Ground broken on October Project

Broke ground on the October Project a few days ago. So far, it is going well.

Unfortunately, it will be some time until this can do anything as sophisticated a full-blown Minecraft clone, so my first target "test game" will be something with a [...]

Here is something I put together, but I am not sure I am happy with it, yet.

Next Projects

Now that the Cacophony tooling work for my site generation is done and working, I need to figure out what to do next.

There is that possibility of Maven-on-IPFS tooling/scripts, but I am not sure how useful that is, at this time. I am currently [...]

Cacophony tooling

Been working on re-organizing the Cacophony code for some tooling related to creating static output of a list of channels, the past few days. It is going pretty well, so far, but this has just been the organizing and shaping of the code. The next [...]

More of a casual vlog-style video where I talk about what I have learned about WebRTC through the implementation of my recent BasicRtc project.

WebRTC is used for real-time peer-to-peer communication between browsers. Its main use-case is for [...]

Next project musings

Now that Cacophony development has essentially wrapped up, I am trying to figure out what the next project should be.

Maven on IPFS: Years ago, I was working with someone to build a way to publish Maven resources onto IPFS, using the Aion [...]

Re: No place like home. :)

I do have that on my doormat. However, when I first got it, I remember thinking it would be more interesting if it were IPv6 and more directly applicable if it were "~" (tilde).

127.0.0.1 is more like "me" whereas the tilde is "home directory" on [...]

Re: 4.1 pre-3

Ok, so the problem is just related to when you move the tab to a new location or when you switch to a different draft?

Do you expect that they auto-save or tell you that you are about to lose information?

I want to make sure I have a sense of what [...]

After much investigation and consideration, I made a few changes. These changes only reduced the number of package relationships (edges in the graph) by 7 but the shape of the diagram now makes far more sense.

There are now fewer cyclic [...]

I recently wrote a little script to scrape the Cacophony source files to find patterns between the packages, based on imports. These relationships are then passed into dot to render as a graph.

This is what the system looked like, when I first [...]

Re: 4.1 pre-release 0

Hmm, I will need to look into that. I suspect that these issues might just be caching related so they might go away once the browser cache times-out the stale data or if you manage to force it to fully reload the page.

The odd thing is that I [...]

Re: 4.1 pre-release 0

Hmm, strange that they are giving you update options for the wrong platform.

Did you find that Chrome worked any better with a force-refresh of the page (the shift-ctrl-r)?

Re: 4.1 pre-release 0

What do you mean? Does it refuse to connect to the server, or something?

Are you sure it is the right IP and port (the :8000)?

Docs

Yeah, Google Docs has really good collaborative editing features but it is a poor word processor and a terrible text editor.

Unfortunately, I have a poor sense of UI/UX (or just don't care enough about them) so I am not great at building tools [...]

I don't have any great insight into this one but I wanted to point out something which we sometimes miss in the software world, especially in the internet age, despite it being something we all realize, at least on some level.

Historically, we [...]

Post Order

There isn't really a strong notion of "post order" except within the context of a single user. Between users, however, it there isn't a specific way of interpreting that.

The posts do have dates but I am hesitant to rely on those since someone [...]

Multi-photo posts

While just making a "bunch of photos" into a kind of inline extension, I am hesitant to do it that way since I suspect people might want to be able to find photos uploaded that way through another path, as well.

Hence, I have to figure out a way to [...]

This is a short talk about how I fear that client-server software design has become a "progress trap" (something which seemed like a good idea but lead into a dead end).

I also provide some possible other ways to design systems, from federated [...]

Scalability of Cacophony's data model

An interesting thing about the introduction of the replyTo mechanism is that it will definitely dump more data, and more meta-data, into the main record stream of the on-IPFS data structure.

In theory, this should be just fine. In fact, the entire [...]

A quick discussion of what vector processing is, how it contrasts with scalar processing (and super-scalar), and how it compares with other processing mechanisms like co-processors and graphics processors.

A simple way to think about this is: If [...]

IPFS eventually finds requested data

Yesterday, there were 2 instances of failing to fetch data which could be resolved with "dht findprovs" which I think is because my node couldn't find the hosting peer "dht findpeer".
In both cases, the data fetch started to work after about 30 [...]

Declarative UI Musings

The Cacophony 3.0 pre-releases mean that I am back into front-end UI world, making updates to support the recent core changes.

Now, as anyone who knows me can attest, I do NOT like working on UI, and definitely not JavaScript-based browser UIs. As [...]

I talk about copy-on-write data structures, most specifically within the context of file systems. The idea does extend to databases, more generally, and some of the themes can even be observed in content-addressed systems, such as IPFS.

The basic [...]

Reddit Post

Just wanted to make a small text update to draw attention to a post I made on Reddit to mention Cacophony.

This seems to be well-received but, unfortunately, isn't drawing as much conversation as I had hoped.

Still, nice to see that people are [...]

I talk a little about memory usage in modern software and how a lack of concern around it has led to systems which are slow, can't scale down to smaller devices, and are often just incorrect.

Take this as a bit of technical rant from "an old GC guy".