Devine Lu Linvega's journal

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?

• Against my better judgment, wrote more Fractran examples.
• Progressing on new album, live show on December 6th.
• Composed a remix of SOPHIE's One More Time.
• Started a rewriting mailing list, say hi!

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.

• Wrote Conway's Game Of Life in Conway's Fractran.
• Found a mouse-picking bug while doodling with Oekaki, and fixed it.
• Improved the little music player with d6's help.
• A thought for the crew of SV Dakota who lost their home.

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.

• Wrote a cyclical self-replicating program.
• Added macro support to Uxnfor and Left.
• Thank you cmus for years of service, it's now time for a change.
• Enjoyed Kristen Ghodsee's Everyday Utopia.

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.

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.

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".

• Corrected Solresol translations in Wiktopher.
• Designed a calligraphy system for Solresol.
• Added Symmetric dictionary to Solrela.
• Reworked tbsp's tea timer.

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:

• 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.

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.

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.

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.

• Improved the sitemap.
• Added selection tool to Oekaki.
• Added step-by-step evaluation to the Uxntal playground.
• Enjoyed listening to Rek read West With The Night from the companionway.

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.

• Added custom brushes to Oekaki and alpha graphics to Adelie.
• Also, made lots of near imperceptible changes to the wiki.
• Enjoyed reading the RA2K race updates.

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:

• Made lots of tiny improvements to Notepad and Oekaki.
• Enjoyed listening to Alcest's L'Envol.

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?

• Started work on Thuesday.
• Enjoying Rek's reading of Andy Weir's The Martian to me at night.
• Is Orca dead?, no, it's just finished.

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.

• Implemented Modal in ANSI C.
• Wrote Tic-tac-toe in it.
• Returned matching parentheses to Left.
• Enjoyed following progress on Uxn FPGA.

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.

• Made a Uxn bot, for the Concatenative Discord.
• Implemented some of Mikael Patel's minforth primitives.
• Collected a list of named combinators for stack machines.
• Enjoyed listening to the Tipping Point podcast.

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.

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.

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.

• Released Potato, added to uxnemu and uxn11 emulators.
• Added Latin Accented support to Left.
• Composed a remix of Sara Landry's Skate.
• Enjoyed reading Bosun Bird's sailing beyond the rapids.

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.

• Added a dark mode to the wiki.
• Dodo soldosisol larelafa solmisimi.
• 𐑒𐑮𐑦𐑱𐑑𐑩𐑛 𐑖𐑱𐑝𐑾𐑯 𐑪𐑯𐑕𐑒𐑮𐑰𐑯 𐑒𐑰𐑚𐑹𐑛.
• Composed a remix of Ivoxygen's Destruction.

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.

• Finding my way back.

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!

• Revamped the permacomputing page.
• Enjoyed watching the mini series L'Effondrement(2019).
• Thankful for Sourcehut's tireless work on resolving the issue and communication.

2023-12-28 Lisp

I've been taking it easy for the last few days of the year, cooked a lot, walked a lot. I've been re-reading SICP and idly poking at implementing a Lisp system in the style of Varvara. I don't have any specific goal for it beyond exploring low-level symbolic computing, but who knows where these things might lead.

After watching an excellent documentary about the Newton, I found myself reading about the various ways to convert hand-written letters into their digital representations, and soon found myself fascinated enough that I just had to invent my own little shorthand calligraphy and interpreter.

• Wrote a daily devlog for December Adventure.
• Revisited the Lispkit book and ecosystem.

2023-12-09 Pomparu

Rek's Wiktopher is out! After nearly seven years, it's finally available for anyone to read. I'm super happy with the result, it includes a few side projects documented on here, such as a dialect of Solresol, and the game Hako. That's all I've this week, so go read it!

• Explored graphical input languages.
• Noodling on an operating system, again.

2023-11-20 Ulz Compression & Elmet Brae

The Elmet Brae compilation has been released, and put up on Beldam Records with a beautiful cover by Rostiger, who also made the Varvara Zine.

I've spared a few evenings to implement a Ulz encoder, for which my first attempt was nearly a year ago, and at the time, writing programs in Uxn that involved many nested loops terrified me. So, it felt great to revisit this old problem that stumped me before, and solve it.

Members of the Solresol community and I talked about the lack of useful example sentences in the language, and how the handful of examples out there often include mistakes, so we've put together a revised list of sentences that we could agree on.

