Feel free to tell what you plan on doing this weekend and even ask for help or feedback… or given this has gone up halfway through the weekend, what have you done this weekend? :-)
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… or given this has gone up halfway through the weekend, what have you done this weekend? :-)
Please keep in mind it’s more than OK to do nothing at all too!
Adding some new AVX 512 intrinsics to rust.
Thank you.
Trying hard to avoid programming and being on a computer. My wrists are hurting and I’ve been incredibly paranoid about RSI over the last few weeks. To the point that most of my projects haven’t made progress.
Instead I’ll be reading, protesting in PDX, and …. I dunno trying to find non-computer hobbies or something.
Good on you. I think more of us need to strive for this. I suggest good hobbies for the programmer are:
I like cooking but sometimes the slow edit-compile-test loop frustrates me.
Any recommendations on books or reading material for someone that hasn’t thought about maths since A-Level/college?
You could try browsing through this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xg3hXCYQPJkwHyik2/the-best-textbooks-on-every-subject
Personally, I can recommend Probability Theory:The Logic of Science if your are interested in Bayes. I like the style. Example quote:
In 2015 I bought a maxed-out iMac 27” inch which I use as my desktop computer today, a powerful machine for my needs. Using the apple aluminium keyboard daily for 8+ hours quickly resulted in RSI. I bought a mechanical keyboard, the pain stopped. In 2016 I bought a maxed-out macbook pro, featuring the butterfly keyboard. I am not sure why, but I strongly prefer using the MBP over the iMac, maybe. it has to do with the screen being closer. Of course, it allows to sit on the couch and still be able to work on a computer which is a huge plus. Unfortunately when I work on the MBP many hours per day, for a few days, I get back mild RSI.
Protesting. And working, among other things. Sigh. My own fault though.
Busy building an IRC bot. I’m relearning Python in the process, as this my first Python project in more than a year.
Marching ofc!
Just worked out a custom protocol for my wayland compositor, river, to send events to status bars and the like. Next on the todo list is patching waybar, the status bar I’m currently using, to add support for my protocol. This is an aspect of wayland that I find very cool and appealing; it is so easy to extend that you don’t need to roll a separate IPC mechanism for compositor-specific usage.
Working on my painfully over-engineered chat bot and adding support for more platforms. It currently supports IRC, but I’d like to add Discord and Minecraft. I’m halfway done with the Minecraft plugin, but the backend service needs to be expanded to work with multiple chat services (and multiple chat platforms).
I have this crazy idea for a search engine. Not Google level, it’s just gonna be a resource for supporting Black creatives and Black-owned business.
And I’ll be playing Fortnite.
Getting back in to the structural editor game and working on OCell. I’ve been mulling this kind of thing over for years, and I still think there’s a lot of potential.
Fiddling with a Wiki engine I stupidly decided to throw together yesterday. And painting our front door!
The Hackerspace that I am running is reopening (with some precautions!) this weekend after being closed for 3 months due to the Coronacrisis. I’m looking forward to seeing the other participants again :)
Moving my wiki to be “shell coded”, meaning it relies on a shell and interconnected files as scripts to build it.
Trying to debug my keyboard via hotair workstation. I hope I don’t destroy my gateron switches… :(
Maybe get back into guitar.
Playing loads of computer and board games.
I moved my libraries that provide config/cache/data paths, following the respective conventions on Linux, macOS, BSD and Windows to an organization on Github and started updating them.
Next up is finishing the updates and getting the website up to shape.
Additionally, the language I’m contributing to merged my module method PR, so next up is removing static methods from the language.
I also ordered a PineBook Pro to work on the ARM64 backend of the compiler.
I also bought a MiniGarden that might arrive later today, so further work on renovating my flat.
Give my wife a vacation from the kitchen. Also reading through a house purchase agreement.
Going to mess around with combining finite state machines and stream processing in my game dev prototype. Also a few weeks into a sketching class I’m taking, so I’ll be drawing lots and lots of boxes.
I’m continuing to tear down my LLC, distilling old NixOS modules into a public repository.
Doing some work on an open source encrypted backup tool, the distinguishing features are ‘append only’ mode for backup clients, and a separation between backup keys and the master key capable of reading data.
