2024
18W
2024-11-06
October came and went, ideas piled up in notebooks, but I kept on drawing. I
knew already by the time I had finished the Pocket Rewriting zine that I would make a
dynamic implementation of it which, by the way, was very well received despite
my not having even had a chance of giving away a single one. I was delighted to
see folks print their own copies.
These past two weeks have been a throwback to the release of Orca, where the less programmatically inclined
started playing with it right away, and those with preconceptions about what
programming is, what it should look and work like, found it inscrutable and
opaque. To some, the booklet remains near undecipherable. I will try to help
bridge that gap with more approachable documentation and examples over the winter.
18V
2024-10-23 Inktober II
Three weeks! I think that was the longest I went on without writing a single
line of code for the past many years, for even during long transits at sea, I
find time to sneak some in to answer these questions one ponders while gazing
at the horizon. I had other things on my mind this month, slides to finish,
dailies to draw, and settling back in our winter life in Victoria. As of
yesterday, that streak ended.
For the upcoming Handmade event, I wanted to be able to show anyone who
might ask a few simple examples of rewriting computation in a way that would
not be intrusive during a conversation, so I printed a zine that covers the basics of it, basics that I could
foresee myself repeat over again and having a challenging time doing so without
visual aids, rewriting being inherently a visual coding paradigm.
18U
2024-10-07 Inktober I
This is what I should have done last year when between the research for Strange Loop, daily maintenance of active projects, and
implementation of new ones, code was what I only ever read or wrote about for
weeks on end. By the time winter came, I was fed up with all of it. If
everything works according to plan, I'm well on my way to not writing a single
line of code this month.
It can all wait 'til November.
18T
2024-09-27 Loosing the plot
I finished my slides but I left in them some gaps to fill with puns, and
other miscellanea. There's this one where a whole culture of people is
programming entirely by multiplying fractions,
y'know what would be ridiculous? If I had actual examples, or even
implementations of classic functions to show the attendees. Not only that, how
better would my point be made if I built enough documentation to teach people
and even wrote games for it.
It has been 4 weeks now, I have vivid dreams in which I reduce the number of
steps it takes my fractions to find the Fibonacci sequence, I have written 3
different implementations and sit on enough material for a
whole extra talk of its own, or at least enough to bore a whole amphitheater to
tears. — Have we lost the plot yet?
18S
2024-09-09 Fractranfooding
We are again in familiar waters, with their familiar weather radio voices,
tugboats, madronas, lean little swallows, cormorants, banana slugs and
extremely bitter IPAs. We wake up and it's still dark out, summer must be
slipping away; the sun looks all burnt up, red and angry against the morning
haze. The music aboard is changing to an appropriate shoegaze, as if to match
the rustling of leaves and wailing of the wind passing through the shrouds.
Six or seven months has been enough to fall so far behind software updates, to
miss just enough versions, that even the part of the program that looks for
updates doesn't recognize the new server endpoints. As expected, most updated
things got worse, a few of them became quite awful, as it typically goes with software. A friend
uses necrotic as opposed to bitrot, because bitrot implies things have
been left to decay but software necrosis is rotting while being alive and
maintained.
18R
2024-08-24 Fractalfooding
I always fall within visible range of a technical solution needed to solve
some generic software issue tormenting me but ever so far as to not be capable
of navigating the tool-chain involved in applying said change to its source,
and so it goes, each time this occurs a new software is born to replace it.
Years melt away, no tool-chain moat is ever bridged, programs of every shape
and form have been transcended, the dogfood thoroughly consumed. "Blessed!",
for the transformation of the damned into doghood is complete.
18Q
2024-08-13 Back to Hathayim
We finally emerged from the fog bank that haunts the north of the island, and
sailed into the remains of a familiar Desolation Sound summer. The sound of
dinghies being pulled up the beach, dry mosses crackling under your feet. Do
our legs remember how to walk, where are the fair weather clothes, put away the
firewood, the sun is setting, catching up with friends, our time apart has it
been years, no, we have just seen you haven't we. How was it up there? Was it
fun.
How near to good is what is wild.
It's time to manifest all these thoughts scribbled in transit. I need to
finish up the slides for the upcoming talk, and the
music for the upcoming show, and, and time is ebbing!
- Found a neat optimization of the Uxn core.
- Made a few contributions to Kodiak.
- Added macros support to Drifblim.
- Wrote a Fractran runtime and updated notes.
18P
2024-07-19 Roudo Ses
The automated weather radio voice drones about the advent of favorable
northerly winds that never manifest, so we've resorted to doing short hops,
weather permitting, between the safety of one inlet and the next whenever the
storm catches its breath, often against tide, oftener against wind. We occupy
the disquieting lulls of what feels more like trench warfare than passaging
drowned in tea, blankets and the smell of paperbacks.
