Due to world events petrol has become a pricy proposition recently, I don’t really go anywhere other than work and it still is hitting my pocket.
I live about 6 miles from my workplace and have been meaning to get back on my bike for a while now. A 12 mile round trip doesn’t sound that bad but I am woefully out of shape since I sit behind a desk most of the day so I’ll need to build up to actually making the journey if I don’t want to spend the whole shift catching my breath just to do it again to get home.
It’s mostly back roads in the countryside which I will need to be careful on, if the crazy early morning drivers don’t get me then the potholes might instead.
Lee Tusman sent me this graphic design book A Co-Program For Graphic Design, in it were a few pages about Hilbert, Peano, and briefly mentioning Formulario Mathematico, a book written in Giuseppe's own Latino Sine Flexione. His work has been on my mind lately as I try to design a kind of standard notation to use across all my notes hoping to standardize multiple topic-specific notations into just one style.
Regardless, as I was clumsily trailing Peano's footsteps, I came across this video, giving me the idea to try and translate some of the Rejoice examples into Peano's language, as a kind of.. homage? Zoom forward a few days, a hundred hours of Latin youtube, nearly breaking Arch installing Latin dictionaries, I might have lost the plot..
[] es nihil, identitate. []/n es predecessore. n es successore.
2026-04-05 - Play like you want to win - Cutting Tofu
I struck a deal with myself
They’d been waiting for me all this time
Whenever I’m trouble
We grit our teeth and clench our fists together
I wanted to be the one to save myself
Even when I knew I couldn’t win
Please understand,
This is what I have to work with.
I’m building Rome amidst all the rubble
It’s collapsed many more times than I can count
And each time I assemble the pieces
I try to remember what parts go where
Like a jigsaw puzzle except everything looks the same.
It’s true I didn’t plan this
It was supposed to end a long time ago
And yet here we are,
Still standing on my feet,
But I’ve found myself shuffled into a line dance
“Now move like you mean it,
The next song is about to start.”
I've just written a little more about wom on this page. I am now happy with the abstractions. I've also been thinking about a little language to start processes and connect files together. That way, a spreadsheet program can connect to a charting program, and the chart can update as soon as a selection is made. More on that soon!
I should be grateful for where I am right now, and yet I can’t be.
I feel hollow, detached from the “normal” people, from the “normal”
stuff. I miss the special someone I never had. I want this
nonsense to stop.
I cleaned the files exposed by a process down to: `ctl`, `wctl` and `label`. The ctl files (ctl and wctl) take in commands and act as pipes: you write to it, the text is consumed. ctl are commands for the process. wctl takes commands to manage the window attached to the process. At first I had a `rect` file, changing the file would update the window's coordinates. But using a ctl file lets me do validation, check ranges etc. For example, to move a window to position 10x10, we can do `fs.write('/proc/pid/wctl', 'size 10 10')`. I've also added a `/opt/start` file where we can list what goes to the global right-click menu
I got a new coffee machine, and it's really good! On wom, I realized that I was conflating commands and state when it comes to IPC. For example, a process folder would expose an observable `dirty` file. Removing its content would trigger a save and update the UI of a window to remove the '*'' next to the name. But what if the save operation fails? What if the program was opened without a path? I could work around that by introducing a little state machine in the `dirty` file: '!' could mean "i request a save" and "*" could mean the file is dirty. But if each file in the process have to expose a mini state machine, the complexity skyrockets. Instead, I went down the Plan9 route: process that will take commands expose a `ctl` file. That file acts as a pipe: what you write in it gets consumed. That's how the outside world communicates with the process. Write `save` in it and the process will trigger a save. Since the content of the observable gets emptied after each message, we can send the same command twice. When we read that file, we see the content of the internal states of the process with key values. I could do that by 1/ creating a ctl file and saving its original data observable's set function and 2/ replacing the file's data set by a new one that just checks the command and take actions 3/ update the original data when any state change.
