Campaigning for Joe Biden because I hate myself

Porting my Hugo blog to Zola. Hugo has become a mess to deal with but that warrants a separate detailed post of why I’m doing this migration.

Adding tests to my lobsters client for Android, then probably building out Search or some other functionality.

https://github.com/msfjarvis/compose-lobsters

• Getting over being sick
• Waiting on Covid test results (as it’s mandatory to return to work – I don’t think I have Covid, just a cold)
• Working on a lot of programming I’ve been backed up on (no time since I work)
• Working on my anxiety
• Attempting to not impulse spend on every good artist I find on Bandcamp
• Trying not to travel the downward mental spiral of software licensing (I almost flat out quit software development because of it, my solution was to write my own license)
• Anything else I may have forgot /shrug

• Waiting on Covid test results

My partner works at the local Domestic Violence shelter, which is the perfect combination of small confined coliving space for strangers and their kids in a locked door building that requires 24 hour supervision (e.g intakes). Thus far 1 board member & 2 staff members have tested positive, with 2 more symptomatic. Fortunately no one in the residency looks like they’ve gotten it yet.

• Fixing middleware rules in treafik
• Got a Kobo ereader. I’m going to work on getting calibri-web & Wallabako running on it. I might even read something on it.
• reflashing my sonoff zigbee bridge
• pet projects 2,3,4

I have 5 projects that have been rattling around in the back of my mind, so I’ll probably hunker down and work on one. Haven’t decided which one I actually want to mess around with…

• A generic API (similar to what Standard Notes uses) designed for End to End encryption, but also with the option to share objects to other people
• A self-hosted, easy-to-deploy markdown notes app
• A self-hosted, easy-to-deploy todo list/task manager app
• Refactoring my chat framework to not use gRPC and possibly replace the internal queuing mechanism with AMQP
• Reformatting all 5 rPis I’ve got around and starting attempt #3 to set up a k8s cluster (arm vs arm64 has been really frustrating)

On the non-technology side, getting outside a bit and just enjoying fall in the Pacific North West. The leaves are changing colors and it’s really beautiful over here.

1. Strengthen rings and modules fundamentals from Dummit & Foote.
2. Work out an exam paper on rings, and send it to mathematician to check them.
3. Revise homotopy fundamentals from Hatcher.
4. Read Friedman’s survey article on simplicial sets, in preparation for the next module.
5. Lightly browse through Goerss-Jardin, and have a map of the contents.
6. Make minor progress on my cubical type theory research project in Coq.
7. [In downtime] Start writing a production-grade parser for claytext, a custom markup-syntax I use to generate my website.
8. [In downtime] Make some progress on my xypic LaTeX parser, for commutative diagrams.
9. [In downtime] Improve my French by passively listening to podcasts and news.
10. [In downtime] Cook one elaborate meal.

I’m will keep writing my operating system in Rust. It’s a non trivial process, but really enjoying so far! Also, wrt some years ago, nowadays there a lot of more resources so I think it’s quite easier to get started. The taught part is understanding and deciding when knowledge is enough to moving on to implementing the thing! In any case, it’s been very fun and satisfying so far.

Oncall weekend. Probably staying in, listening to some podcasts, and attending a small halloween “celebration” at night.

I’m also hoping Americans vote for Biden - Stephen Miller has a scheme to kick me out of the USA if Trump wins.

I will be thinking about writing my resignation letter next Monday. Maybe find some time to plan or think about what I am going to be doing next…

Playing The Last of Us Part 2. Sometimes you need a break.

• waiting on Covid test results (due sunday or monday)
• sleep a lot
• drink tea
• watch wood oxydize in the chimney
• being glad that I ran all errands and shoppings over last weekend
• being glad that I have no symptoms whatsoever
• maybe videoskype a lot against the camp fever

Last week about all of my siblings have been quarantiened (teachers, and partners of techers…) so I did all of their “panic” shopping, too.

My battery feels empty.

In 2020 some languages not popular, I’m talking about PHP. But my project is on PHP and has biggest impact of all my projects (https://medv.io). So I’m working on DevOps tool on PHP for PHP world: https://github.com/deployphp/deployer Pushing forward to release v7 for a few months straight.

• Catching up on classwork
• Getting desktop dual-booted. I realized the primary benefit of running windows is gaming, so might as well run Linux when I’m not playing games.
• I think I may try and do the exercises from This blogpost on parsing ELF headers

Figuring out how to make Halloween fun for a 5 and a 9 year old during a pandemic.

• Biking
• Learning Frida

Planning to write a Cloudwatch Exporter for Prometheus in Golang (yet another yet another cloudwatch exporter?). Have been using the Cloudwatch Exporter by Prometheus at $WORK, but we have a lot of metrics which makes the scraping very slow! We have also tried Grafana’s Cloudwatch datasource, which is just as slow if not worse (and we need alerts). The other exporter (yace), is written in Golang and looks pretty good. But, as a personal preference, I’d like to write something that’s native to VictoriaMetrics over Prometheus (mainly for simplicity and performance benefits).

