The beautiful machine

20 years later, I have built an other PC!

The Abiopause

The sun has an influence on its surroundings. One of these is in the form of small particles that are constantly ejected from the sun in all directions, which exerts an outward pressure, creating an expanding sphere of particles that moves away from the sun. These particles are the solar wind. As the shell of particles expands, the density (and pressure) falls. Eventually the solar wind reaches the interstellar medium — the space between the stars — which, despite not being very dense, is not empty. It exerts a pressure that pushes inwards, towards the sun.

Where the two pressures balance each other is an interesting place. The...

My code style

Thoughts on performance & optimization

The idea that programmers ought to or ought not to be called “software engineers” is a contentious one. How you approach optimization and performance is one metric which can definitely push my evaluation of a developer towards the engineering side. Unfortunately, I think that a huge number of software developers today, even senior ones, are approaching this problem poorly.

Centrally, I believe that you cannot effectively optimize a system which you do not understand. Say, for example, that you’re searching for a member of a linked list, which is an O(n) operation. You know this can be improved by switching from a linked list to a sorted array...

Fucking laptops

The best laptop ever made is the ThinkPad X200, and I have two of them. The caveats are: I get only 2-3 hours of battery life even with conservative use; and it struggles to deal with 1080p videos.

The integrated GPU, Bluetooth and WiFi, internal sensors, and even the fingerprint reader can all be driven by the upstream Linux kernel. In fact, the hardware is so well understood that I have successfully used almost all of the laptop’s features on Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Minix, Haiku, and Plan 9. Plan fucking 9. It can run coreboot, too. The back of the laptop has all of the screws (Phillips head)...

Status update, February 2020

Today I thought it’d try out something new: I have an old family recipe simmering on the stove right now, but instead of beef I’m trying out impossible beef. It cooked up a bit weird — it doesn’t brown up in the same way I expect of ground beef, and it made a lot more fond than I expected. Perhaps the temperature is too high? We’ll see how it fares when it’s done. In the meanwhile, let’s get you up to speed on my free software projects.

First, big thanks to everyone who stopped by to say “hello” at FOSDEM! Putting faces to names and getting to...

Welcome, 2020

Here's the new decade. 2019 went by as an important year where I regained some of my health, discipline, and motivation. Next to the inevitable iOS development, the most important milestones were the release of the 2nd edition of my Vala book and my first music album after more than two decades of inactiveness. I'm looking forward to this decade. The best is yet to come.

Trim TTF

Для удаления неиспользуемых глифов из TTF или OTF можно воспользоваться консольной или GUI-утилитой FontForge или консольной утилитой FontTools. Оба инструмента открыты и кроссплатформенные. Для чистки огромного 16Мб файла OTF я воспользовался утилитой FontTools. Для этого с помощью cat собрал все …

The post Trim TTF appeared first on Ugolnik's blog.

Dependencies and maintainers

I’m 34,018 feet over the Atlantic at the moment, on my way home from FOSDEM. It was as always a lovely event, with far too many events of interest for any single person to consume. One of the few talks I was able to attend1 left a persistent worm of thought in my brain. This talk was put on by representatives of Microsoft and GitHub and discusses whether or not there is a sustainability problem in open source (link). The content of the talk, interpreted within the framework in which it was presented, was moderately interesting. It was more fascinating to me, however, as a lens for...

KnightOS was an interesting operating system

KnightOS is an operating system I started writing about 10 years ago, for Texas Instruments line of z80 calculators — the TI-73, TI-83+, TI-84+, and similar calculators are supported. It still gets the rare improvements, but these days myself and most of the major contributors are just left with starry eyed empty promises to themselves that one day they’ll do one of those big refactorings we’ve been planning… for 4 or 5 years now.

Still, it was a really interesting operating system which was working under some challenging constraints, and overcame them to offer a rather nice Unix-like environment, with a filesystem, preemptive multiprocessing and multithreading, assembly and C...