I've also kept busy revising some of the Solresol
poetry in Wiktopher. In R. W. Kimmerer's Grammar
of Animacy, she says that 70% of words in Potawatomi are verbs, as opposed to
English in which only 30% are. Through the lens of an animist language, the
hill is less there, than there is occupied at being a hill. She
puts it succinctly in "A bay is a noun only if water is dead".
18O
2024-07-19 A Halo Around The Sun
The inlets we find ourselves anchored in are worlds of their own with
inhabitants that, as transitory as some may be, are affairing themselves with
happenings that extend to the shores of the lagoon, but no further. A
strange new thing has come into the sheltered water and disrupted its hubbub,
now everyone looks as if caught in a gasp, at its skyward pointing wing, at its
opaque lifelessness. Through the oblong eyes of the vessel, like under a
diving bell, we peer back in wonder.
There are as many days to our bow without connectivity than those that lay
between our stern and Prince Rupert, where we were last able to make contact.
In these secluded days, I am reminded of a passage from one of Thoreau's
journals that reads the inscription on a Swedish inn:
You will find at Trolhate excellent bread, meat, and wine, provided you bring
them with you!
- Progressed toward a Markl prototype.
- Improved Uxnfor to better handle OOP formatting.
- Wrote for Malleable Systems Collective's Fearless Extensibility.
- Took care of many small tasks for the wiki that I
had been putting off, such as improving categorizing and removing redundant
pages.
18N
2024-07-12 Southward
We twice waved farewell to Sitka. A few hours after untying the lines, the
engine that normally cycles water through itself to cool down decided that it
would not do that anymore. The problem appeared to have gone away after some
tinkering, only to return further down the coast, precipitating an emergency
arrival in some questionably-sheltered flies-infested inlet hidden past but a
few jagged rocks that the ocean breakers have as of yet unsuccessfully softened.
We dropped the anchor, slept, slept some more, once our strength returned, we
had to seriously take things apart and figure shit
out.
A single persimmon
left in the sky;
picked for me.
For as long as Uxn has been around, I've meant to resume and complete a puzzle
game that Rek and I wanted to build after Oquonie,
called Markl. During these recent night passages I've
spent my watches playing the game out in my head, and arrived to an exciting
place with the design. I've started implemented it the moment we reached
port.
- Wrote a track for a Diablo tribute cassette.
- Added binary data pasting to Left.
- Enjoyed the haikus from Santoka's teacher Seisensui Ogiwara.
18M
2024-06-25 A sensibility for the useless
We have sailed as far north as we are willing to go this year. As the summer
weather settles, heading further would mean crossing longer distances with
decreasing chances of favorable winds, less sailing and more motoring, which
does not appeal to us one bit. We'll head to Sitka before making our way back down to warmer waters and enjoy what remains of the summer free
of foul-weather jackets.
Spend enough time in the esoteric programming circuit and you'll come across
the usual suspects: self-generating programs, polyglot programs and quines; but
until this week I had never heard of ambigram/palindrome programs, which that
can be evaluated from either directions. Naturally, I had to have a go at it,
and I've added it to my growing collection of
labyrinthine programs.
18L
2024-06-14 Endless summer days
Alaskan summer days are long, the sun wakes us up at 4am, and it stays bright
until 11pm. By 5am, the batteries are already topped up from solar, if we were
very motivated, we could solar-cook every meals each day.
I occupy the few moments we have between sails by knocking down tasks I had in
my notes for a while, like making a disassembler and cleaning up the web emulator enough
that I can use it to show programs on wiki pages, like bifurcan and wireworld.
18K
2024-05-30 At the Alaskan border
Sitting aboard Pino in the last port in Canada before entering Alaska, thinking about
how odd it is to be sailing straight from the south and having to change
timezone. We've been moving every day of the past two weeks, making use of the
favorable wind to jump from anchorage to anchorage. During these long passages,
I try to write the talk for Handmade in my head.
Abner, who organizes the conference, asked me specifically to explore other ways to live with the attending creatives and
developers affected by burnout or the mass layoffs. I've had Edna St. Vincent
Millay's poem in mind these past few weeks, it goes:
Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!
18I
2024-04-27 String rewrite III
We've stowed away our 120v devices, untied the lines and begun our sail north
to Alaska! During the next few days, we will sail
through the inside passage and out the northern tip of Vancouver Island. As we
hop between anchorages, I wonder if a graphical
environment running on a naive string
rewriting computer possible, or even usable?
18H
2024-04-13 String rewrite II
Rek and I are completing the remaining projects on our pre-departure list and
provisioning for our sail to Alaska. Over the winter,
we've strengthened critical parts aboard Pino, replaced
experienced pieces of the rigging and simplified the habitat's life-systems
— Hopefully, this will all make the journey safer, and dryer.