Other than that, I hope to spend some quality time with my family. I also have a leftover library that I need to finish, clean up, and write a Telegram bot for, but that probably is a post (and work) for another weekend!

A fair amount of CAD for shelves, a raw stock rack, and an updated server rack w/ 3D printed accessories.

Also putting the final touches on a set of shell scripts that takes in an Distro/Board/bootstrapping script combo and spits out a uSD-ready image that’s completely ready to go. And trivially repeatable.

Just finished first version of my HN reply notifier not: https://github.com/golergka/hn-comment-bot

And now I’m going to rewrite it from scratch, using postgresql as a work queue, to make all the operations async and split into smaller ones as granular as possible. Obviously, this is an overkill for a bot that literally nobody uses, but the point with hobby projects is to experiment and to learn, right?

Next – a search engine over a dozen or so internet book stores that my girlfriend searches manually every time she wants to order something. One user is better than none.

Converting my API to be async where necessary. Rust async await is nice enough, but definitely has some sharp corners.

Working on painting. I bought oils and acrylics and can’t wait to get into it.

Writing a blogpost summarizing my progress with wasmcloud over the last week. I bought two domains for the project (one for handlers to be executed on and another for everything else) if only to make sure others don’t buy them instead. I’m really getting places with this now!

Finishing Dune Messiah (the second book in the Frank Herbert series). Then moving over to the Larry McMurty Thulia series.

So far, taking the cargo bike out in the rain to the farmers market. I had planned to put a new chain and sprocket on it and tighten the loose headset, but that can wait for a drier day.

In hacking time, progressing my quest to remove Monit from NixWRT and maybe refining the nixwrt-in-qemu target a bit to make userland development a bit less clunky. For context, nixwrt is my pet project that uses Nixpkgs and the Nix cross-compilation toolchains to build software images for the kind of embedded MIPS devices that you’d usually put OpenWrt on .

I’m on call this weekend so my movement is restricted.

Saturday:
Chores, daemon/network programming, and reading TLPI.

I’ve learned that are some pretty significant differences in daemon() implementations. The FreeBSD commit that added catching SIGHUP gives a rationale for doing so.

• glibc - forks once, doesn’t temporarily catch SIGHUP.
  This behavior makes sense on a BSD but Linux is System V. Daemons can reestablish a controlling terminal even though they called a function to prevent doing so.
• OpenBSD - forks once, doesn’t temporarily catch SIGHUP.
• NetBSD - forks once, doesn’t temporarily catch SIGHUP.
• FreeBSD - forks once, temporarily catches SIGHUP.
• Illumos - forks twice, doesn’t temporarily catch SIGHUP.
• become_daemon.c - forks twice, doesn’t temporarily catch SIGHUP.
• APUE daemonize() - forks twice, temporarily catches SIGHUP, calls exit() instead of _exit().
  Calling exit() means that any functions registered with atexit() are invoked when the parent process exits. This is probably not the desired behavior.

Sunday:
Chores, programming, laundry.

Phase one of the apartment move.

• Finish putting the winter bike together (I stripped parts off it to upgrade my summer bike during the summer.) Needs chain fitting, gears adjusting and mudguards fitting. Might even ride the thing, who knows.
• Sort out a bunch of household admin I’ve been putting off, things like sorting out energy provider renewal, etc.
• Poking my sandbox server to try and modernise my home stack. Completely for learning purposes, the existing home server is still performing admirably. Couple of things I want to hammer out to understand in my head on a new stack though. Learning is fun!

The baby is now 6 weeks old so while she is getting to be less of a handful, she’s still eating most my time… that said, I made a little white noise generator whose gui code with my own library looks like this right now:

        struct Control {
                private bool paused;

                Algorithm algorithm;

                @ControlledBy!Button("Start / Stop")
                void pause() {
                        if(paused)
                                ao.unpause();
                        else
                                ao.pause();
                        paused = !paused;
                }

                @ControlledBy!VerticalSlider(0, 32000, 800)
                int volume = 3200;
        }

        Control control;

        window.addDataControllerWidget(&control);

Yes, the widgets are just annotations attached to the struct, which is pretty cool. The library actually creates the controls and connects the events to the data (the “algorithm” is an enum, so it knows to make a drop-down selection from its options automatically, the pause is a function so the button just calls it on press, and the int volume is just wired right into the slider widget).

Pretty cool, I’m fairly happy with it for simple things like this. But I’d like to add some kind of layout annotations too - currently it just stacks the widgets in the window vertically. I’m tempted to do something kinda like css grid’s ascii art template… or something. I don’t know yet. But perhaps I can figure it out during naps over the weekend and get something coded.