There’s so much excellent content on wiki.c2.com it’s ridiculous. Many of the things people rant about on HN, on Facebook, on Twitter, in their blogs, have already been debated to death over a decade ago on the original wiki. (And probably on usenet before that.)

If there’s any interest, I can do similar writeups for my later NaNoGenMo projects.

Previously on lobsters: https://lobste.rs/s/ho3ypn/another_world_source_code_review_2011

Speaking of Delphine Software and art-over-gameplay games, you can chalk me up as probably one of the only people who liked the Flashback sequel, “Fade to Black”.

For a more visceral view of the situation, you can read about Tim Maughan’s visit to Baotou. This is why I support efforts like Right to Repair and EOMA68.

But I note that I’m also part of the problem, as I have a Nexus 5 on my shelf I’d still be using if not for a broken 5-cent switch requiring microsoldering to replace.

Not sure if the original article author was aware of it, but: Hydraulic macroeconomics and MONIAC.

Working on adapting the sample code in Data Laced with History to Rust as part of a prototype. It’s been a great Rust refresher, although translating the Swift paradigms has lead down some rabbit holes.

Along these lines, see David Reed’s memories of UDP “design”, where he notes that he and Steven Kent argued unsuccessfully for mandatory end-to-end encryption at the protocol layer circa 1977.

• Evaluated enough libs to move into active experimentation on my main research project
  • Forked and documented the library-evaluation repo to be a collection of CMake recipes
• Now working on the networking test-spikes I sketched out awhile ago(various combinations of ZMQ, 9P, CBOR, etc.)
• Looking more at K/Kona to see if it’d be useful for the actual 3D math and data storage nodes.

Do you plan to add examples for install() (and cpack)? I’m writing a library using CMake and I’m not sure what the best way to go about that is.

I’ve heard that CMake makes complicated builds more easy to manage, but this particular tutorial doesn’t really show that. In fact, it’s actually much less “work” to write a simple Makefile in this case. As such, I left the tutorial with no reason to care about CMake, and instead of a “woah! you knocked my socks off!”, my reaction was, “so what?” But! I’ve been using make for years. For someone new to everything, I think this shows that CMake is easier to reason about. It just wasn’t enough to sway me from my more familiar make.

Criticism aside, I really liked the style of the tutorial, and how the repo is all inclusive. I hope to see more tutorials in the future adopt this style (instead of the typical blog post that isn’t all encompassing without linking out to somewhere else, etc).

At my undergrad CS program (NYU, 2002-2006) they taught Java for intro programming courses, but then expected you to know C for the next level CS courses (especially computer architecture and operating systems). Originally, they taught C in the intro courses, but found too many beginning programmers to drop out – and, to be honest, I don’t blame them. C isn’t the gentlest introduction to programming. But this created a terrible situation where professors just expected you to know C at the next level, while they were teaching other concepts from computing.

But, as others have stated, knowing C is an invaluable (and durable) skill – especially for understanding low-level code like operating systems, compilers, and so on. I do think a good programming education involves “peeling back the layers of the onion”, from highest level to lowest level. So, start programming with something like Python or JavaScript. Then, learn how e.g. the Python interpreter is implemented in C. And then learn how C relates to operating systems and hardware and assembler. And, finally, understand computer architecture. As Norvig says, it takes 10 years :-)

The way I learned C:

• K&R;
• followed by some self-instruction on GTK+ and GObject to edit/recompile open source programs I used on the Linux desktop;
• read the source code of the Python interpreter;
• finally, I ended up writing C code for an advanced operating systems still archived/accessible here which solidified it all for me.

Then I didn’t really write C programs for a decade (writing Python, mostly, instead) until I had to crack C back open to write a production nginx module just last year, which was really fun. I still remembered how to do it!

Hurriedly preparing a talk on mruby for the local Ruby meetup this week, using How To Prepare A Talk from Deconstructconf.

I’m not giving it nearly enough of the time the article recommends though, because I spent the month getting my home office in order and then discovering that the mruby build system still has a lot of rough edges (which are ending up as part of the talk)

For a related/amusing/useless game history factoid, Bangai-O Spirits on the Nintendo DS from 2008 also used this technique to transfer custom levels without a link cable or Internet. ( technical details here , IIRC it’s ASK)

You can still find a lot of them on YouTube under “bangai-o spirits sound load”

I still use jwz’s venerable youtubedown.pl script for archiving YouTube, even though I have youtube-dl installed for mpv. Still works with nary an update.

If a site is small or eclectic enough I’ll spider it with wget, but there’s been a few times where I’ve had to spend a few hours finding a single archive.org link to save. It’s on my to-do list to write automation for going through my pinboard XML to find broken/moved links, and to find forum posts: ltehacks.com went down a few months ago, and now that I’ve got a Calyx hotspot it would be useful to have those posts for reference.

Fnishing up this security cert before holidays arrive in earnest next week. The live capture-the-flag exercise is turning out to be more entertaining than I thought, since they provide a VPN and suitable target machines.

The OpenBSD 6.2 upgrade broke inteldrm on my UX305 laptop, so now I’ve got to work out how to exfiltrate a panic dump when the screen is blank, the only built-in network hardware is Wifi, and there is no physical serial port.

“Work” has mostly been trying to finish the prepaid SANS cert from my last employer before it expires next month. In between I’ve been seduced by Firefox Developer and its CSS tools to redesign my personal website. Still wanting to fiddle more with Inferno once I put those to bed.

Also, with moving to a new apartment in an old building along with this discussion, I want to try simulating a 4G connection to see if it’d be acceptable to me for home internet, as I’m tempted to donate to Calyx to avoid having to deal with Comcast.

<delurk>

I’ve been experimenting (in the context of making a low-level windows front-end for xi-editor with making a desktop UI that sends layers to the compositor, rather than rendering complete frames. Based on my experiments so far, I’m encouraged that the performance (latency and smoothness) will be qualitatively better than anything else out there. I think performant desktop UI is something of a lost art, all the attention seems to be in other areas.

I’m a little uncertain how much public noise to make, or whether I should just crank on this on my own until it’s a usable client (might be a while, since I’m interleaving this with lots of other things).

@work After a surprise restructuring two weeks ago and helping a friend with a college football photoshoot this weekend, this week is trying to identify what work should be now. Looking through Matt Mitchell’s Strange Loop keynote for ideas, along with revisiting my professional network. Finishing a SANS course/cert in the meantime, since it was already paid for.

@home Sorting through projects to decide which one to spend time on: ongoing research into distributed 3d/content creation, experimenting with Inferno on embedded/phone platforms, or scratching an itch and building a PIM server in MirageOS for use as a cloud/AWS image.

Why have computers at all?

There does not seem to be anything that can be purchased which is not 100% broken.

I guess this is as good of a time as any to bring up RISC-V:

https://riscv.org

If you’re interested in a deep-dive into the history of these techniques, Tim Wu’s “The Attention Merchants” is well worth a read.