I released a Rust crate to simulate a RISC-V CPU: https://github.com/stephank/rvsim

This has been spare time project of several months. It was fun and challenging to build.

The most recent work was the floating point parts, which is maybe the first time I actually took a good look at how floating point really works.

Connecting the C parts of Berkeley SoftFloat was also fun, though I may try to translate the pieces I’m using to Rust. As another fun challenge.

Eventually, I want to try and build little simulations of fictional machines with it. Kinda like Pico8 or ye olde RoboWar.

Trying to finish a long running project: my e-ink computer.

The Cambridge Analytics scandal has prompted me to delete Facebook and be much more aware of my privacy. I know that deleting Facebook is now a “cool” thing to do now, but it’s been a difficult decision. I still had many friends there that I have no other means of contacting. Ads have gotten much scarier recently, perfectly retargeted among services, so I was getting mentally ready for this. But stealing data for political purposes is where I draw the line.

I’ve also replaced google with DuckDuckGo, and am planning on changing my email provider too. But I don’t know if it’s going to be futile. I still shop on amazon and use many other irreplaceable services like google maps.

Again, I’m not a privacy freak. I try to find a middle ground between convenience and privacy, so these changes are hard for me

Any recommendations for a balanced solution?

Wondering where all my free time has vanished. Mostly taking a week of not planning things outside work and seeing what I end up doing.

Possible contenders:

• Sailing! (If it’s not too cold)
• Compression testing / bleeding the Project BMW (If it’s not too rainy)
• Home Automation. Mostly can’t be bothered wiring sonoff stuff into mains, as that’s the dangerous bit.
• Garage Gym. Needs a bunch of stuff (including a bed) moving out the way so I can actually get to the equipment

I’m trying to write a toy/esoteric scripting language: https://github.com/sevagh/orcscript

I have gaps in my CS knowledge and one of those is the whole world of programming language design (lexers, parsers, ASTs, interpreted/compiled, etc.)

I’ve been reading through the Dragon book (very) slowly.

Many of my projects are rapid-fire one-offs. I feel like it’s been years since I sat down with a textbook and actually learned something new instead of chaining together things I copy/pasted from the internet to achieve a goal.

This time I’m forcing myself to be patient and go slow.

I’m working on the long overdue refactoring of my text editor [0] code base. Currently I’m reimplementing underlying data structure [1] of file buffer. I’m prone to over-analyzing.

Apropos over-analyzing: After I read the post about BF interpreter in Zig I thought about programming languages. I’m wondering why something like Pascal’s Subranges [4] is not more present in modern programming languages. I like where Wuffs’ [5] is going, but wonder if it would be also a good fit for a general purpose language.

I was thinking about a language that could look like something like this:

struct Buf {
    len int<0:.size> = 0// len is an integer within 0 to .size, by default 0
    size int<0:> = 0 // size is an integer within 0 to INT_MAX, by default 0
    // data is a pointer to array of chars with write bounds to .size and read bounds to .len
    data *[<:.size>]<:.len>char = null // by default null
}

var x Buf
x.data = &[28]char // allocate 28 char array
print(x.size) // 28
print(x.len) // 0
//print(x.data[0]) // error
x.data[0] = 'a'
print(x.len) // 1
print(x.data[0]) // a

Is the reason for lack of such language features is that it’s prohibitive in cost of compilation? I think that it would be all checked at compile time. When compiler would be unable to prove safe access (initialized data) it would require adding a run-time check like in Wuffs. Bounds could be also added to function parameters.

[0] https://github.com/hadrianw/werf

[1] https://gist.github.com/hadrianw/4447052496bd019ea4a8eea7fef868af

[3] https://lobste.rs/s/vjh6ni/how_zig_do

[4] http://wiki.freepascal.org/Subranges

[5] https://github.com/google/wuffs/blob/master/doc/wuffs-the-language.md

A couple weeks ago @wezm posted a great article on his process of leaving Mac behind. Part of his post mentioned a pain point around a budgeting app, and the requirements document that he had written to replace it. I had been thinking of taking on a self-hostable YNAB style budgeting system for a while and his post (plus the groundwork he shared) was the appropriate kick to get things started.

