What are you doing this weekend?
12 points by caius
12 points by caius
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!
Trying to get people to help me rebuild modern computing 😅
Oof, that sounds like a monumental undertaking. But a noble cause. I wish you the best of luck!
I sympathize, but why would your attempt succeed when the thousand other such attempts litter the halls of history? Or, what advantage does this have over building a new userland atop OpenBSD?
I don't know that I will succeed, but I would rather try and fail than do nothing.
As for why I chose to build from scratch rather than use an existing project, that would be due to the issues I have with existing software. I mostly consider Unix-like operating systems to be outdated and don't want to be forced to build with the legacy concepts. Programming languages, too, I've found have largely stagnated with only one or two relevant developments over the last decade. It took me a long time and research to come to this conclusion, I think we can do better.
Currently in Barcelona for a 25 year anniversary with my wife. Arrived yesterday for a long weekend. Loving it so far!
My wife is a huge fan of the Broken Sword series of games, and this morning we followed in George Stobbart’s footsteps: we visited the Montserrat monastery, by cable car, and saw the Black Madonna. (And chatted to American tourists.)
We’re planning to take the cable car over Barcelona tomorrow.
(It's a long weekend for me—I'm a teacher and Monday is a school holiday where I live.)
Heh, I just got my diglot translation alignment tool working, one of the first books I aligned was Записки из мертвого дома with Roger Cockrell's translation.
Still working on the typesetting for ereaders, but workable.
I just got my diglot translation alignment tool working, one of the first books I aligned was Записки из мертвого дома with Roger Cockrell's translation.
That looks very cool. Does it make interlinear editions for specific languages? Or is the goal to have it work with any pairs?
Relatedly, I would love to learn Russian, and I really should make the time.
I've tested with ru-en, fr-en and pt-en. Main goal was to get it working for the languages I want to evaluate translations for/practice. I don't speak any CJKV languages, so no clue how the approach would perform there.
The rendering side is just TeX because Knuth-Plass renders so clean and I'm visually spoiled. If a typesetting nerd would help me get epubs to look as nice as TeX, I'd love to trade notes.
It's a beautiful day to stay inside and update servers :P But more seriously, there's a memory leak in a C++ project I've been contributing to on and off. I am most certain I've introduced it, so I should really clean it up >.> (if I figure it out I should come back here and reply)
Oh and Celeste speedrunning. I got addicted again
Trying to finish the Apple Network Server MacOS extensions pack. I'm blocked on the SCSI-2 extension: I can find the right OpenFirmware node for the controller but for some reason the extension won't talk to it, so the first yak shave is to unfudge the PEF compression on the ROM driver I'm trying to modify.
More job hunting: Devoting today to deeply customizing our resume and cover letter for a particularly exciting job opportunity. With any luck, this should get us past this HR screen and future ones both. If anyone would like to review either document, that would be greatly appreciated.
Prepping for our birthday next week! And hosting board games ahead of that!
I've been creating an SVG editing program that I always wished existed after many years of using Inkscape. Doing more work on that this weekend. Unfortunately I'm mostly vibe-coding it but I'm just making it for me so whatever. Mostly just wanted to see if all my ideas actually work in reality. It does help a lot when I get it to copy software architecture from my many hand-coded projects I've done over the years.
Unsurprisingly to me, by "building the house on solid ground" (implement the core things once and do it correctly up front), everything I build on top of that core is automatically of much higher quality than if the core stuff is an afterthought. I could be less vague if anyone is interested about the specifics.
Would love to know more. I’ve been casually working on a floor-planning tool that uses SVG for self-contained storage and it’s been a lot of fun. Same idea: get the core of it exactly how I want it and then the additional niceties fall out pretty easily and Just Work.
The secret sauce, if anyone’s curious, is that it’s built on a soft constraint solver. My house is old and not square. As you draw out the walls, every measurement (I’ve been using a construction-grade laser rangefinder) is treated as having an unknown error built in. The constraint solver points out the measurements that you need to make to go from undetermined to exactly determined to overdetermined (at which point it starts doing least squares fits) to nail down the actual as-built-then-settled measurements of everything. As you go and add redundant measurements, it also points out measurements that are likely wrong or inconsistent.
I’ve been dogfooding it on my own house here for now. Once I’ve got my own place done, I’ve got a few friends who’re interested in giving it a shot, so that should help me find parts of the workflow that only make sense inside my head.
I can hardly believe what I'm reading right now because you're describing exactly the same problem I have been trying to solve with a project I started like 5 years ago except in a completely different field: Sewing pattern design.
I made a dress with my wife, and we used an existing dress as reference. The problem was that we didn't want to unstitch it, so we had to take about 1000 measurements over and over as they are super inconsistent cause fabric is stretchy. What I wish I had was a program where I can enter a bunch of very conflicting constraints and it would solve for the nearest solution. There are quite a few CAD programs that basically offer this, but nothing I can find in the world of sewing pattern software.
Anyway, I have an ongoing pet project where I'm creating such a "lazy constraints" sewing pattern CAD, and it sounds like it's exactly the same thing you described!
Might come back with another comment later on about my SVG editor.
Handmade Cities has a number of meetups coming up:
The folks attending all care about the craft of making good and quality software (even though we often disagree on definitions... but that's half the fun!)
Note: We have mailing lists for these cities in case you can't make it this time around. Happy Friday!
Enjoying a gorgeous fall weekend for the first time in three years. Well, at least today and Saturday. Hurricane remnants hitting the area on Sunday for a good soak, but welcome: after an above average precipitation summer, we've had a weird little drought for this time of the year.
I finally cleared a big gate on my long under renovation house: I can live here, says the local government, 22 months after moving in.
My partner wanted an iPad and it arrived last night. I've not had an iOS device in the house for ~10 years, and that 2 years was a weird phase for her. So we'll be exploring how iOS has changed in that time.
As long as the weather holds up, though, I'm gonna just go touch grass and watch leaves fall.
I'm starting classes this Wednesday, so my "idle time" is almost over. Yesterday I finished a first "functional" version of a Klondike solver, so I'm not sure I'll pour more time into that.
I think I should work on my Nagios clone, as a weird series of circumstances makes my current infra monitoring quite annoying lately and what better way to solve that than implementing a monitoring system from scratch? What could go wrong?
Hopefully spend a little time learning Lean and P (https://github.com/p-org/P -- a state machine modeling language)
there is so much I want to do (mostly more writing), but I am sick (cold) so I don't know if I'll manage to do anything at all honestly.
