Entries

• Another story

  Published on 2023-02-20

  I've published another new story, Ia's Devotion. Predictably for me, this is a story about trans girls and goddesses (and, in this case, love).

• Note 2 from 2023-02-14

  Published on 2023-02-14

  I bought TRPL.

• Note 1 from 2023-02-14

  Published on 2023-02-14

  The Rust Programming Language, 2nd Edition is $50...

• How do you like your SQL?

  Published on 2023-02-13

  There are a number of ways to style SQL code, varying in capitalization, indentation, etc. and frequently the style any given programmer, group, or project uses is very different from the style of their application code. Here's my typical style, as it is nowadays.

• Note 2 from 2023-02-06

  Published on 2023-02-06

  When people say Why should we be doing X when Y problem exists? I just get confused, because... we have multiple people who can be working on multiple different things at once. That's one of the benefits of having a society.

• Note 1 from 2023-02-06

  Published on 2023-02-06

  sometimes I see people talking about 1st person or 3rd person writing being "better"

• Note 1 from 2023-02-01

  Published on 2023-02-01

  Pragmatic brain: Shaving my legs is an annoying, fiddly, time-consuming process that often results in cutting myself and creates chances of infection and ingrown hairs.

• More stories: Queer, sci-fi, and mythology

  Published on 2023-01-22

  I've published three more pieces of my own fiction here on my own site. Two of them are repatriated from elsewhere, and one is brand new.

• Note 1 from 2023-01-20

  Published on 2023-01-20

  I explained the GNU project to a non-computer-toucher friend as the following two facts:

• Note 1 from 2023-01-19

  Published on 2023-01-19

  As we here in the US continue careening through an era of chaos and hope not to see a less-bungled repeat of the recent attempts to seize dictatorial power, let's remember one thing: Caesar came from the left, after Sulla came from the right. Keep an eye on the people you think are on your own side too.

• Note 1 from 2023-01-16

  Published on 2023-01-16

  I slowly begin to develop a stronger and stronger urge to declare outright war on short-form platforms and refuse to use anything with a hard character cap.

• Separation of data and control

  Published on 2023-01-16

  One of the most fundamental lessons we seem to keep re-learning is that one of the most important factors in protecting systems from being hijacked is the separation of data, which could be from untrustworthy sources, from control information, which has the power to make the system do specific things.

• Note 2 from 2023-01-13

  Published on 2023-01-13

  Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day has a working RSS feed! It's also a podcast, apparently, but the actual word-of-the-day text entries show up perfectly in a feed reader.

• Note 1 from 2023-01-13

  Published on 2023-01-13

  Maybe it's paranoid but I have a habit of never writing loop tests with equals or not-equals the last value, I always write while i is greater than zero or until n is less than or equal to x. Because, like, what if the loop overshoots? Or something? What?

• Note 1 from 2023-01-07

  Published on 2023-01-07

  In reply to Xe Iaso

• Oops CSS

  Published on 2023-01-04

  I may have accidentally written a CSS stylesheet for U.S. House roll call vote XML.

• Note 1 from 2023-01-02

  Published on 2023-01-02

  This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

• Note 1 from 2022-12-28

  Published on 2022-12-28

  Earlier today I spent a bit of time rediscovering how you can frequently take XML data and make it palatable in a Web browser with no more than a couple dozen lines of CSS. Not the most accessible unfortunately, but for visual rendering ::before/::after and the content property are pretty powerful. And of course if you need more power and better accessibility there's always XSLT. And if you use fragment references in your <?xml-stylesheet?> declaration you can manage this with no external resource dependencies.

• Renaming myself

  Published on 2022-12-26

  I've decided, after much thought and quite a bit of self-annoyance about the pretentiousness of it, to name myself Athena, after the Hellenic goddess of wisdom. I did actively fight this name in multiple ways before eventually deciding to go with it.

• Note 1 from 2022-12-21

  Published on 2022-12-21

  So, I was looking at a bill on congress.gov, and I got curious and looked at the XML - they publish the bills as XML and XSLT them client-side into HTML - and I discovered that the enacting clause (Be it enacted etc.) is not even in the XML. It's so canned they literally have it hard-coded in the XSLT stylesheets. (I found this amusing.)