• Released the Elmet Brae compilation.
• Implemented the ULZ compressor in Uxntal.

2023-11-11 Ternary Party

Rek and I are doing a final proof-reading of Wiktopher before release, we're trying to make sure that all of the book's conlang dialogs are consistent with each other. On the topic of conlangs, we've also translated Thousand Rooms in Solresol.

In the evenings, I've been revisiting ternary computers after wondering about string encoding in such a system. I've only implemented the basic scaffolding so far, but I'm hoping to reach a point where it can assemble and run basic TerSCII printing routines.

• Improved the Opcode Tests, and Device Tests.
• Made a Solresol Translator based on Sidosi.
• Did a few fixes to Uxn5 and Nasu.

2023-10-25 Back Aboard

After being away since leaving for the train to Strange Loop, we finally made our way back to Pino. It feels great to be back in our things, and to have the mind-space to create again, I was able to write music this week, and it had been a very long time since I last felt like doing so.

I also helped with the implementation of a few devices for the Javascript version of Varvara that a friend of ours use in their classroom, someone also contributed a WASM implementation of the Uxn core, which speeds things up a lot in comparison with the old one I made last year. I've also played with sixels.

• Wrote a song for Elmet Brae EB01.
• Released transcription of Computing And Sustainability.
• Implemented a few missing devices to Uxn5.
• So happy to be back on the water.

2023-10-12 Perma

These past few days, Rek and I were invited to participate in conversations with students, researchers, and radio hosts about sustainable technological practices(Right To Repair, Design for Disassembly, Open Source, etc). We're witnessing a growing interest in software longevity, digital preservation, and the organization of a critical mass of ecofeminist collectives exploring the failability of modern tech, and the development of resilient practices, beyond mere academics.

• Nothing to show yet, but working on Varvara's new Audio device with Bad Diode.
• The talk for Strange Loop is now available online!
• Enjoyed reading Pauwels' Blumroch L'Admirable once again.

2023-10-07 Stolas

After taking the train from Seattle to Saint-Louis, I kept on heading East to visit family and friends. I've been feeling a bit of out of sorts in regards to programming, and unmotivated to do any software development. It'll come back to me, but in the meantime I'll be spending my days drawing dailies for the month of October, and catching up with movies and music that came out since we last had access to reliable internet connection.

• Translated parts of Wiktopher to Solresol.
• Removed interactive mode to Drifblim.
• Got a Prince Stolas from Lizbeth.

2023-09-25 Strange Loop Or Die Tryin'

On the eve of the talk, I sit half-awake waiting for my first real meal since leaving Victoria to arrive, it's been two hours, blatter is coming down hard on this very loud, and very understaffed, and only available vegetarian place within walking distance from the hotel. And, my voice is shut, the talk is in a few hours.

I normally am a really careful planner when it comes to giving these sorts of technical talks, you wouldn't catch me going out the night before.

I had assumed that the train from Seattle would either carry their one vegetarian meal on the menu, or accommodate. After a first day of eating cold bread loaves with margarine, and an altercation with an uncompromising attendant on the second day, I managed to secure myself a "Steamed Russet Potato A-la Tomato Sauce" for the third.

I had also assumed that the venue would carry palatable vegan options, or that I could cook my own. After missing the Strange Loop meal service twice in a row, due to talk scheduling conflicts, I managed to queue long enough to acquire one of the last remaining scoops of an awful vegan soup. I promptly returned to stealing whole fruits from the hotel gym and eating them in my room, which I was content with. The problem that wasn't apparent at first was that eating sweets all day kept me up all night.

Despite these mistakes in preparing properly for the road leading to the talk, I managed to show up on stage on time, give an (hopefully) entertaining presentation at Strange Loop 2023. I'd love to give a special thank to Jack Rusher for the tea that brought my voice back, and Josh Morrow for letting me borrow their laptop and install Uxn on it for the presentation.

• Released slides for the Strange Loop 2023 Talk.
• Added soft-reboot to Varvara.
• I learnt how to cook instant noodles with a clothing iron.

2023-09-09 Solresol

Now that the first pass of proof-reading for Wiktopher is behind us, we have begun to look into cleaning up some of the worlding aspects of the book, which include congames, conlangs and even conrecipes. One of Lupin's dialects can be whistled, and as to encode the various poems of the story into pitches, we decided to pick the Solresol constructed language as a suitable candidate.