Would love help thinking of a name :D
I like to sometimes try and invent some names, but I completely don’t get the distinguishing features you mention :/ I mean esp. the point/goal of them - ? e.g. ‘append only’ of what and why? as to the keys, you mean different write keys (as in public) than read key (private)? but you wrote “keys” not “key”, so it’s something else than the typical/common assymetric crypto? Also, to help with naming, who is/are your intended user(s)? and what was the reason you started building this tool? (but please don’t cop out with a “because there was no such thing” or similar) Kinda like in a git commit message, try to convince me the tool is needed and the world is better with it than without it ;P obviously, just if you like to :)
The tool was designed to address some concerns I had with existing backup tools, When I say data below I mean tarball, zfs stream, or database dump.
These were my requirements:
I want to be able send new data to a backup host without being able to delete or read old data. This is to protect against malware/disgruntled employees/hackers who may actively try to destroy my backups. This is ‘append only’
I want stored data to be de duplicated automatically so I can run backups frequently without wasting space.
I want to be able to store the decryption key offline where it cannot be stolen easily, such as in a safety deposit box. The backup server should never need direct access to the decryption key.
I want a simple tag based search system for the data so I can run simple queries to filter and cycle old backups. Without access to the decryption key.
I want good performance for uploads and retrieval.
I want the server/client to run over ssh with no running daemon and minimal setup.
I want the tool written in a memory safe language and have extensive tests to ensure data integrity even against hostile tampering and other adverse conditions such as no disk space or ram.
I want the choice to have the backups on an external drive or on a vps or both.
Even when backups are on a local external drive, they shouldn’t be readable. Deleted data is private until the offline key is brought out of storage.
I suppose the target audience are devops people like myself, anyone who worries a lot about different ways their backup system can fail. Cares about security and privacy, and cares about OSS.
The user interface is somewhat like git or similar tools.
Eh, I’m afraid it’s not looking like I’ll have as much time to spend on this as I hoped for. For now I kinda noted two words I personally liked as some initial inspiration: “den” and “cove”. I also started experimenting with using them as a core and trying to stick some stuff onto them, like “rockden” or “alcove”. But it looks like I must put it on hold for now, sorry!… I’m leaving those here in the open in case they might tickle your inspiration in any way :) Personally, the next of my usual venues/steps I hoped to try were: first, to throw the words onto thesaurus.com and try to do some “thesaurus surfing”, noting any possible other tangentially inspiring/applicable words; second, to try and explore some “halfcronyms”, which is how I call playing in a field between acronyms and backcronyms. You can try fudging around with those two approaches for yourself/on your own if you like :) If yes, please try to do it unhinged, only crazily looking around and having fun, with no self-critique, just noting options. You can get back to them with a critical eye later, even ditching all of them, but even if you do this, don’t dismiss this time as worthless - it is a valuable step, and surrendering/subjecting yourself to luck and randomness is kinda its main and defining characteristic :)
edit: in the “ideas trimming” step, I suggest to also see for conflicts with existing projects on linux.die.net manpages and in github search (and maybe also in google). More often than I wanted it resulted in having to ditch a name I really liked and start from scratch… go figure :)
Thanks for taking a look. Some name candidates I have:
bupstash, dstash, archivist, buppy, rstore, datvault
Will keep looking.
Playing Really Awesome CTF!
Continuing to work on my Go recfiles parser. I’ve made a lot of progress on it. In the course of working on it, actually, I incorrectly implemented my parser because of a mistake in the online documentation; I’ve informed the recutils folks, so hopefully it’ll be fixed up soon. Happy to dive into more detail if any of y’all are interested.
Other than that, some friends and I are hosting a virtual microconference. It’s a very laid back atmosphere (generally, no presentation slides or anything; all verbal). I’m giving a talk on recfiles and a talk on unexpected behaviors I’ve encountered in Go (and I’m sure it’ll devolve more generally into the very few things I don’t like about Go)
Writing documentation
docs.nixnet.services
Assembling a 3D printer, having some fun with ODrive BLDC control, some soldering, and testing out an IPA recovery idea