I’m off work between jobs this week so will be working on envelope_budget. I’m building against @wezm’s spec in Rust with a goal of a minimal-functional CLI release by the end of this week. I footed out some of the data structures when I got the spec and will be picking up next with serialization, then moving to the CLI binary.

I probably keep refining the libraries of the directories project, which currently consists of a Rust and a Java implementation. I back-ported improvements of the Rust version back to Java and added a lot of documentation to both projects.

The core goal of the project is to help developers pick the right directories for their application-specific data, instead of just dumping things into users’ $HOME directory.

I also received the key caps for my first self-built keyboard last week, so I’m currently waiting for the PCB to start soldering. Picture of the keys and the planned layout.

Continuing my productivity system improvements. Last week wasn’t as huge a success as previously, but I maintained the same gains despite several unexpected events which normally would have tanked my productivity. So, still success? :)

This week’s personal activities:

• Move my organizer’s sections around so that it’s closer to the recommended GTD layout.
• Make a weekly planning checklist so that I’m less likely to forget a step
• Follow through on some long overdue family records paperwork.
• Continue refining the family budget with YNAB.

And for occupational activities:

• Learning how to write a proper Jenkinsfile (I mostly work on UI stuff, so this is a little outside my normal)
• Get out of the weeds and do some proper planning of our UI architecture so that we’re ready for upcoming projects.

Continuing my work on reversing the old Quake cracking program QCRACK. I have a way forward to completion, basically reversed, just writing my own version in code so I can show that instead of assembly (and to verify to my self that I do understand it right.)

You can see my previous work on it on my site.

Personal: Trying to do some OS debugging. My touchscreen’s pen doesn’t work quite right on OpenBSD, and there’s some hardware that I want to get running on 9front. Other than that, smaller bits of Myrddin hacking.

Work: Starting to rewrite the core of our cooking code to move to a new algorithm.

I’m continuing to work away at that Lobsters iOS / Android app, and it’s getting to the point where I’d probably feel okay throwing it up on the App Store / Google Play as a free download for others to use. It really has a pretty limited use case though, since as far as I know Lobsters doesn’t have any way for third-party applications to authenticate users, limiting my app to being read-only.

I’ve also been learning Rust with the fantastic official docs, and Ive started porting a half-complete Swift Game Boy emulator I worked on years ago to Rust. It’s definitely taking me a while to wrap my head around lifetimes and borrow semantics, but I’m really enjoying the experience.

Working on cache server nuster, adding following features:

• Purge cache by path (curl -X PURGE -H “path: PATH”)
• Purge cache by regex (curl -X PURGE -H “regex: REGEX”)
• Purge cache by host (curl -X PURGE -H “x-host: HOST”)
• And purge by combination of above

I’ve been cleaning up guitktk, my simultaneous GUI and GUI toolkit maker, for release. Its one of my larger projects, with a good amount of accumulated, erm, cruft.

Do people tend to read the code for these things? Should I suggest a reading order and what individual files do? I feel the more docs I write, the more stuff can get out of date.

Last week, I recorded some demo videos of guitktk (preview) to try to give an idea of what the intended workflow looks like.

Last week, I also look into a possible native Mac backend but didn’t find anything better than PyObjC which too much like a hack for Python. I also learned that Tkinter doesn’t use anti-aliasing by default and basically need an external drawing library to get that effect.

So I decided to record the videos with the Cairo backend instead.

I think I’m going to write a bunch of graphql stuff into our rails code in hopes of simplifying our react front end. We do redux and I’m just sick of all the boilerplate. Hoping graphql plus Apollo means we save a lot more frontend time.

I’m making a concerted effort on pushing out things I’ve been working on, and making them public.