Not previously knowing the language, I have spent the past few days neck-deep in digital archeology excavating some of the language's vanishing documents from the Wayback Machine and transcribing them in a format that will allow me to translate the texts. While I'm at it, I'm planning on translating the Thousand Rooms story, Famimi Remisolla as practice.

• Collected notes into a Solresol, and Solrela, pages.
• Enjoyed exploring the archives of the Sidosi community.

2023-08-26 Oekaki

In an attempt to catch up with all of the readings I have had queued in preparation to Strange Loop, I've inadvertently filled my every waking moments with enough dry PLT papers to make myself altogether sick with the topic. I've been so caught up trying to learn about expressiveness, that I momentarily forgot what about it was that I even wanted to express. So, while I recover, I've picked up daily drawing again.

• Wrote a 4kb illustration program, and drew.
• Enjoyed rediscovering the AltaPlana wiki.

2023-08-06 Lambdas

The first pass of review for Wiktopher is done! Rek and I have been working toward this milestone for months.

While implementing changes to Oquonie, I noticed how many single-purpose labels were used merely to hop over short lengths of code, enough that having ran of ideas for names to called them, I would default to things such as &skip, &continue or even &ok. The solution was to create anonymous labels, and as to be capable of nesting them, I ended up inadvertently adding lambdas to Uxntal which has drastically improve code readability, and as a side effect allowed for the rapid creation of tree data-structures.

• Started versioning Varvara.
• Implemented whole-sprite flipping to Varvara.
• Added makefiles to major uxntal projects.
• Enjoyed playing with Felix Winkelmann's Fleng.

2023-07-28 Maintenance All The Things

We are anchored in Von Donop, and I'm taking some time away from working on the talk to finish proof-reading Wiktopher.

Week after week, I find myself revisiting Drifblim's implementation, and each time I leave convinced that I've succeeded in improving it as much as I ever could, considering the negligible scale of the program, yet more elegant solutions, entirely unimaginable at the time, always become nothing less than obvious, a week later. — The destination that I'm grasping for is getting ever farther at the same rate that I approach it, but for as long as the program decreases in size, and increases in reliability, the chase remains exhilarating.

• Changed how the 0x00 color is handled by Varvara.
• Added a bit of breathing room to Left's interface.
• Enjoyed Nettie's Uxntal Cheatsheet.

2023-07-12 Uxntal Presentation

I've done little else this week other than proof-reading Rek's Wiktopher manuscript, but I did have this idea, while working on program verification, that I might like to realize in the fall. A system like Smalltalk's definition of interfaces for message passing, in which a message must find a match in the listening object's methods dictionary, might help improve Uxntal's expressiveness and be realized entirely with syntax already understood by the assembler.

We had to negotiate rapids and convert the ideal transit time from tide tables to Daylight Saving Time, which reminded me that I never made time to know when the change occurred in Canada. I am taking a not of it here for next autumn, it begins on the second Sunday of March at 2 a.m. and ends on the first Sunday in November at 2 a.m.

• Created a desktop slide rule toy.
• Implemented a few birds to yo!joy.
• Added an astronomy page.
• Enjoyed using Lynn's Chibicc compiler.

2023-06-18 Princess Louisa

Ever since we sailed back to Canada, from Japan, friends have told us to make the trip through Jervis Inlet to Princess Louisa Inlet. After making our way there this week, and hiking up and down its cliffsides, I can confirm that it does indeed live up to its fame, it is absolutely breathtaking.

Having no connectivity has helped me focus on writing my talk for Strange Loop 2023.

• Added speaker's notes and pencil mode to Adelie.
• Formatted some of the major roms.
• Redesigned the uxntal arity-checker, some design notes.
• Enjoyed Jenny Odell's Another Kind Of Time conversation.

2023-06-16 Context Inference

We're on our way north, anchored in Telegraph harbor. We've preserved enough food to get us through the summer, and stocked the shelves with books to last us as long. I was especially happy about finding a copy of Carroll's Sylvie & Bruno, and Golding's Lord Of The Flies, to carry along with us.

To continue my research on concatenative language inference, in contrast to the reassembler which creates an intelligible textual representation from a binary file and a symbols file; this time, I've written a reformatter that works from a textual source file and reindents it based on context. An interesting puzzle, considering how few syntaxic structures Uxntal has, lacking explicit notation for loops or even conditionals.

