even if it didn’t win, will still turn it into a real product
Fifth book in The Weirkey Chronicles by Sarah Lin released today. So re-reading the fourth one and looking forward to the fifth.
I am going to set up my resin 3d printer. Dealing with the resin seems like it will be a hassle, but the extra detail will be nice for miniature war games. I haven’t decided if I want learn 3d design so that I can design my own parts for my tech projects, most of what I want to print is already online.
Working on my Go implementation of Opus. Learning the concepts at first made it slow, but now it is moving faster.
Pardon my ignorance, but what’s Opus in this context? The repo has no indication and that word has been used to name SO MANY THINGS including a pudgy penguin, a file manager, and uh, music stuff :)
Looks like the Opus Audio Format :)
Heck, probably more child-wrangling
Back to working on Garnet. Maybe clean the house. Play with the dog. Perhaps a barbecue?