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!
Going to the symphony! Beethoven’s seventh.
Also taking a stab at implementing the Boyer-Myrvold planar embedding algorithm (PDF). I still don’t really know anything about graph theory, but after lots of reading this is pretty much the only paper that I can actually follow. And once I can calculate planar embeddings, I will have the final piece I need to finish implementing The Best Procedural Level Generation Algorithm I Have Ever Seen. (The canonical implementation just uses Boost for the graph theory stuff but like that’s no fun.)
Beethoven’s 7th is his greatest middle-period symphony IMO (probably most critics would rate the 3rd and 5th as more influential though). An almost equally great work that clearly (IMO) owes a huge debt to the 7th is Schubert’s 9th symphony.
I never got into procedural stuff, but that’s an awesome-looking algorithm.
It’s my younger son’s birthday party. Our two kids are half-vaccinated and all the adults are fully boosted, so we’re having a party for him in the back yard. The first birthday party with people from outside our immediate family in two years.
Reading some more of “Operating Systems in Three Easy Pieces”. Was a physics major in undergrad and never got the CS 101 operating systems course.
I think this book is one of the most impressive pieces of technical writing I’ve ever seen. It sits firmly at the introductory level, which is actually a fairly hard niche to fulfill. But the authors do it wonderfully, walking the tight rope between too much and too little detail, and leave me feeling very prepared to go investigate deeper material on these topics.
It’s amazing that I feel like I could give this book to people who know absolutely nothing about computers and say, “This will teach you.”
And, though I prefer the hardcover, somehow this book is free online on the author’s website. Insane.
Putting some time into the Z4 to get it back on the road (MOT expired in October). Airbag light is permanently on, but there’s broken wires under the passenger seat which are likely related so trying to figure out where they connect is the first job. Also need to rip the GM5 module out from under the dash and send it off to have relays replaced, to make the passenger door unlock with central locking again. Quicker I start on the jobs, quicker it’ll be done.
Also running 5k organised by the local brewery, because there’s a free pint at the finish line with my name on it. Haven’t run since I did a 10k in September, so that’s going to be slow I suspect.
Will try to get some rest.
Nothing!
…ahahahaha no that’s a lie.
Trying to work up the initiative to start prototyping a game design. Probably reading some more The Art of Prolog.
What’s the core gameplay you have in mind?
That’s exactly the problem, I don’t know yet. I am really good at finding flaws in anything concrete I come up with. I think I need to just try implementing something that I can then criticize and improve.
To be a little less vague, I’m trying to come up with a programming game mechanic that is amenable to building and traveling between layers of abstraction, with the sense of place and movement of a video game. I express this a little differently every time I try to write it down, there’s mostly a feeling I’m going for.
This turned into a whole blog post, Triangulating a Game Design, thanks for asking!
Let us know when you have something concrete. I love playing games and I’d wager a guess I am not alone here. Especially the computer-related ones.
I loved Shenzhen I/O as well as Turing Complete. Turing Complete might have been dry, but it helped me to put the concepts I already knew together and enhance my understanding of the CPU internals.
Also, thanks for the reading tip. :-)
I am pondering a game myself. Two player real-time stealth in a near-future megacorp dystopia slowly eroded by Walkaway. I am still figuring out gameplay that highlights creative destruction.
quarantining at home; the household has COVID. Not that big of a deal, as public life is mostly shutdown anyway.
Hope they get better soon!
Thanks!
Playing with the band at the Victorian Christmas Market today, visiting as a civi tomorrow
Trying to get my NAS working again without losing any data… >_<
Hopefully posting my second blog post to lobste.rs!
Success! https://lobste.rs/s/xdmqk8/pinned_vec_invalidating_iterator
Playing BF2042, catching up on Advent of Code, and waiting for the C19 test result.