• Found a way to removed the page limit of 32kb for the wiki.
• By popular demand, the docs folder is now browsable.
• Enjoyed playing with Bellinitte's Pinhole renderer.

2023-05-28 Road to Strange Loop

I've submitted a talk about permacomputing to Strange Loop 2023 and it has been accepted. This summer, as we sail north, I'll be collating my notes on the overlaps between permaculture and situated software design practices — And, hopefully, have a substantial presentation by September.

It's unbelieveable that we can sail up along the coast, find a pretty nook between two mountains that seems inviting, and just live there. When we'll have walked up and down the old trails to our heart's content, maybe we'll keep going. Part of me wonder for how long this will remain possible, it's just too good to last.

• Implemented Dad's Puzzler, in Uxntal.
• Added interface controls to Varvara's Bicycle.
• Illustrated an interpretation of the Merveilles logo.
• Enjoyed Graham Shawcross's Five Finger Exercises.

2023-05-12 Type Inference

For a few weeks now, I've been sketching the basis for a type inference system for Uxntal. I first came across a stack-effect validator when writing Factor, and I've been meaning to make my own since after reading Rob Kleffner's talk notes. Prior to this project, I had a sense of what the different constructions were, but writing a type-checker drew clearer lines between all these different patterns.

We're casting off for Desolation Sound in a few days. Most afternoons are spent stocking up Pino with enough food to last us until we make our way back south next autumn. I'm eager to depart.

• Implemented type-inference in Uxntal.
• Resuming work on proof-reading Wiktopher.
• Wrote a falling sand, simulator.
• Enjoyed Conal Elliot on elegance and beauty in computation.

2023-05-01 Concurrency All The Things

I recently watched David Ungar's Everything You Know About Parallel Programming Is Wrong talk, which lead me to read Tony Hoare's Communicating Sequential Processes, after which I felt inspired to consider parallel computing once more, and soon found myself taking a detour to play with the OCCAM programming language, and revisit threads in Uxn.

As a side-project, unrelated to threads, I made a pixel-perfect implementation of the classic Macintosh Note Pad application, so I could keep notes throughout the day and that turned out to be a fantastic aid to collecting passing thoughts. While building it, I also had a chance to implement text-wrapping in a project with very few moving parts and better understood how to handle text selection, where the boundary of a selection ends up being before the original anchor, and implemented it in Left.

• Ported the classic Macintosh Note Pad application to Varvara.
• Enjoyed Ramsey Nasser's Causal Islands 2023 talk.

2023-04-22 Structured Editing

These past few months, I've explored playful things to do with programming that might not directly serve a purpose, or at least, one wouldn't come across them without seeking them out specifically, and I've collected some of those seemingly useless, ideas into a talk and submitted it to the Strange Loop conference happening in September.

Also, while I consider Beetbug to be a kind of disassembler, I wanted to see if I could build something that would let me go from a source file to an assembled rom, and back again. I figured that being able to recover a project from a rom and its symbols file has important potential in terms of data preservation. To make this possible, I modified the symbols file to include comments, and was able to complete the back and forth I wanted.

This allowed me to experiment with something called structured editing, in which you modifying the underlying structure, symbols and bytecode of a program, and not its structural representation.

• Added an interactive mode to Drifblim.
• Started building a reassembler.
• Added a type port to the Varvara Console device.

2023-04-05 Interaction Nets & Oquonie

The past two weeks have flown by, between finishing Oquonie and preparing Pino for the summer, each day I fall into bed completely exhausted. But the game is nearly finished now, there are fewer and fewer bugs, and most of my time is spent doing optimization.

I've been diving into Interaction Nets again, and fallen for Sato's Inpla language, the code is a nightmare but I feel that with a bit of work, and a better division between the interpreter and virtual machine, this could turn out to be something very fun.

After watching Alan Kay's OOPSLA 1997 talk, I went and read Smalltalk-80: Bits of History, Words of Advice and I've been fascinated with it. It goes in details about their approach to the implementations of the Smalltalk VM, and the challenges to getting the ST-80 image to boot on all these different platforms.

• Discovering new things in Uxntal.
• Rewrote Bicycle to be a companion application to Left.

2023-03-13 Residency at Biosonic

Spent the week at the LEÑA residency collaborating with audio-visual artists. They call it a retreat, but really, I returned from Galiano more exhausted than when I left. It was well worth it tho, as I rarely allow myself to play music for more than an hour or two at a time.

