Progress

I'm doing stuff with RFID and MQTT again. Very nice, and could lead to some exciting follow-ups in new industries. Also, it's so nice to work in a prototype environment where one can simply do, instead of do right.

Other work continues steadily, which is also nice.

I'm still unsure about the tone of my weeklogs. Do I talk to myself, or to someone else, or to no one, or what?

I had to re-order my business cards because I'm an idiot and didn't proofread them before ordering.

I found out that one can lay carbon fiber by hand. It's literally just carbon fiber cloth and epoxy resin, and it's not even that expensive. The same is true for aramide fibers, which is what Kevlar® is made out of. It's super-hard to cut (who would've guessed) and it frays very quickly, since the fibers are so smoothProtip: Put some tape on the place where you want to cut, then cut along the tape. Reduces fraying and shifting fibers.. And once you wet it with the epoxy, it becomes a sticky mess that's impossible to work with. And finally, all the tools you use with epoxy are single-use, because, well, it'll cure and glue itself to everything.
Then you'll have, essentially, bullet-proof stuff.
I also found out that, no matter how well you patch childrens' shoes, they'll still manage to destroy them.

I'm trying to store time-series data in PostgreSQL, while not having to hit the disk too often. There are several ways to do thissimple tables, arrays, RRDs, and general durability options, but I'm leaning towards UNLOGGED tables. Unlogged tables work in such a way that they are not stored in the WAL, so they'll be empty after a crash. Since I'll do roll-up of the raw data points anyway, that shouldn't be a problem, so I guess this is perfect.

I have no idea where to get kite line at this time of year.

I have some ideas on continuing The Book. Maybe I should do that sometimes.

NTS

No progress on NTS this week. I was thinking about the memory subsystem and it feels more daunting every time I do anything about it.

TWIL

• Gitlab has issue boards, and those are very useful -- I've used them before, they're great. But indeed, Gitlab has two kinds of issue boards, one for repositories and one for groups. Both have swimlanes for your issues, but they are different. In a repo, the swimlanes are for tags on the issues in the repository. In the group, the swimlanes are for tags on the issues in the group. Naturally, these groups of tags are completely separate and not combineable, which means that the issue boards look absolutely identical, except for where your issues are.
• When you self-publish a book, you must send two specimens to the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Ebooks, too.

Ideas

Inspired by restmail.net, I'm thinking again about a programmable email server, an MTA/MUA that one could work with. All the current solutions are, well, old and rather inflexibleFrom Wikipedia: Surveys probing Internet-exposed systems typically attempt to identify systems via their banner, or other identifying features; and report Postfix and exim as overwhelming leaders in March 2021, with greater than 92% share between them. [1] . I think a programmable mail server would allow some very nice possibilities, like: - one-time-use email addresses, like restmail - infix names and automatic aliases - better mail filtering - unified email accounts - interactive email applications - integration into other products - better spam filtering

Now, who's going to give me an IMAP server library?!

Shopify

Shopify is now worth more than SAP. Someone should do something with that.

Articles

• # SoME1 results: I participated in the "Summer of Math Exposition" and the winners are in. Mine is, very, very unsurprisingly, not among the five best math exposition videos submitted. So many of those videos are great! Maybe I should make a better version of mine.
• ## IPv4 addresses are silly, inet_aton(3) doubly so.: some very surprising behaviour of aton which converts stuff to standard IP addresses.
• Fascine Mattresses: Basketry Gone Wild: Fascine mattresses are wooden constructions for dam and coastal stabilization, made by hand and very, very durable.
• How to Make Biomass Energy Sustainable Again: Nowadays, most wood is harvested by killing trees. Before the Industrial Revolution, a lot of wood was harvested from living trees, which were coppiced. The principle of coppicing is based on the natural ability of many broad-leaved species to regrow from damaged stems or roots – damage caused by fire, wind, snow, animals, pathogens, or (on slopes) falling rocks. Coppice management involves the cutting down of trees close to ground level, after which the base – called the “stool” – develops several new shoots, resulting in a multi-stemmed tree.
• An oral history of Bank Python: Sometimes you find an article that's just so good that you have to follow all the links and read everything that's related. This is one of those articles. It's about the "Bank python""Bank Python implementations are effectively proprietary forks of the entire Python ecosystem which are in use at many (but not all) of the biggest investment banks." ecosystem that is at the same time really, really strange but also really wonderful, and we "outsiders" could take a slice of the good ideas it contains.
• The Architecture of Open Source Applications: I'll have to read this one day.
• The troublesome "Active Record" pattern
• Volcker Rule: The rule was originally proposed (...) to restrict United States banks from making certain kinds of speculative investments that do not benefit their customers. Volcker argued that such speculative activity played a key role in the financial crisis of 2007–2008. The rule is often referred to as a ban on proprietary trading by commercial banks, whereby deposits are used to trade on the bank's own accounts, (...).
• Electing the Doge of Venice: analysis of a 13th Century protocol: Next idea for a board game? I also love that this is an HP Technical Report!?
• It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription: Unfortunately, we live in a time where so many things are openly subscriptions, that the things that are secretly subscriptions aren't that important any more
• Does having prime neighbors make you more composite?: A bit rambly and a bit too philosophical, but great analysis of the numbers between twin primes.
• As a solo developer, I decided to offer phone support, and this is what happened
• How a SQL database works
• GPT-3 is not longer the only game in town

Libraries, programming, etc

• GitHub - Shopify/toxiproxy: A TCP proxy to simulate network and system conditions for chaos and resiliency testing: Toxiproxy is a framework for simulating network conditions. It's made specifically to work in testing, CI and development environments, supporting deterministic tampering with connections, but with support for randomized chaos and customization. Toxiproxy usage consists of two parts. A TCP proxy written in Go (what this repository contains) and a client communicating with the proxy over HTTP. You configure your application to make all test connections go through Toxiproxy and can then manipulate their health via HTTP.
• EZTable is a lightweight python table library.
• django-rq and rq-scheduler: A background-task system using redis as its backend and sole dependency.

Books

• Zamonien by Walter Moers(1)
• Still A Philosophy of Software Development, still good.

Games

• A Fisherman's Tale, VR: You're a puppet and you see yourself outside of your puppet house. Then it plays with this wonderfully absurd size contrast. Nice little game, not too interactive, but very nice. 7/10
• The Curious Case of the Stolen Pets, VR: Very cute, with music by Wintergatan. I'd just wish I could see my hands, instead of those impractical (but cute) dandelions. 8/10
• Insult Simulator, with bison: a silly little game, nice to play after having played other, more serious games. 6/10
• MHRD: the classics. While I've almost finished building a CPU, there's lots of room to optimize all of my designs. I still dislike the interface, and I still think one could make an even more brilliant game out of this concept. 8/10

Other media

• Dead as a doornail
• You suck at Excel - Joel Spolsky: Yes, I do.
• Microservices. This is usually how these meetings go.