After exploring Wryl's Modal language further, I
decided to write an
implementation to better understand how it worked, mechanically. This
sparked a renewed interest from the original creator, attracted members of
catlang community to explore string rewriting and has given me long and
delightful evenings pondering about how to crack various programming problems
with it.
18G
2024-04-02 String rewrite I
We are waiting for a few parts that we had machined, to return to us from the
local fabricator. While we wait, I spend most of time playing with esolangs,
one that has especially interested me lately is Modal,
which is a simple string-rewriting scheme similar to Thue,
but with the added feature that it allows for variables, and recognizes scope
delimiters. It's a brutally simple idea that allows a program to be shaped as
to mimic nearly any programing paradigm.
I had been reticent to expanding the Uxntal
macro system because of how it creates disjointed fragments of code that
couldn't be properly optimized, but after talking to people writing programs in
which macros were definitely the right tool for the task, I've decided to
rewrite the implementation and make them more robust.
18F
2024-03-21 Catlangs
As days are getting warmer, we can begin to tackle some much needed
maintenance topside like changing old lines, varnishing the oars and inspecting
the rigging. After a whole winter of getting up in the dark to do weight
training, I feel it was well worth it as my back pain is gone, I sleep better
and feel more overall physically capable. I have a month left of gym membership
and plan to make use of it as much as I physically can before its expiration,
and our casting off.
I've spend the idle hours of these past few days improving Left, thinking about concatenative programming and trying to better
understand what makes a language concatenative. To try and answer this
question, I've asked members of the catlang community to add example programs
for the various flavors. One of these examples was the Tak
Function which was new to me, and found it to map surprisingly well to
stack programming.
- It's just been too nice outside for any more computer musings.
- Enjoyed Henrik Karlsson's Third Chair story.
18E
2024-03-10 Left revamp
We took Pino's chainplates off and while the new ones
are being fabricated, we reinforced the area where the chainplate meet the
deck. It makes for a momentarily uninhabitable place to live, so I haven't had
much headspace to do creative work these past few days, but it will be well
worth it considering the places we're hoping to venture into.
Whenever I get to reclaim my desk from the pile of tools and materials that
took residency on there, I fool around with UTF-8
encoding support in Left. Looking into how diacritics
can be appended to other glyphs, I've begun to consider if I couldn't possibly
encode the Uxntal Alphabet entirely from
pre-existing glyphs within the two-bytes range and use diacritics for
modes.
- Made a few improvements to Left's support for UTF-8.
- Rewrote the uxn.js, it now passes the opcode tests.
- Added example programs to the concat wiki.
18D
2024-02-25 Hello, Dot?
Our plans for the summer are coming into focus. It looks like we'll depart
early, head as far north as we can make it, and see if the boat and its crew
can weather the cold. This ought to give us taste of what we might expect would
we decide to make it further into the arctic next year.
Someone found an interesting undefined behavior in the assembly of Uxn code,
where the nesting of child labels could be
implemented in one of two ways, leading to an incompatiblity between
assemblers. I've explored this further and found myself pulled me into a
concatenative object-oriented programming rabbit-hole.
18C
2024-02-11 Conlang Weekly
Other than doing improvements aboard, it has been a month of playing
with conlangs and conscripts. I begun exploring variable
length glyphs in Left after adding support for the
Lambda(λ) character last month, and went further still by supporting the Shavian alphabet. I had been looking for an alternative
alphabet for a while and loved its 48 letters, the symmetries in the glyphs and
how easy it was to learn
it.
18B
2024-01-26 Back to music
I've originally started looking into virtual machines to build a target to
host some games, a handful of tools and my wiki — but instead of stopping
once I had done so, I kept pushing further and became obsessed with this
programming language design stuff, and along the way, I lost track of why I was
even doing it all in the first place. After a two year detour, I look back and
I've almost totally ignored my other interests as a digital artist and
musician. It's about time I find my way back.
18A
2024-01-13 Maintenance
The forge that we use at Hundred Rabbits has been taken down by DDoS attacks and
is struggling to come back online, the event reminded us that we ought to also
have mirrors and release versions of these source files available elsewhere. I've begun
to host copies across our various websites. The builds are still
accessible through itch.io.
Until we regain access and release the changes of the last few days, keeping
with the spirit of improving the resilience of the tools we use I've taken a
moment to write a kind of pocket version of the console emulator and self-hosted assembler as to see how many lines are
needed to start from the seed assembler and replicate it. A copy of the pocket
emulator, the source for the assembler and its hexadecimal representation have
been added to the wiki.
In the meantime, if anyone is looking for a specific file that is currently
unavailable, get in touch!