I've had a bit of time to kill between rehearsals, and whenever I had a few minutes to myself, I'd pour over the Lisp Machine memos. It occurred to me that the byol-type books really ought to teach about targetting Lisp architectures(or at the very least, something in the vein of SECD abstract machines), instead of implementing Lisp on top of imperative languages, which does a disservice to the entire exercise.

• Preparing slides for our talk at Biosonic.
• Implemented the Hilbert Curve fractal.
• Returned image support to Left.
• Added the Hundred Rabbits splash to Donsol.

2023-03-03 Preparing for Biosonic

I've been progressing on Oquonie, implementing sounds and making sure that it runs as smoothly as possible on as many different platforms as I can. This meant revisiting a lot of the implementation details. The month has flown by, but it has been a lot of fun learning about optimization.

I will be staying on Galiano for a week during the Biosonic residency, it has been a while since I've last slept on firm ground.

• Preparing slides for our talk at Biosonic.
• Wrote a faster Uxn core.

2023-02-24 Oquonie is nearly ready

The weather has been absolute garbage and so has been a great help in advancing the Oquonie port. Not only is the project pushing Uxn further than it previously ventured, but it is equally pushing the tools used in its creation. The building of the game has had me do some significant improvements to Drifblim, Uxnlin, and Left.

• It looks like Oquonie will make its way to the Playdate.
• Played a set at the Lovebyte Party.
• Added a REPL mode to Beetbug.

2023-02-07 Oquonie is happening!

After putting together a demo of what a Varvara implementation of Oquonie could look like, Rekka and I decided to officially port it. It's a lot of fun to revisit this strange universe. I hope that we can bring the essence of the original into the redux version.

• Spared some time to fix a handful of issues in Orca.
• Spent nearly every waking moment working on the Oquonie prototype.

2023-01-20 Function Stacks

I've been reading about reversible computing and put together a playground that allows me to experiment with the ideas of psi-lisp. This whole business of time reversible logic feels like visiting an old friend.

Meanwhile, I've also tried to bring potato to a usable state, which means that for it to entirely replace the current launcher, it should be able to assemble and run the assembled rom, a state to which I am inching closer.

• Finally found a use for the 3 unused uxn opcodes.
• Rewrote the javascript REPL implementation.
• Could I possibly port Oquonie, to Uxntal?

2023-01-08 Pino Rewiring

Since the new year began, we have spent every waking hour rewiring Pino, it has been a more challenging project than we had hoped but we will sleep soundly knowing that each connection has been well made.

I've read Koopman's Stack Machines: The New Wave and it inspired me to experiment with other virtual machine designs, namely that of the NOVIX NC4016. But after two weeks of experiments, I returned to writing Uxntal, partly because I do not feel limited in the realization of my ideas with my current stack, and partly because these sort of systems make for extremely obfuscated assembly languages. That being said, I can't seem to shake the craving to experiment with the Setun-70..

• Chose a new metadata format and implemented it.
• Revamped the mirrors.

2022-12-25 Reversible Computing

This week, I was introduced to reversible computing and linear logic, which not only do not generate garbage, but also preserves state by making any loss of entropy explicit and an integral part of the program's architecture. To say that this new knowledge shook my understanding of programming would be an understatement.

I don't know what 2023 has in store, but some of it will be invariably spent tangled up in this.

• Wrote a stack-effect checker for Uxntal.

2022-12-12 Beetbug

Continuing my recent experiments with the self-hosted emulator, I decided to repurpose it and turn it into an entirely virtualized step-debugger. It is called Beetbug, after Uxn32's debugger. To improve error reporting across the ecosystem, I've also written a symbols file specification that will allow the various emulators and debuggers to add labels to addresses when throwing errors and warnings.

As I was learning to use the Soroban to do elementary level multiplications, I stumbled on this fantastic article on the use of the Salamis Tablet, which has been fascinating me and occupying my mind at night. There, now it can torment you too.

• Created a calendar program.

2022-11-27 Soroban

I had this idea of implementing the Uxn virtual machine in itself, to virtualize the memory and runtime entirely in a sandboxed emulator rom. That would allow something like a debugger to be built that doesn't preclude any special Varvara support.

I also tried writing a block editor for Uxntal, but failed, I couldn't make up my mind on how to visualize each cell, and in the end, I've decided to drop the idea and went back to reading Takashi Kojima's Advanced Abacus book and toying with my virtual soroban while the snow fell on the boat.