• Homeworld fanfiction

  Published on 2022-12-20

  So, quite a while ago, I wrote some fan fiction for the Homeworld games, having gotten into them for a while. I've finally done some final proofreading, and I've published them on my Archive of Our Own account (as I usually do with fanfic). Both of these focus on Karan S'jet's perspective, and make an attempt to explore the bizarreness of her relationship to the reality around her.

• Note 3 from 2022-12-20

  Published on 2022-12-20

  Please ensure you dimension all limb positions in radians only to avoid unexpected results.

• Note 2 from 2022-12-20

  Published on 2022-12-20

  Incredible, no socks were eaten in the wash today.

• Note 1 from 2022-12-20

  Published on 2022-12-20

  I added dark mode to my site. It was like 12 lines of code.

• Note 1 from 2022-12-18

  Published on 2022-12-18

  Ahhhh, nothing better than valgrind telling you in use at exit: 0 bytes in 0 blocks.

• XAML static sites

  Published on 2022-12-14

  So... I must apologize for this concept in advance. I've thought, in some fediverse posts, about the concept of using Microsoft's XAML as the basis for a static site generator. This is an XML-based language Microsoft uses for declarative UI in .NET, among other things. Again, let me preface this all with an apology and a clear statement that this isn't really a serious idea, just the result of me getting too much of a concentrated dose of .NET at work.

• Note 1 from 2022-12-10

  Published on 2022-12-10

  I found this comment in the original DOOM source code release README file...

• Objective-C#++

  Published on 2022-12-08

  Gaze upon my creation and despair. Witness... Objective-C#++

• Note 1 from 2022-12-08

  Published on 2022-12-08

  This article by Julia Evans is a really nice and concise expression of a bunch of things I should really be doing (and maybe you too). I'll have to get the full zine when it comes out.

• Some repatriated microfiction

  Published on 2022-12-07

  I spent a few minutes to hunt down and copy-paste a few bits and pieces of trans microfiction I've published on the fediverse, so now they're readable here in a little anthology.

• [AO] Ehm, well...

  Published on 2022-12-07

  The subject of this post is meant for adults only.

• Note 1 from 2022-11-30

  Published on 2022-11-30

  arrays now start at whatever index you access first.

• Note 1 from 2022-11-27

  Published on 2022-11-27

  hey, when you are consuming fiction, remember you have this awesome power to stop at any time if you aren't enjoying it

• Note 2 from 2022-11-26

  Published on 2022-11-26

  This article by Anton Zhiyanov makes a lot of the points about SQLite that I'd like to make to people who haven't seriously considered it. There are other things too, but it's a good overview.

• Note 1 from 2022-11-26

  Published on 2022-11-26

  This post is a quick reminder that captions exist to provide an accurate transcription of content that would otherwise be inaccessible. Do not censor captions.

• Note 1 from 2022-11-23

  Published on 2022-11-23

  I added a p-author h-card to my blog template. It's getting a bit visually cluttered, I might need to come up with a less vertical design...

• Note 2 from 2022-11-22

  Published on 2022-11-22

  Replying to Aaron Parecki

• Note 1 from 2022-11-22

  Published on 2022-11-22

  ProxyPass / http://localhost:54328 # postgres

• Note 1 from 2022-11-21

  Published on 2022-11-21

  User-Agent: fetchwebmention/2.1 (like archive.org_bot, like Googlebot); curl/7.86.0 (compatible)

• Simultaneous SQL and XML crimes

  Published on 2022-11-21

  New developments in the field of ungodly data format design have led to the following hybrid evilness.

• Note 1 from 2022-11-20

  Published on 2022-11-20

  "Our newest title is Linux-exclusive."

