Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • No sugar for a month

    Some colleagues of mine had the wild idea to try saying no to any added sugar for a month.

  • Eight: Apoptosis

    I've long experienced a sensation while I'm working on a problem. My strongest early memory of it (though I am certain it was around before then) was always associated with my Java programming class as a first-year Computer Science major.

• Technology and Free Software

  • A eulogy for smartphones I'll never understand

    When I was younger, I used to be really into jailbreaking Apple devices. I had an old iPod--old enough that jailbreaking it was relatively easy. Back then, the fact that I knew how to jailbreak my iPod didn't mean much to me. It was a cool thing I knew how to do, to make cool modifications to my device that Apple otherwise didn't want me to have.

    Today, I own a Samsung smartphone. I've never figured out how to root Samsung devices. Any Android devices, really. I'm not sure why. It seems like it'd be easier. The Android ecosystem has always felt more open by design. Maybe Samsung products are particularly mean about this sort of thing. Maybe I just don't have the energy to investigate these kinds of problems like I used to.

  • removing dead bodies from the process list

    I had over a 1000 PIDs on one of my servers that were <defunct> zombies children of a weechat process someone was running. I didn't want to kill their weechat, but I still wanted the zombies gone. So I sent the weechat a SIGCHLD just in case that'd trigger a cleanup wait() in it. It did not.

  • Tech Goldilocks

    Getting tech just right can be tricky; on the one had you have the type that spends hours on IRC asking how to make a read(2) call not block, whether something can ask whether there are bytes available to be read, how to deal with timeouts and unexpected handle closures, and how deal with all the prior complications with multiple handles at the same time. The general advice here is to use an async library. You can write some or all of this yourself (and it might be good practice to do so, possibly in private) but on the other hand libevent or various other async libraries or languages do exist. Yes, there can be a learning curve, but there's also a learning curve to figure out select(2) or poll(2) or whatever, and to step on (some of) the same rakes that the authors of the async library have already stepped on and know how to avoid, depending on the maturity of the code in question. Here, the complication of an abstraction that handles async I/O is probably a good thing.

  • Mounting video ram on Linux

  • Mounting video ram on Linux

    Hi, did you ever wonder if you could use your GPU memory as a mount point, like one does with tmpfs and RAM?

    Well, there is a project named vramfs that allows you to do exactly this on FUSE compatible operating system.

    In this test, I used an NVIDIA GTX 1060 6GB in an external GPU case connected with a thunderbolt cable to a Lenovo T470 laptop running Gentoo.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Emacs: Starting Gemlog Entries Faster (publ. 2024-02-12)

      A great thing about gemtext is it is so simple I don't need a CMS. But it was still taking me a minute or two to create the new gemtext file on the server, as I had to login, navigate to the correct directory, and type a file name with the correct date and sequence number. I use a sequence number in my system in case there is more than one post a day. Naturally, the solution for me was an Emacs function.

  • Programming

    • APL-likes as a notation for thought

      I recently took it upon myself to fill a hole in my exposure to branches of the programming tree and learn an APL-like.

      APL is often labelled as an "array programming language", indeed its name is derived therefor, but having spent some time learning the rudiments of one of the languages "descendent" from APL i feel that this "array language" moniker is missing the wood for the trees.