Spending the weekend seething at Apple and UPS for lying (both outright and by omission) for the last 4 days about the delivery date of my new Air, and then out of nowhere updating it to be AFTER the weekend. Not that I even trust that date anymore…
Other than that, $WORK is “continue leaving Mongo” and $HOME is “finding a game or housework that can distract me from my anger”
Your anger seems to stem from entitlement. Sure, the ‘social contract’ say you may be entitled to certain ToS but your mental health knows better. The problem with humility is that it is seen as weakness by exploiters and so many of our interactions are with exploitative entities. Finding people who don’t take advantage of me even though I let them has been a really high signal criteria for me but don’t take this as me giving you advice, I’m not qualified…
It could be worse. When I sent my first Mac (a PowerBook) in for repair, they sent a box and someone from a courier company to fetch it. I waited and a week later I called them and asked when I’d expect it back. They told me it had shipped and I’d get it soon. I waited again and they told me the same thing. After a month of this (and £20 of phone calls, because back then their support line was a non-geographic number with call charges), they finally admitted that they had no record of the machine ever making it into their repair centre’s pipeline. It had been signed for with the courier and then disappeared.
I was very glad I’d used CarbonCopyCloner to back up the data and then wiped the disk. They didn’t do anything to actually fix the problem until I contacted their press-enquiries email with a draft article that I’d written about their awful experience (being a journalist was useful for once). They then sent me out a loan unit that the press office had and eventually replaced the machine (with a newer model).
Their support story got a lot better over the next few years but I understood then why Apple had no presence in the corporate world.
Working on revamping my Vim reference guide.
Currently reading Ella Enchanted - whimsical fantasy, liking it so far.
Splitting my time between rewriting my personal site in Astro (https://astro.build/) and playing Minecraft (FTB Endeavour, which is thus far OK)
I implemented account data export for Subreply using StrictYAML. Last weekend I increased the character limit from 480 to 640.
Putting another layer of insulation in my new loft! Never done it before, but I suspect it’ll be worth the savings.
Packaging some new Prometheus exporters for my home setup for nix and probably working through more of my anime and movie backlog.
Maybe deep clean the house as well.
which exporters are those? I currently only use the node-exporter for my servers.
A deluge torrent client exporter, modifying my network exporters, followed by seeing about getting a custom build of jellyfin going with a Prometheus endpoint enabled for stats on my media library.
Reading about synthesizers [1]. Looking into my blog server, console full of sshd and sendmail errors. Playing Bloodborne or something. Kittenproofing the house.
[1] https://www.virus.info/downloads , see all manuals & tutorials: synth programming
I’m auditioning for improv house teams. I’ve been out of practice during the pandemic, so I don’t know how it will go. I’m just gonna try to have fun.
Good luck!
Physically? A lot of waiting around for the kids to finish their activities.
Mentally? Contemplating how many of Kubernetes’ configuration options I need to be familiar with in order to use it safely.
Moving. God I hate moving.
Finishing a custom IKEA hack wardrobe 2.0 for the new apartment. It is basically a wooden frame with Jonaxel pieces, which we absolutely love. Way better than shelves. I love messing around with furniture. Something to compensate for the moving, I guess. :-)
I just got my P2P message-log system, tentatively named Bonsai, to sync message stores between two processes. At a high level it’s similar to Scuttlebutt, but much more efficient, esp for partial replication; it’s an evolution of Aljoscha Meyer’s “Bamboo” schema.
Anyway, I was able to import 34,000 messages averaging 1KB from a text file in a fraction of a second, and sync them to another process’s database in about 2 seconds, including all the signature verification. (This is orders of magnitude faster than my experiences with Scuttlebutt, albeit those were running over a real network.)
I don’t know if I’ll work more on it over the weekend, but it’s very tempting to start building a toy chat app atop it.
Used Bank of America’s Museums on Us plan to visit MoMA and Met in New York City for free… Met is so large that my friend and I want to spend at least one more day next week there.
Oh, I still occasionally check reviews.llvm.org for incoming reviews as otherwise I may have too much community work to do after the trip…
Today I will write some programs that use SIMD instructions. I’ve watched Casey Muratory talks about hardware, SIMD, slow software, and now I’m trying to learn what’s possible with SIMD and also develop a better intuition for how long code takes to execute in a modern CPU architecture.
Tomorrow will be family time with close relatives.