• Note 1 from 2022-11-18

  Published on 2022-11-18

  me trying out she/her pronouns online for the first time: this better not awaken something in me

• Note 2 from 2022-11-17

  Published on 2022-11-17

  Just imagining an isekai main character who doesn't even try to hide it, "yes, yes, two plus two is four, thirty two divided by four is eight, the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is the square root of the sum of the squares of the other two sides, the square root of negative one is the imaginary unit, and the derivative of two X cubed is six X squared, now can we get to magic?"

• Note 1 from 2022-11-17

  Published on 2022-11-17

  Well, well, well, if it isn't the consequences of my actions. (I put salad on the grocery list and now there is salad in the fridge.)

• The pain of XLSX

  Published on 2022-11-17

  Today at work I had the misfortune of attempting to work with the Microsoft XSLX format. I hope never to repeat this.

• Note 2 from 2022-11-06

  Published on 2022-11-06

  let's be clear it is true and utter nonsense that the program you use to show the contents of a file is called cat

• Note 1 from 2022-11-06

  Published on 2022-11-06

  $ cat robots.txt
  # it's ok :)
  User-agent: *
  Allow: /

• Note 1 from 2022-11-05

  Published on 2022-11-05

  Oh no.

• Note 1 from 2022-11-02

  Published on 2022-11-02

  Alright, well, I managed to accidentally soft-brick my machine by overwriting both the active and backup GRUB configuration files. Fixed now.

• Note 3 from 2022-11-01

  Published on 2022-11-01

  Protocols, Not Platforms!

• Note 2 from 2022-11-01

  Published on 2022-11-01

  HUM-161 Transfeminine Practical

• Note 1 from 2022-11-01

  Published on 2022-11-01

  I'm going to be using this blog more casually. Starting immediately.

• Note 1 from 2022-10-15

  Published on 2022-10-15

  Newtonian physics doesn't allow immovable objects.

• Note 1 from 2022-09-26

  Published on 2022-09-26

  In reply to Aaron Parecki

• Note 1 from 2022-09-17

  Published on 2022-09-17

  <em> and <strong> are not "the correct way to do italic and bold," despite what WYSIWYG editors may have you believe. <em> is for emphasis, but if you need different text, say, the name of a ship, or a Latin word, <i> is still the right tool. Both elements exist because there is more than one reason to italicize things. If you want italics for purely stylistic reasons, there is yet another tool you should be using: <span style="font-style: italic">.

• Note 1 from 2022-09-12

  Published on 2022-09-12

  I had to fiddle with systemd for a while but I fixed a problem where ejabberd's /run directory wasn't getting created. The LDAP server starts after whenever it would normally happen, and ejabberd's account lives in LDAP for... reasons. Now it waits for the LDAP server to start and then creates it as part of the daemon startup.

• Various stuff I've been up to

  Published on 2022-09-11

  Since I last blogged about my personal infrastructure, I've been up to a few things. I meant to write longer blog posts about each of these, but it's been a bit and I've forgotten quite a few details. Sorry. Here's some quick summaries, though.

• Note 1 from 2022-09-07

  Published on 2022-09-07

  Is there any significant difference between ul {display: flex;} and li {display: inline;}? The latter seems to require less additional work to remove the list markers, pad the items out, etc.

• Reconfiguring our home network, part 2

  Published on 2022-08-29

  To follow-up on part 1: In brief, we got it working.

• Note 1 from 2022-08-25

  Published on 2022-08-25

  I like CGI. I know it's slow, but I never run at that scale. It's so simple. I can just write a response to standard output. I don't need to learn a framework, I don't need routing or HTTP parsing, I can just put a normal program on my server and it will work.

• Note 2 from 2022-08-20

  Published on 2022-08-20

  I think the only things left to add to Lillybooks now are a better tokenizer than just splitting on spaces, and a Misskey driver.

• Note 1 from 2022-08-20

  Published on 2022-08-20

  I'm working on Lillybooks again, I've implemented filtering based on CWs, and I'm moving token filtering into the database instead of an external filter file (this is better because it means less bouncing between SQL and Python).

• Note 1 from 2022-08-19

  Published on 2022-08-19

  More than once the Rust compiler has demonstrated a better understanding of good software architecture than me, and as a result of its complaints I ended up with a program that was not just safer but cleaner and more performant.

