Yokohama, Japan

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HTML5 “Ballz” engine powered by Phaser and TypeScript – a better way to show ball trajectory

"Ballz" HTML5 prototype built with Phaser now will look better thanks to an improved trajectory system, using tweens rather than tilesprites. Full commented TypeScript project available to download.

Weird Lexical Syntax

I just learned 42 programming languages this month to build a new syntax highlighter for llamafile. I feel like I'm up to my eyeballs in programming languages right now. Now that it's halloween, I thought I'd share some of the spookiest most surprising syntax I've seen.

Bespoke solution to monitor power outages at home

When I came home from a 5-days family trip this summer I immediately realized power was off in our flat. The main switch in the electricity panel was down together with one other additional switch. Everything appeared to have happened a few days before we arrived, so a few things in the fridge were ruined and most of the freezer contents had to be discarded. This was despite the fact we have relatives living close by with an emergency set of keys but, as we were completely unaware of the events, we couldn’t ask them to go check.

I thought about what happened and...

HTML5 “Ballz” engine rewritten to feature double and quadruple blocks, powered by Phaser and written in TypeScript

Do you want to feature different block sizes in a HTML5 "Ballz" game? Look how I built the game engine using Phaser and Arcade Physics, written in TypeScrypt. Full source code available.

The Fastest Mutexes

Imagine you have a workload where all your threads need to do a serialized operation. With Cosmo, if you're looking at htop, then it's going to appear like only one core is active, whereas glibc and musl libc will fill up your entire CPU meter. That's bad news if you're running a lot of jobs on the same server. If just one of your servers...

Waiter, there's an IES in my DGC!

Finally! Yesterday Khronos published Vulkan 1.3.296 including VK_EXT_device_generated_commands. Thousands of engineering hours seeing the light of day, and awesome news for Linux gaming.

Device-Generated Commands, or DGC for short, are Vulkan’s equivalent to ExecuteIndirect in Direct3D 12. Thanks to this extension, originally based on a couple of NVIDIA vendor extensions, it will be possible to prepare sequences of commands to run directly from the GPU, and executing those sequences directly without any data going through the CPU. Also, Proton now has a much-more official leg to stand on when it has to translate ExecuteIndirect from D3D12 to Vulkan while you run games such as Starfield.

The...

Neurodivergence and accountability in free software

In November of last year, I wrote Richard Stallman’s political discourse on sex, which argues that Richard Stallman, the founder of and present-day voting member of the board of directors of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), endorses and advocates for a harmful political agenda which legitimizes adult attraction to minors, consistently defends adults accused of and convicted of sexual crimes with respect to minors, and more generally erodes norms of consent and manipulates language regarding sexual harassment and sexual assault in his broader political program.

In response to this article, and on many occasions when I have re-iterated my position on Stallman in other contexts, a common response is...

Cosmopolitan v3.9.2

Cosmopolitan's Windows support may finally be feature complete. It's now possible to send signals between processes using kill() on Windows. Ten new torture test programs have been written to tease out more fixes and offer a high level of assurance that signal handling is correct. Some of these tests are good enough to deadlock the signal handling of UNIX OSes but not our ...

Introducing the 101 games challenge

I will build 101 games as a solo developer. Why? Because why not?