What programming/technical projects have you been working on?

A few weeks ago, I bought a Wyse WY-60 serial terminal. Last week, my USB serial adapter and DB25 null modem cable came in. Since then, I've been having fun with it. This will probably come as no great surprise, but the software infrastructure for serial terminal support in modern free software unixen has… suffered some bit rot. =P Some of the issues I've had to fix include

• FreeBSD base includes and uses termcap, which is… let's call it legacy, difficult to find documentation on and difficult to use. terminfo (the modern replacement) is present in the packages collection, and some other packages will use it, but having software use different, slightly incompatible, terminal capability databases is not fabulous. (I specifically had the damndest time trying to puzzle out tput—the one in base uses termcap, but you can install ncurses from packages to get an alternate that can use terminfo—because spitting raw xterm escapes into a monochrome serial terminal that's not a vt100 goes about as poorly as you could imagine.)
• Did you know about bracketed paste? Sounds neat, potentially useful, right? Did you know that very recent versions of readline unconditionally send the enable/disable escapes regardless of the value of TERM? Did you know that a serial terminal from the early '80s for which "paste" is what users smear on the screen has no idea how to interpret those escapes? I didn't know any of that; guess how I found it all out. (If you find yourself in this slightly esoteric situation, you can prevent readline from sending those escapes by disabling bracketed paste mode: put set enable-bracketed-paste off in ~/.inputrc.) Filing a bug about this is on my personal to-do list.
• For some reason Linux isn't correctly setting the viewport dimensions, even when TERM is wy60-43-w (indicating the 43-line, 132-column wide mode). Mostly this either doesn't matter or means things just draw in a little 24x80 square in the top right left, but drawing optimization routines occasionally take advantage of the wrap, and if it doesn't happen where they expect, they get very garbled.
• My USB serial adapter isn't stable at 38.4 kb/s. It introduces noise when flooded at that rate, which invariably wedges the terminal and necessitates a hard reset. Works fine at 19.2 kb/s. I know it's the adapter, because plugging directly into the serial port of a system which has a serial port works fine at 38.4 kb/s.
• Talking to a terminal at double-digit kb/s is so slow oh my goodness! Multiple seconds to fill the frankly not especially large screen (even in the high-resolution mode) is surprisingly painful. We're spoiled by the extreme bandwidth possible over the internal pipe between programs and terminal emulators.

I'm learning Lisp, to be specific MIT Scheme by following SICP book. Why, I don't know, but the concept of treating code is data is very intriguing. It is absolutely worthless to have Lisp on my resume, but I'm hoping it will be fun and might push me build some tooling around Emacs.

I've been working on my Portal VR clone again (I posted about it a while ago, honestly I'm surprised there still isn't anything like this, it's been 2 years). I've made some major structural changes, including removing the VR level editor and just making it flat screen (having the level editor in VR was more effort than it was worth). Everything's been going pretty smoothly so far, so I suspect it'll only be a few weeks until I've added most of the level elements from portal and fixed the biggest bugs, although I'm really bad at time estimates so who knows.

Also, this time I've decided to make all the assets myself, so I've been getting better at 3D modelling (still haven't approached texturing yet).

Anyway, here are some in-progress gifs:
https://gfycat.com/aliveweightyiceblueredtopzebra
https://gfycat.com/barrenminiaturechimpanzee

I’m just about fed up with AMD’s non-support of ROCm. I have been trying to get the higher level libraries working on NixOS, as I’ve posted about in the past, but was unable to do so. I decided instead to spin up a drive with Ubuntu 18.04.5 on it, just to run one of my old neural styling programs - lo and behold, it doesn’t even work (at least the beta 4.0.1 PyTorch wheel) on the supported OS! So I filed a bug report with the errors from the PyTorch tests on my machine over a week ago and still have not heard back from either the PyTorch team or ROCm support. I might try building from source to overcome the issue, but I don’t have high hopes that will work either. The last time I actually had ROCm working on a machine was at 2.8 - and I have not had any actual support that I can remember since then. On top of this, the documentation is so bad that I’ve been working on this in spare time for at least a year and don’t even know if there’s a sane, simple way to check if the ROCm stack is working properly - it’s an absolute mess, and I’m close to selling my GPU (for a profit???) and just buying a 3090.

Rewriting Moonlander in Vala. (Previous Thread)

Vala is, if you didn't know, a language made specifically for working with GNOME libraries (GLib, GTK, etc.). It's kinda like C# in syntax, but compiles down to C with GLib instead.

Why rewrite? Because GTK on Rust was too darn complicated and boilerplate-y for me. Also Vala compiles a bit faster and is overall a better Linux citizen regarding packaging and stuff IMO.

Currently, I got to the point of connecting to Gemini without any TOFU and rendering Gemtext pages as plaintext, but just in 2 days work this is really good (obviously some "architecture" work is ported over from the Rust Moonlander), but Vala does things a bit differently so it was still a fair bit of work.

There are some things I'm missing from Rust (enums with actual data, Result<>, match, etc.) but overall the language itself looks like a pretty neat Java/C# clone to me so far.

If you're planning to do any GUIs on Linux, do give it a shot! But be warned, it's documentation isn't as great as it could be, and while it can use C libraries, it requires you to write VAPI files and whatnot, so the small-ish library ecosystem can also be an issue. Still do try it out though, I like it.

For the past few weeks I've been trying to grok a way to use LibVGM in an Xcode project so I can make VGM player with a GUI.

The problem is that I really don't understand Xcode yet, and at the same time I'm trying to get this library working with either Swift or Objective-C (with this being the first time I've ever written any code that uses a C library to begin with). LibVGM has no real documentation, so I'm stuck reading the code, which is made more difficult by the fact that its build system is cmake, which I of course have no experience with. It doesn't help that the code seems to be absolutely everywhere in some sort of pattern that I can't seem to understand. Oh, also I've technically never written an application for MacOS.

So yeah, I basically have no idea what I'm doing and it's frustrating. It doesn't help that I've been depressed lately so haven't been able to focus on it much at all.

That being said, I haven't not made progress. It helped that I learned that cmake has the ability to generate Xcode projects, which will do a lot to help me understand how to get things running. And I should be grateful to the contributor who added Core Audio support, without which this would have been much more complicated.

There are a few projects I've been working on.

First, since the beginning of Covid, I've been using AWS to spin up Minecraft servers for my friends and I to play on. I've found that Minecraft while voice-chatting has been the closest thing to physically hanging out with them. Recently though, I've decided to migrate to Dreamhost, since I'd rather not support AWS more than necessary. So I need to rewrite my scripts in Python to work with the OpenStack API, which will be a little bit of a challenge, but I think I'll learn a bit.

Second, I saw someone mention a pubnix that they set up recently using the Shizaru server, so I looked into it and saw that it blocks <script> tags. So I'm trying to use HTML entities to get a react page running, despite the blocking. I think it'll be a fun project that'll help teach me more about XSS and its limits.

Anyways, glad to hear from y'all.
~Archwizard

I'm diving into learning CAD using Fusion 360. I started out doing this so I could make designs for my 3D printer, but now it's so enjoyable I'm also designing things just for fun!