Status update, January 2020

I forgot to write this post this morning, and I’m on cup 3 of coffee while knee-deep in some arcane work with tarballs in Python. Forgive the brevity of this introduction. Let’s get right into the status update.

First of all, FOSDEM 2020 is taking place on February 1st and 2nd, and I’m planning on being there again this year. I hope to see you there! I’ll be hosting another small session for SourceHut and aerc users where I’ll take questions, demo some new stuff, and give out stickers.

In Wayland news, the upcoming Sway 1.3 release is getting very close -...

BitTorrent bencode format tools

Following up on "Hello world"

This is a follow-up to my last article, Hello world, which is easily the most negatively received article I’ve written — a remarkable feat for someone who’s written as much flame bait as me. Naturally, the fault lies with the readers.

All jokes aside, I’ll try to state my point better. The “Hello world” article was a lot of work to put together — frustrating work — by the time I had finished collecting numbers, I was exhausted and didn’t pay much mind to putting context to them. This left a lot of it open to interpretation, and a lot of...

The Polygons of Another World: Genesis

How Another World was implemented on Sega Genesis/Megadrive!

Hello world

Let’s say you ask your programming language to do the simplest possible task: print out “hello world”. Generally this takes two syscalls: write and exit. The following assembly program is the ideal Linux x86_64 program for this purpose. A perfect compiler would emit this hello world program for any language.

bits 64
section .text
global _start
_start:
	mov rdx, len
	mov rsi, msg
	mov rdi, 1
	mov rax, 1
	syscall

	mov rdi, 0
	mov rax, 60
	syscall

section .rodata
msg: db "hello world", 10
len: equ $-msg

Most languages do a whole lot of other crap other than printing out “hello world”, even if that’s all you asked for.

The Polygons of Another World: PC DOC

How Another World was implemented on PC DOS!

The Polygons of Another World: Atari ST

How Another World was implemented on Atari ST!

The Polygons of Another World: Amiga

How Another World was implemented on Amiga!

The Polygons of Another World

Let's kick off the year with a series about Another World!

Managing my dotfiles as a git repository

There are many tools for managing your dotfiles - user-specific configuration files. GNU stow is an example. I’ve tried a few solutions over the years, but I settled on a very simple system several years ago which has served me very well in the time since: my $HOME is a git repository. This repository, in fact. This isn’t an original idea, but I’m not sure where I first heard it from either, and I’ve extended upon it somewhat since.

The key to making this work well is my one-byte .gitignore file:

*

With this line, and git will ignore all of the files...