I’ve started already with Koalephant Shell Script Library, a library for building (mostly ops/admin related) tools in shell, and helpers to simplify build/documentation of said tools. I’ll be continuing work on Koalephant Certificate Manager, a set of tools to simplify use of Certbot with e.g. HAProxy. I’m aiming to make a 1.0 release this week.

Earlier today (and building on work from last week) I published new builds of our Debian Vagrant boxes, which have finally added support for VMWare Fusion/Workstation.

For $CLIENT I’m working on the first part of a new reasonably-HA self-managed (i.e. nothing “-as-a-Service”) cluster.

I’m working on being more relaxed. Learing Toki Pona. Also might play with APL/J and or F# Type providers. I do think an APL/J type provider would be pretty amusing.

Somewhat related to the backup tool I mentioned earlier, I’m making a website that lets you do provisioning of a backup server from a declarative config and it manages storage space and security updates for you. The basic goal is you can do backups with any software you want, and it abstracts away most of the annoying parts.

1. I’m working on a personal congressional outreach project based around ProPublica’s Congressional API.
2. Tweaking my kubenetes cluster.

1. Finishing up our first major UI overhaul.

Working on the LLVM backend for the dependently-typed functional language compiler I’m working on, silt.

It’s super fun, and incredibly challenging as someone who’s unfamiliar with dependent types in general.

My weekend hack was porting the ISETL SETL interpreter to Mac OS X. My next step is to learn more about curses so that I can get the user interface to display properly.

I’m not sure if this is only about private projects, or also about work related. Please tell me if there are guidelines on this.

At work I’m working creating a message-queue based load balancer for a 3rd party backend service having an http api which is very problematic to properly load-balance via standard http load balancers. This will achieve optimum capacity use, request prioritization, lower error rates, etc.

Also I started work on my pet project planned and postponed since a while: an news categorizer, recommender system. Currently work on rss is in progress, but eventually also and bookmarks (read multiple times), read it later (read once) support will come, and also full text search. The rss fetching, parsing, linked item fetching is done, language toolkit for stemming and language detection (if metadata is not available) for Hungarian and English is done, HTML corpus and metadata extraction is being worked on. I expect to have HTML based text-feature-extraction (currently word counts, some metadata from html head) to be completed this week. Then I plan to create some frontend for categorizing, collecting teaching data. And only then will I start working on the ML part, which will be something I have never done so far, and I hope to learn a lot new stuff.

I am struggling to find the time and energy to work on the things I want to work on (personal projects), because the things I have to work on (jobby job) are taking up too much of my time and energy. The week is full of activities. I’m hoping next week will be a bit better. :/

I am messing with a GPS U-blox. The idea is to create a data logger able to upload to internet (via ESP8266). Interestingly, my main issue for development is almanac&ephemerics data for GPS, Galileo, Glonass and Beidou. U-blox has AssistNow service but they ignore my registration request :-). Do you know about any similar online service?. I can not pay. Not in money :-). Any suggestion?

Thanks!

We’re doing a lot of plumbing for a Magento 2 instance to work with our production facility whilst our UX guy works on our new designs.

I also have to do some post on a comedy show I recorded a month ago. Probably going to finish my Fleetwood Mac remix and start some more tracks that wont get finished.

Fixing up my sql tutorial so it worked better on mobile and adding a few more questions. http://www.windowfunctions.com/

VP of Engineering at a small startup is a “how many hats are you wearing job”.

This week at Wallaroo Labs, I’m wearing my “you aren’t writing any code” hat. IE, this week is more of a traditional VP of Engineering week. I’m doing strategic and tatical planning for the features and work that we’ll be doing for Wallaroo over the next few months, meeting with possible clients, and working on a couple job descriptions.

I noticed my bit-fiddling skills have deteriorated as I am mostly doing high-level things for many years (or let’s say, higher level than plucking individual bits out of a byte stream), so I started implementing an ASCII85 encoder/decoder: https://gist.github.com/winks/35492a4de4ca9cad6777919de223c427 (after first reading about mp3 decoders and giving up for now, prompted by this post: http://blog.bjrn.se/2008/10/lets-build-mp3-decoder.html )