• More foot-shooting

  Published on 2022-08-17

  I've updated one of my most popular pages, Shooting yourself in the foot in various programming environments, with a number of new additions, and a few changes to more accurately reflect how they make me feel.

• Version 4.1: Going XSLT-only

  Published on 2022-08-17

  I decided to redesign my static site generator, XSite, because the way it worked previously was kind of limiting. So I threw out XSlots, my custom templating language, and switched to using XSLT for everything. My entire site is now generated with XSLT.

• Note 1 from 2022-08-13

  Published on 2022-08-13

  If I could revise the way keyboards work, they would have another two modifier keys, a Lock Screen key, and a Secure Attention key. Also Num Lock would be removed because the presumption would be that you always want to use the numpad as a numpad.

• Reconfiguring our home network, part 1

  Published on 2022-08-07

  We embarked on a project to rebuild our home network today; here's what's happened so far.

• Note 5 from 2022-08-07

  Published on 2022-08-07

  This note is just a test.

• Note 3 from 2022-08-07

  Published on 2022-08-07

  y'know if we'd just gone ahead and created ~/etc, ~/var, etc. as part of the standard homedir layout we might not be in this situation

• Note 2 from 2022-08-07

  Published on 2022-08-07

  I really dislike the recent trend of taking command-line tools that were previously implicitly accessible to people with visual disabilities and piling unnecessary TUIs or terminal pseudographics on top so that the actual text stream becomes unreadable or nearly so.

• Note 1 from 2022-08-07

  Published on 2022-08-07

  I love how simultaneously incredibly boring and very exciting RISC-V is.

• Note 3 from 2022-08-06

  Published on 2022-08-06

  Follow-up to Note 2: It appears certain variable substitutions are allowed in cgitrc, including one called $HTTP_HOST. I think that solves this.

• Note 2 from 2022-08-06

  Published on 2022-08-06

  Hmm, problem attempting to switch to cgit: How do I virtualhost?

• Note 1 from 2022-08-06

  Published on 2022-08-06

  I'm gonna have to get rid of these two Go programs. Just download the binary and move it to /usr/local/bin sounds nice until you realize you have to do that by hand every time they release a new version.

• Note 1 from 2022-08-03

  Published on 2022-08-03

  I should probably swear less.

• Note 2 from 2022-08-01

  Published on 2022-08-01

  Has anyone found a good piece of software yet? Just one?

• Note 1 from 2022-08-01

  Published on 2022-08-01

  It's very satisfying to install 365 package upgrades and then only have to restart Firefox which takes like 15 seconds

• Note 1 from 2022-07-31

  Published on 2022-07-31

  Proposing: dm-cloud

• Note 3 from 2022-07-19

  Published on 2022-07-19

  it would be fun to play with the ntoskrnl source some day if intellectual property is abolished or Microsoft goes under

• Note 2 from 2022-07-19

  Published on 2022-07-19

  that's a relief - my backup drive is working again

• Note 1 from 2022-07-19

  Published on 2022-07-19

  Having a personal domain under com implies you consider your personal pursuits a commercial endeavor.

• Note 1 from 2022-07-18

  Published on 2022-07-18

  Does anyone know if it's safe to share a Guix /gnu/store directory between two operating systems on the same disk? It feels like it should be fine, but this kind of thing makes me nervous.

• Note 1 from 2022-07-16

  Published on 2022-07-16

  I found Wine inside the WSL image on my work laptop yesterday. ???

• Note 1 from 2022-07-15

  Published on 2022-07-15

  Okay so microformats2 right

• More evil SQLite

  Published on 2022-07-15

  Here's some more evil use of SQLite.

• Note 1 from 2022-07-13

  Published on 2022-07-13

  Occasionally I get a desire to install like a dozen Windows 2000 VMs and set them up in an Active Directory forest just to see how it worked before they piled 20 years of Innovation on top.

• Some non-criminal database design: HIF

  Published on 2022-07-10

  I made a non-evil database design. This one is an instance of SQLite as an Application File Format, because I've always wanted to do that.