A few days ago I had a dream that I rode a white horse across the sea to Scotland and won a prize, when I came back it was the dead of night, and the city was full of dangerous things but I was safe on my horse. When I got home I thought someone I once knew would be there, but she wasn't, however, I forgot I'd invited friends over, and they were cooking me soup instead! Then Picasso was there, speaking in gibberish and making cool art in my shed!
I suppose you can't always find the things you expect, even after incredible journeys. Like stars and cars, we all end up in the future, missing bits, but maybe seeing what matters too!
2026-03-26 - See how deep the rabbit hole goes - drisc's Journal
Over the past 6 months I haven’t really used my iPad Pro for anything, trying to do any coding tasks on it was a chore and required external services or hardware. It is great for media consumption and playing iOS games but not great for sitting in a coffee shop to work on code (yes, I know this is a cliché).
So, when the MacBook Neo was announced I decided to price out what a trade-in would net me and it came out to over £550, leaving me with around £150 to pay for a 512GB model that has TouchID.
Going from a device with an M4 inside it to an A18 Pro feels like it would be massive step down but for what I wanted the Neo for (light coding, game emulation, travel) it has been amazing. The 8GB of RAM that the machine has is constantly at 80% due to my Safari tab habits but I haven’t noticed any huge performance hits in the stuff I’ve been doing.
Something I’ve noticed about myself as well is that when I have an Apple device I tend to baby it for trade-in or resale potential but since I don’t intend to do either of those things with the Neo I’m going to stickerbomb it which I haven’t done since my Thinkpad X201.
It's March all of a sudden, and spring is coming fast. I'm back on my bullshit again with another toy programming language. That, and relearning Vala. Maybe third time's the charm. But damn, I have to manage my effort. Being middle-aged sucks.
(Update: I have a working interpreter, and Vala worked out wonderfully for this!)
Otherwise, this month is shaping up busily, between errands, friends to get in touch with and a scheduled visit to the doctor. Surprisingly, this time they offered me an appointment much sooner than last autumn. Turns out they have a lot fewer patients now, just as I suspected. The significant price hike looks like a likely culprit.
By the way, my eyes are the same as last time, so that's one less reason to worry.
Somehow the spring equinox came and passed already. Weather was chilly again for a while, though nights were no longer freezing. Now it's warming up rapidly. The magnolias are almost in bloom. I made another release of Babble-M; thinking about scripting-adjacent ideas now.
Next major milestone: Easter, and hopefully getting in touch with a friend.
Mobile app of the month: NerdCalci, a kind of linear spreadsheet or digital workbook for those who don't need the full power of microMathematics Plus. Ended up not using it on any device, but it's an interesting concept.
I did some preliminary work on the directory structure of the filesystem for wom. The OS is single user, which simplifies things a lot. I'm using /tmp to store current Prompt windows return values. Since a file is an observable I can just listen to any changes to it and trigger a callback accordingly. I've added a Confirm program too, as well as a `dirty` file within a proc/{id} directory. When attempting to close a process that has a non-empty dirty file, a Confirm window appears to ask for confirmation. The fact that `dirty` is a file allows programs from the outside to trigger a save as well. For now, that's how I plan to manage IPC.
I just turned one of those bold, round numbers that invites metaphysical thoughts about Time. Waking up at forty, I find myself in a body that feels healthy. From here, the past doesn’t look effortless: waking at six, workouts, repetitions, injuries, recoveries. But it does feel contingent. Perhaps a future version of me wished it so. Maybe a wish is not something that happens in the future, but something that selects a past.
Not an injection of energy, but a constraint on what histories are allowed, a pressure that filters the trajectories that can lead to this moment. There has to be a sequence of events that leads to the arrangement of me now. Perhaps this is the only history that survives the constraint of a wish I would one day impose: that I be well.
I'm setting up this new journal. My attention's been scattered a bit and I'm not sure where to write anymore, so here's the place! I've moved contents I had from other places to m15o.net. I've added a context menu to wom, and simplifying the folder structure. It's going to be a strictly single-user operating system. It's also now possible drag/drop files to Dir from your host computer.
