Lately I feel that even an HTML journal has too much structure, all of it placed there upfront. Life is too freewheeling for that. Note to self: just write! You can figure out where it fits later.
It's the end of July, and I'm eating sour cherry jam with a teaspoon, right from the pot. It's hot outside again, and bots are hammering my website. My desktop struggles a little, but won't admit it.
August rolls in, and my bank lets me know how much harder it will be to use my debit card starting next year, in the name of "security" and "convenience". A few days later, the heatwave arrives in earnest. The government decrees energy-saving measures. Luckily not for the populace.
I'm reading about BBC Basic, not for the first time. Hardly my favorite dialect, but I keep thinking it could be useful for something... some day. Maybe. Still keeping up with the QBasic scene too. Also imagining uses for Yabasic. All of it looks increasingly pointless though. Too much computer, not enough real life.
Mid-month is marked by another heatwave, then a visit to the dentist. Starting to catch up on errands here for a change. Cricket season has started too. Makes waking up at night much more pleasant.
Finally got around to renewing this domain, by the way. More details in the site news.
Before summer is over, we finally get around to our first day trip to Sinaia since 2019. Suffice to say, it's my second-favorite place in Romania. Ought to spend longer there and learn the area. Bonus points for perfect weather and things going smoothly despite little preparation. Pictures here.
I have three talks lined up, and coming up quite fast, about digital archival and esoteric computation models. I somehow lucked out this year, for I got myself presenting a full forty minutes on FRACTRAN of all things, in front of I swear non-imaginary people; and paid; and in Sweden! I must be the luckiest person alive. And if I can eloquently and captivatingly share my love for multiplication, rewriting, prime numbers, tropical arithmetic and fractions; doubly so.
In the hours of the day when I'm not trying to stitch together some 300 slides into a coherent story about dead programming languages and preservation, I've been reading the history of auxiliary languages(like Esperanto, that sort of thing). In Peano's desire to make a portable preservation medium, a kind of mathematical object to encode scientific ideas, I find something of a kindred curiosity. But more than that, I find places within his work that could be improved by elements that didn't exist in his time.
I read Sylvia Pankhurst's Delphos feeling like it was celebrating an unfinished monument, Peano stripped Latin down, sure, he did, but never formalized the grammar and left a whole lot of flexion in. His logical notation(⊃, ∈, ∩, ..) has not dissimilar issues, they're compressed and minimal but arbitrary. Compare that to Zellweger's Flipstick alphabet. Had Peano kept pushing, I like to imagine Formulario's margins filled with something closer to that, symbols that carry their own logic in a language that is truly transparent.
As for me, I think there is definitely something romantic to documenting a frozen system in a language without semantic drift, I'm just not sure how it all connects yet..
Spent a wonderful week in Spain with my Uncle and his family on my first proper holiday outside the UK in years. I have been wanting to travel more and this was a good first trip.
There was another purpose to the trip though, for years I’ve wanted to see a total solar eclipse, it’s been on my bucket list forever and today I finally checked it off.
I'm entertaining the idea of writing a second assembler, one written in a higher-level language than Uxntal. As a sort of reference. But as to not add an irreconcilable dependency into the mix, it must be in a language that I can realistically write a compiler for. With that in mind, if I had to pick a second language, which one would it be?
It would be POP-2. It was an obscure outlier among the Pascal and C shaped things that was extremely cat-brained, and a beautifully designed one at that, that still manages to preserve that classic look. If it wasn't for the infix assignment operator(->), it would look just like any other.
function factorial n;
if n = 0
then 1;
else
n * factorial(n - 1);
closeend
fact(5);
But it has a clear advantage over Pascal, in that it expects something that looks almost exactly like Uxn underneath. To test my idea, I've spent the better part of the past two days implementing a POP-2 compiler that comes to about 800 lines of Uxntal or a 2.5kb rom. Only one thing left to do, let's find out if an Uxntal assembler might be written in it so I may close the bootstrapping loop.
The month started with a huge storm that left mud and broken trees in its wake. Then my birthday came and went. The icecream was good (though that was the next day) and various people called.
One week into July, I have text-based apps on my mind again. No particular reason. I already use dialog(1) in a non-trivial Python app: a daily driver now. That's a surprisingly capable solution; I haven't even scratched the surface yet. It's also widely available and well-documented, much like the underlying ncurses. For a term of comparison, the Newt library only has a tutorial, and CDK mostly relies on examples.
A few days later, it's Zenity instead. I use it in e.g. AntiWiki to show native file dialogs on Linux, but YAD is better documented and more capable (though Debian is yet to catch up). On the other hand, Zenity has Windows builds if Wikipedia is to be believed.
Halfway through the month, it's time for my annual three-day "vacation" (read: visiting relatives). Verdict: mid, and topped by a nasty argument. So much for that. I did come back with a dozen photos. Even shared a couple on Mastodon.
Some time after my return, I'm helping a friend with their Codeberg project that had unexpected success and now requires more attention than real life allows sometimes. Very satisfying experience; highly recommended. Finally learning to properly review and merge pull requests is just a bonus.
Last weekend's highlight was a plate of crepes with the remaining sour cherry jam from last year's batch. We're about to make the first batch of this year, too.