• Note 1 from 2022-07-09

  Published on 2022-07-09

  The best sign of reliable information is URIs matching /wp-content/*.pdf.

• A crime against database design

  Published on 2022-07-08

  I present, a crime against database design, in interface definition form.

• Note 2 from 2022-07-06

  Published on 2022-07-06

  MediaWiki is one of the best Web applications, because the "Web" part is the focus, not the "application" part.

• Note 1 from 2022-07-06

  Published on 2022-07-06

  If Walt Disney's original EPCOT concept had actually happened it would probably have been destroyed by riots within the first ten years.

• 'Broadcast' pipes on Linux

  Published on 2022-07-03

  A little while ago, I wrote a couple of Fediverse posts about wanting a sort of broadcast pipe and subsequently a solution for implementing one without coordination of a list of recipients. (Those are Misskey links, so unless you have a high-powered machine I recommend copy-pasting the URLs into another Fediverse server's search box to load them there instead of opening them directly...)

• Note 2 from 2022-07-02

  Published on 2022-07-02

  So I've talked about this before, but Java as a language is, like... okay.

• Note 1 from 2022-07-02

  Published on 2022-07-02

  Design Patterns Considered Harmful, TBH

• Note 1 from 2022-06-30

  Published on 2022-06-30

  If anyone has a recommendation for a Matrix client or a way of using Matrix via XMPP, I'd appreciate it. I've already ruled out Element, nheko, Quaternion, and FluffyChat, and I'd like to be able to handle encrypted conversations and rooms. I realize there's probably not one but I figured I should ask.

• Note 1 from 2022-06-29

  Published on 2022-06-29

  Need to make my webmention scripts better, they still pull the wrong author from Mastodon replies, and some other problems.

• Note 2 from 2022-06-28

  Published on 2022-06-28

  what it is: memory access violation

• Note 1 from 2022-06-28

  Published on 2022-06-28

  I have far too many project ideas for a person of my level of executive function.

• Note 2 from 2022-06-27

  Published on 2022-06-27

  *sees a commit in my site repository named send/receive mentions*

• Note 1 from 2022-06-27

  Published on 2022-06-27

  What do you mean database? Everyone around here just uses a directory full of XML files.

• Note 2 from 2022-06-26

  Published on 2022-06-26

  I need to do something quite urgently about the unpaginated, low-content index and Atom feed on this site.

• Note 1 from 2022-06-26

  Published on 2022-06-26

  no points for correctly guessing what the opcode mnemonic iaddi8 means

• About BitTorrent

  Published on 2022-06-25

  I want to stress to those unaware that BitTorrent can be, and often is, used for entirely legitimate purposes. It is a protocol for downloading large files in a scalable way. It's a good choice any time you want to make a big download available to lots of people simultaneously.

• Note 2 from 2022-06-25

  Published on 2022-06-25

  Why is it called a saucepan when it's clearly a pot?

• Note 1 from 2022-06-25

  Published on 2022-06-25

  If you couldn't tell, I'm starting to try and move towards POSSE, using this site.

• Linux filenames (and legal characters within them)

  Published on 2022-06-25

  The following are legal in Linux (and most other Unix) filenames: ()[]<>$:;&@?`’“!=+*^%#~| and space. (Note here that I do mean Linux, the kernel, not any of the operating systems built on it.)

• Note 1 from 2022-06-24

  Published on 2022-06-24

  For some reason I automatically look at my PineTime whenever my phone buzzes in my pocket, even though I don't have notification forwarding and have never had a smartwatch that does it.

• Note 1 from 2022-06-06

  Published on 2022-06-06

  I'm thinking about dropping Caddy from my Web server setup and switching to using Apache httpd as the reverse proxy.

• Note 2 from 2022-05-30

  Published on 2022-05-30

  Hm, I wonder if Adrian will get this correctly or if I'm going to need to fiddle with it.

• Note 1 from 2022-05-30

  Published on 2022-05-30

  Replying to Jacky Alciné

• Note 1 from 2022-05-25

  Published on 2022-05-25

  I just noticed that several of my styles were broken by CSP. Now the search box should have proper proportions.

