For the Lang Party Summer 2022, I wrote a BASIC interpreter. It took a bit of mental gymnastics and learning on my part. In this post I hope to share some of the experience in implementing this interpreter. For the curious, the code lives on GitHub. Figure 1: A TinyBASIC session in Cool Retro Term Try it out! Want to try it out? Run raco pkg install --auto tinybasic to install it.
Recently I have begun migrating my workstation and laptop from Gentoo to NixOS. There are a great deal of tradeoffs between the two operating systems. Before going into the details, consider where I’m coming from and why I moved away from Gentoo below. Why was I running Gentoo on workstations?? This is my heuristic for a good operating system: The Distro must provide facility to modify system packages and maintain their modifications in sync with the upstream distro.
Digital Ocean’s App Platform works fairly well with Racket. To activate this service, create a git repository with a Dockerfile in it. Your app will be ran as a container built from the Dockerfile and hosted by Digital Ocean. It appears this platform handles load balancing and scaling. These are good value prospects when considering hosting on this platform. If you wish to use a custom domain you can also do so, such as was the case with p.
Awhile back I found a stack of audio CDs I wished to digitize. It’s a bit of work to do the following steps quickly and while doing other more cerebral work: Open the disc tray Insert the disc Wait a few seconds for the disc to be detected by the OS Kick off abcde to rip the CD. Repeat ad infinitum. The solution is to streamline the workflow:
GitLab has recently locked down the accessibility to free CI/CD minutes. You now need to provide a Credit Card to prove you’re a human. Apparently cryptofriends were using the CI/CD minutes to mine for cryptocurrencies. Huh… if I had lesser ethics I’d probably do the same thing! Kind of brilliant to be honest. Anyway, the end result is if you want users to contribute to your project they need to either provide a CC or better yet, you can set up private GitLab runners.
Figure 1: Behold! Emacs 27! When upgrading to Emacs 27 there were quite a few weird things I had to address. My Emacs is installed via Gentoo Portage. The USE flags I have set (to enable/disable features at build time) essentially configure my Emacs to be like Lucid Emacs builds. Here’s the USE flags: Xaw3d acl alsa athena cairo dbus dynamic-loading gif gmp gui imagemagick inotify jpeg lcms libxml2 png source ssl svg threads tiff toolkit-scroll-bars xft xpm zlib -aqua -games -gconf -gfile -gpm -gsettings -gtk -gzip-el -harfbuzz -json -kerberos -livecd -m17n-lib -mailutils -motif -selinux -sound -systemd -wide-int -xwidgets Make note that cairo support is enabled.
The goal of this post is to demonstrate the usefulness of IPMI even in hobbyist or personal use. Anything that means less touching physical machines to power cycle them, or fix network misconfigurations, can save a lot of time. I had broken my NAS’s networking by adding a bridge and attaching the existing ethernet device to it. I forgot to configure the ethernet device to not try to fetch an IP address (via DHCP), but instead only fetch an IP address on the bridge itself.