• Created a little virtual abacus.
• Enjoyed discovering DuskOS.

2022-11-18 Handmade Seattle 2022

I had a unforgettable time at Handmade Seattle 2022. I met countless wonderful creatives, including someone who introduced me to Interaction Nets, another who showed me their little programming language targeting Uxn, someone even noticed the Ithkuil easter egg on one of my slides and came to talk to me about it. I also got to spend hours exchanging ideas with Peter van Hardenberg and Rasmus Andersson, whose work inspire me.

The conference coincided with the first Pacific Northwest Merveilles meetup. There was no better way to end this trip than having the chance of finally meeting, in person, some of the friends with whom I share this online community.

• Presented Weathering Software Winter.

2022-10-31 Last Daily

Today was the last day of October, and the last daily drawing. I had a good time beginning each morning that way, but it's time to wrap up the slides for Handmade Seattle.

I haven't had time to do much else this month, but I did modify Left to use a variant of the Smalltalk-76 font, which after a handful of tweaks, has quickly turned into my favourite font to program with.

• Preparing slides for Handmade Seattle.
• Implemented TinyBASIC in Uxntal.

2022-10-08 TinyBASIC

I've recently finished reading What The Doormouse Said, and I was fascinated by the story of the People's Computer Company publishing the specification for a subset of the BASIC programming language, inviting programmers to write their own unique implementations for their machines.

This motivated me to take a deep dive in the language, and what better way to grasp a language than to write an implementation.

• Preparing slides for Handmade Seattle.
• Still doing daily drawings.

2022-10-02 A month of conworld

We have returned to Victoria for the winter and reconnected with our little local sailing community, it has been wonderful hearing about everyone's summer adventures. We have a lot of challenging projects to do over the next few months and knowing that we have dependable friends nearby is reassuring.

I am dedicating each morning to drawing a different scene from the Neauismetica, and will try to keep it up for as long as I have ideas.

• Sown a sleeve for the Playdate, and a Merveilles burgee.
• Updated the Playdate implemenation of Uxn to the latest core.
• Added d-pad controls to the Wireworld playground.

2022-09-12 We've got worlds to go to

Once again, finding ourselves having drinks over a scattering of world atlases and passage planning compendiums.

The days are getting shorter, and so is the time that we can spend on the computer, due to our batteries depleting earlier a bit each day. So, I spend my evenings proof-reading the Wiktopher manuscript and reading.

• Added monochromatic modes to Orca, CCCC and Catclock.
• Wrote a little program for the Adafruit Playground.
• Finally gotten around to fixing the calendar page.
• Wrote a document reader, called Bouc.

2022-08-30 Hunger for a Way Out

The misantropia that accompanied our return to the noise and smell of the cities, has not yet subsided. We find ourselves surrounded by people, homologous to those who happily mow the lawn at dinner time, who will break the quietude of an anchorage by running a gas generator to watch television as the sun sets.

It's no wonder that birds don't sing here, lest their songs be invariably drowned by the deafening display of the vacationers broadcasting to the fourth horizon over that they are taking it easy.

• Made Drifblim capable of assembling large files, namely Potato.
• Started poking at building a little sequencer again, oh no.

2022-08-16 Farewell Desolation

We've left Desolation Sound, and stopped in Texada to reprovision before sailing south. We finally have access to reliable internet access again, but none of my near-endless supply of things to catch up on, none of it stirs any interest in me right now.

Despite my unsettled moods, I was able to built myself a cozy little world to work from, the operating system turned out to be extremly useful in looking through my large collection of pcm, chr and icn files.

2022-08-01 A Potato

We've sailed ourselves into somewhat of an internet deadzone, where my evenings consist of lying in the hammock hung between the jib and the mast, thinking about what sort of an operating system I'd like for myself; what would be both realistic for the Uxn platform, and the limits of my own aptitude for realizing it.

• Built an operating system.

2022-07-16 Slideshow Tech 2000

I haven't had it in me to start new projects these past two weeks, so I've instead revisited projects in need of care; namely Adelie which was until now undocumented, leaving people to guess at how things worked. It has been nice to see some terrific projects made with it, like tower of hanoi, and these gorgeous slides. It took all the restrain in the world not to turn it into another Hypercard.