• Note 1 from 2022-05-23

  Published on 2022-05-23

  I'm almost getting addicted to typing scripts/publish, it's just so satisfying to have it automated.

• Note 2 from 2022-05-21

  Published on 2022-05-21

  Okay well there's definitely a lot to fix, like there's no way to find the Atom feed I think, but I'm done for today, that was like six hours of work.

• Note 1 from 2022-05-21

  Published on 2022-05-21

  As you might have guessed, it wasn't quite as simple as typing scripts/publish to roll out the new version. I had to do a lot of troubleshooting of my deployment scripts, and my Apache configuration. But it seems to be working now! :)

• Version 4.0 and XBlog

  Published on 2022-05-21

  On-and-off over the last little while, I've been rearranging and reworking a lot of this site, trying to turn it into an IndieWeb-style personal Web site instead of the previous no-particular-purpose site.

• XBlog for XSite blogging

  Published on 2022-05-21

  As a follow-up to XSite, I decided to split out my blogging tools into their own project and expand on them to build a proper blogging support package for XSite. I decided to keep blogging tools separate from the core XSite project out of a general pro-modularity attitude; a lot of static site generators bundle blogging in their base configurations, but there's no reason that functionality can't be separate. My approach is to keep XSite as the Python code that provides the core functionality like XSlots, XSLT support, datasets, etc., while implementing blogging support on top of it largely as XSLT and XSlots templates. Much of this work happened in the middle of the night, and often into the early hours of the next day, but I've datestamped it with the day I started each session.

• Note 2 from 2021-10-07

  Published on 2021-10-12

  This is my first test note.

• XSLT

  Published on 2021-05-18

  As I planned in the 3.1 launch post, I've now implemented XSLT support in XSite. Using this tool, I've implemented some improvements to the site to restore some of the pieces that got cut to fit into XSite. This should improve accessibility, as well as making some things easier on myself.

• Version 3.1 and XSite

  Published on 2021-04-25

  If you're reading this, that means I've rolled out alm 3.1. This version is based on the XSite static site generator. I wrote this software myself, as is the expected rite of passage for programmers doing Web sites; it's based on XML and written in Python, with an eye towards both relative simplicity and a strict content structure. Currently, it's less than 300 lines of code, which feels small for how much it's managed to do.

• alm 3.0 with custom CSS

  Published on 2019-02-11

  If you're reading this, that means I've rolled out alm 3.0. There are a few big changes in this version, namely:

• Available on GitLab

  Published on 2018-09-08

  After quite a delay, this entire site's source is now released on GitLab here. This includes both the site's basic framework as well as its content.

• Azure hosting

  Published on 2018-06-09

  Programmingwave is now hosted on Microsoft Azure! This move was prompted by some (months-long) DNS issues, and also me just wanting to play with Azure. I'm using Azure's Web App Service at the F1 free tier, which limits disk space, bandwidth, and features, but not so much as to actually pose a problem for a site this small (~210 KB for the entire site).

• Programmingwave.com 2.2 has launched

  Published on 2018-01-24

  If you’re reading this post, that means Programmingwave.com 2.2 has launched. This version is an upgrade to Bootstrap 4.0 with a few minor fixes. There may be some bugs with the navbar, but it should be usable.

• Now working on version 2.2

  Published on 2018-01-21

  With the official release of Bootstrap 4, I am now working on Programmingwave.com 2.2 with Bootstrap 4. It should be a fairly simple migration, but there may be some hiccups. If you want, you can watch development of 2.2 here.

• Version 2.1 & Jekyll

  Published on 2017-06-12

  If you're seeing this post, that means I've rolled out Programmingwave.com 2.1, based on Jekyll.

• Programmingwave.com 2.0 has launched

  Published on 2017-04-23

  This article was migrated from the Wordpress blog on 2017-06-12.

• More confusion about version 2.0

  Published on 2017-04-20

  This article was migrated from the Wordpress blog on 2017-06-12.