I will try to relax and take it easy

I’m preparing my move to Cambridge for my PhD, so this involves a lot of bureaucratic UK Visa work!

We submitted two papers to PLDI today, so I’m taking a break for the weekend, and will try to read some maths :) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exact_couple)

Working on part 2 of “Crafting Interpreters”, the bytecode VM.

I’m going to play the Super Mario RPG remake because I loved the original.

Still vacationing in HK. We’re over jet lag. Meeting one of my wife’s childhood friends and her family at a park this afternoon. Hopefully her kids will hit it off with ours!

Found a great guitar at a fantastic price, and trying to find out if I can get it home. It doesn’t come with a hard case, so Ba refuses to take it in the hold. It’s just a bit too big to take as hand luggage, so I’m trying to find out how much it would be to buy a seat for it, but BA is not very helpful. You have to phone them, but most of the time they don’t pick up. I got through yesterday, and left some details. Apparently they’ll get back to me within 72 hours…

Honestly, I’m trying to re-learn how to socialize and make friends as a 30 year old adult man

I’ve recently been indulging my younger self, when I enjoyed exploring computing just for fun instead of worrying about if it’d be practical. To that end, I’ve been enjoying learning Cuis Smalltalk, a minimal Squeak-based Smalltalk. It’s honestly just been a blast playing with, even if, yes, it’s not that CPU efficient, and its GUI scores a 0/10 on accessibility, and so on. But I can also build a simple GUI in about two minutes that does whatever I’m up to, and then live debug my way through it. So I’ll probably do some of that.

Going to survival in the woods with my kids, cycling and cramming for JLPT N4.

I agreed to (at least try to) do a volunteer programming project on a short deadline, while already overly busy with work and home stuff (and Thanksgiving isn’t the kind of holiday that generates copious free time). Which is stupid on its face, but it’s a project I want to do, and a person I want to do something for, so shrug.

Oh, also: the other day I murdered the boot drive of my main desktop machine with a wayward screwdriver (I was changing a video card, and the lever for that PCIe retention latch is in a spot that’s impossible to get a finger into when the card is actually installed, so I tried to push the lever with a screwdriver while pulling the card with the other hand… it didn’t go so well). I didn’t have a backup, because I consider boot drives noncritical ­— everything that I would really miss is on /home. But it turns out that while nothing essential was lost, reconstituting the system is still annoying.

Trying to find a place in the middle of nowhere to go for American Turkey Day, and looking for jobses.

There is a volcano brewing in the backyard (Iceland), so I am going to create a small notification system which will hook into the open access air quality measurement devices around the country and notify me if the quality drops in my area. Later on the plan is to hook this up to my home assistant and have it turn the air scrubbers on and close all windows.

My personal site is now live, so I’ll be back to focusing on Feather and building my career incubator.

I’ve built a little daemon for cargo-sandbox. It runs as root and it:

a) Sets up some namespaces b) Sets up landlock policies

before running cargo. Clients communicate with it via unix domain sockets, which has been fun to do more work with, and then the server hands the client back the stdin,stdout,stderr file descriptors of the cargo <whatever> command that was run. This way the client “feels” like it’s just cargo <whatever> under the hood. I also have a signal handler for ctrl c that will send a message to the server to kill the client.

It works! Sort of! The problem right now is I’m running into an odd problem where when the server runs as root it gets EPERM when spawning the child process. Odd but whatever, I’ll fix it somehow.

The extrasafe crate has been great and I’ve learned a bit about how Cargo works. Cargo is doing a lot of shit and when I start actually trying to lock the sandbox down (I’m basically allowing everything unconditionally right now) I wonder how effective it can even be. A testament to how whole-process sandboxing is really tricky, I suppose - ideally Cargo would just do this itself, but it would be a breaking change to suddenly not allow crates to do the things I’m going to stop them from doing.

Today is the last nice fall day here, with temps hopefully up to 18. Winterizing stuff in prep for a long cold freeze.

Lots of work projects to tackle as well. Yesterday, I finally finished up a one-day project that took a month. I’ve got a short list of projects to tackle while I’m that part of the code, including one to allow imports in a module file but before the module definition (logically inconsistent, but syntactically desirable because it looks more like what people are used to).

Going to be (hopefully) recording the very funny Chris Quigley at the local comedy club for his next album. I worked with him in 2021 and it turned out great so we figured, lets do it again! I put hopefully in there because he only wants to do the taping if the ticket sales are right.

Other than that I’m hanging out with my wife and kid.

The weekend is almost over, but I’ve been having a lot of fun starting a new Next.app from scratch. I’ve been using Tailwind for the last few years and wanted to go back to regular CSS for this one. It feels so nostalgic!

Would have been an extra jitsu session this morning but for child[0]’s football, and later probably lots of indoor activities for children[1,2] as it’s British Wet outside