• Wrote a Thue interpreter, and a tiny desktop calculator.
• Sent artwork to the second issue of Fantomes zine.
• Designed a fresh new bold font for Orca.

2022-07-02 Self Documenting Binaries

The more I try to imagine what resilient software might look like, the more shortcomings I find in Varvara roms, namely, the ones that rely entirely on external documentation. So, I decided to try and begin to tackle this problem by adding a menu navigation manifest to each one, which not only makes the application self-documenting, but also improves accessibility.

• Planted soy at 50°8.549'N 124°56.972'W
• Wrote a macros pre-processor for Drifblim.

2022-06-19 Dwindling Stores

I hate to think that we will, at some point, have to sail south to re-supply, we've both decided that we shall stretch our supplies for as long as we possibly can. We will soon run out of fresh produce, but we have prepared enough preserves to last us for months.

• Wrote our keynote for NIME 2022.
• Transcribed notes over to the Permacomputing Wiki.
• Planted wheat, barley and mustard greens at 50°8.409'N 124°56.842'W

2022-06-03 Uxntal Communication II

We've arrived in Desolation Sound and met up with friends. We spend the long afternoons rowing the dinghy along the shoreline and exploring the thickly forested coast. I went ahead and assigned a glyph to each Uxn opcode, to make an Uxntal Alphabet, it adds a wonderful conlang aspect to the project. I'm hoping to turn this into a little graphical assembler at some point.

2022-06-01 Uxntal Communication I

I couldn't stop thinking about the idea of a Uxntal Sign Language. So, with Rekka's help, I began assigning hand gestures to numbers, operators and modes. I'm also thinking that I might like to assign glyphs so an assembler that does away with English altogether could be envisioned.

• Wrote a linter for Uxntal, and implemented tail-call optimization to uxnasm.
• Planted lentils, mung beans and radishes at 50°8.527'N 124°40.195'W

2022-05-30 Heading North

We are finally making our way north toward Desolation Sound and the Broughton Archipelago. We are spending these late spring days anchored between high mountains, revisiting ideas for projects we conceived of this last winter, but decided to leave for a later time. I've been fascinated by how an entire computing paradigm can emerge from the primitives of combinatory logics, my recent thoughts have been populated by these strange talking birds.

• Implemented an ornithologics playground.

2022-05-14 Slides rules

Aquired a couple of slide rules from a retired teacher, and figured out how to use them. My plan is to gift them to people we meet in our travels. I've spent the better part of the week plotting shapes on paper with the help of the slide rule, while also experimenting with a line-plotting engine, inspired from Turtle Graphics, for creating procedural graphics.

• Made a little spreadsheet program that fits neatly in a 6kb rom.
• Wrote a HTML5 implementation of UxnVM.

2022-04-30 Uxn Specs

I felt frustrated by the development of Uxn this week. It reminded me of the difficult period in Orca's development when it was beginning to be actively used, meanwhile the last few operators were being finalized. Folks would raise hell each time operators were moved around and it made finalizing the spec extremely painful.

2022-04-14 Bedrock Failure

Inspired from the Cuneiform Tablets paper, I considered realizing the paper's point of implementing Smalltalk72 on a UVM, I spent a few days experimenting with the ST72 environment — Only to realize that, like the ChifirVM, it is poorly thought out and fundamentally irreconcilable with my vision of small computing.

• Wrote a plain X11 implementation of Varvara.
• Created an Uxntal REPL, called Varvara's Bicycle.

2022-03-30 FSF

We gave our talk at LibrePlanet 2022, and it went very well. During the Q&A, we talked about living without a fridge, from food preservation to sprouting, and we were delighted to see so many people interested in that stuff. I guess the intersection of computers and gardens is slightly larger than I thought.

• Played a little set for Algorave's 10th anniversary.
• Revamped Orca, Nasu, and Left to support Varvara's new Screen/Auto port.

2022-03-14 Digital Preservation

Took a deep dive into the various experiments in digital preservation(PADI, CAMiLEON, Domesday, etc..), didn't really find anything worthy of note, but it did inspire me to rewrite some of the content on permacomputing. I've also spent the past couple of days improving Noodle, and adding support for tga images.

• Wrote a little single-file Uxntal assembler called Drifblim.

2022-02-30 A Dice Game

Rekka is putting the finishing touches to Wiktopher, and asked me to design a game that the people of Iridi could be playing. I thought a dice game combining the capture mechanism of Go and the randomness of the Domino draw might be a good fit, learn to play Hako.

• Implemented J & Y wiring, in the Uxn port of Orca.
• Wrote a version of minesweeper for Varvara.

2022-02-14

Our upcoming keynote for Libre Planet 2022 has been announced, we've built a little slideshow program for the presentation. I've revamped the Orca documentation and added a reference page, as well as fixing a few bugs in the Uxntal implementation. Toying with wireworld sucked much of my time, again.

Finally, brought back incoming links at the bottom of wiki pages. They had been gone since the migration from C, to Uxntal.

2022-01-30 Tamagochi

Rekka and I completed Yufo, our entry for the Virtual Pet Jam 2022, we also added a Serbian and Polish translation to Thousand Rooms. When I wasn't playing with primes, or reading, I was noodling in wireworld. Ah! Also, Uxn turned one year old.

2022-01-14 Devlog Start

To kick off 2022, I've decided to write 3 documents for the Uxn project, in which I'll save my design notes, the first one is about the virtual machine itself, the second one is about a personal computer and the last one might be about the language design. Hopefully, by the end of this year, this project will have have matured into something that is more easily definable.

2021-12-30

Revisited the tga format as a potential transfer format for Varvara applications such as Noodle. I've also been flicking through the massive collection of notes I've accumulated on the topic of paper computing and reflecting on this year that is now ending.

• Wrote a CHIP-8 emulator for Varvara.

2021-12-14

Spent the first few days of December solving the Advent Of Code puzzles in Uxntal, got distracted, and started thinking about image support inside Left. I've also spent time experimenting with the Subleq virtual machine.

• Released the Turye font-editor.
• Released a Cat Clock.

2021-11-30

Was away from Pino to visit family, spent our evenings catching up and watching movies. Received a replacement keyboard for Ayatori, it's good to be working on the Thinkpad again.

• Rewrote the Uxn assembler to use a single pass.
• Released Busy Doing Nothing in paperback.

2021-11-14

Wrote a little brainfuck interpreter in Uxntal during this week's transits. My thoughts have been drifting back to primes and fractions, I've been considering a twist to fractran where fractions with a zero as nominator or denominator might be used as jump operations, but I have yet to implement this.

2021-10-30

Decided to stop doing daily drawings and port Donsol instead. I had it all planned out in my head before starting, I went ahead and completed the port within just a few days. The work was done on a Pinebook Pro, revealing a few issues with Left, so I spent some time optimizing the text-editor so it would run faster.

• Released Donsol, for Varvara.
• Added a reference manual for the Uxntal opcodes.

2021-10-14

Spending the month of October between daily drawings, and various food preservation projects. As I work on a picture, I'll occasionally stop to improve Noodle in some way or correct a bit of friction. The near totality of my computer activities(drawing, composing and programming) are now done from within the Uxn virtual machine. I couldn't be happier.

• Added guides for the line and rect tool, in Noodle.
• Added interface responsiveness, in Dexe.

2021-09-30

Rewrote Dexe to be compatible to the latest changes to Varvara. I'm unsure what to do about Oscean's twtxt and RSS feeds, generating them in Uxntal will be hard, especially the date conversion. Maybe I could build the now page's body from the twtxt feed, but if I did, I would loose the Arvelie timestamps and links. Picked up Moogle again, cleaned up the codebase.

2021-09-14

The grey weather gives us only a few hours of solar power each day, so we alternate between cleaning and doing other things, such as origami. I've been optimizing Orca, trying to make it run faster, inspired by the recent optimizations of Noodle.

• Added d-pad controls, in Orca.

2021-08-30

Currently rewriting Oscean in Uxntal, as an experiment to see how far I can push Uxn, and explore what a wiki from first principles might even look like. A few features have yet to be ported, but the main components are done. We're slowly sailing North toward Vancouver to see friends, we left Saturna for Ladysmith and Silva Bay, Pino has engine problems, again.

2021-08-14

We're anchored near Saturna, it has been nice to work offgrid again. I've started porting paradise in Uxntal, it would be nice to port Oscean at some point too.

After 16 years of daily journaling and tracking, I am finally stopping. I believe that the problems I was attempting to tackle, such as moodswings and the lack of focus, have been fixed and the data gathered in these recent years reveals nothing new or actionable. A bi-monthly format where I write a few sentences on my recent interests might be more practical.

Let's begin, once again.