After my initial research I filed two bugs (35596 and 35597), decided to put graphics aside and tried getting non-graphics programs running.
And I’ve had good success so far. I’ve ported 15 so far.
The fpc compiler has various modes which includes a Turbo Pascal mode. However that’s somewhere around Turbo Pascal 7 - definitely not all the way back to version 3.01a like we were using.
This isn’t a huge stumbling block though.
Read more»
I came across a bunch of code I wrote in high school. So I decided I could see if I could get the programs running again.
I have them running inside of DOSBox but I was wondering if I could get them running natively. And sure enough, there’s a Free Pascal project. It’s targeted at “newer” versions of Turbo Pascal than I used.
Amusingly I already hit an issue with the systems runtime library.
Read more»
So after using Go to do the initial activity collection, I went a bit more old school for
extracting it from git repos directly. Note that this and the previous post use the data capabilities
of hugo.
Yep, shell, sed, awk, sort and uniq
baby! It’s not ideal, but this script only runs once so good enough.
The reason for this one-off extraction is because both gitlab and github
restrict the time period they save activity data (two years for gitlab, 90
days for github - though some gitlab instances hold more and some less).
Future activity recording will be done via the Go programs described
before; this just runs once-ish. If I find older code repos I’ll likely
add them to this.
Added some activity graphs to this
( linked off my about page ). Currently
they just look at activity on a set of gitlab servers I use. I’m going
to try and add github later. And then maybe raid some other data sources.
[posted this on facebook originally, this is the start of a series on migrating off facebook]
I first joined facebook around a decade ago because someone told me there were other Kevin Lyda’s here and that just seemed wrong. And then, horrifyingly, I learned my 20 year high school reunion was happening.
Now, ten years on I’ve finally booked tickets so I can actually go to a high school reunion. horrors And I’m beginning to think about being on this site.
Read more»
On cable channels you’ll find loads of “documentaries” breathlessly telling you about supervolcanoes and how Yellowstone is going to kill everyone. Possibly also involving aliens.
So it was nice to see this public lecture on supervolcanoes and what they actually are (and are not), their history in the Pacific northwest and the science behind it all. It’s an hour and a bit long and makes for a good listen on a lazy weekend morning.
Read more»
I’ve converted code repos a number of times through my career. From cvs to subversion, from subversion to mercurial and git, from mercurial to git. However until the other day, I’d never converted from cvs to git directly.
In this case it was converting an old CVS repo I’d found in some old backup cdroms which were being tossed out.
It went well but there were a few hiccups. First there are a number of methods to do this.
Read more»
My first attempt at Cheez-Its went ok, but they were
too dense. Looking at the official recipe I saw it called for yeast. So
I looked for a recipe that used yeast and found this one from
Serious Eats. As always I tweaked it a little. Currently on
step 5, so should be interesting to see how they turn out!
Like quite a few Galway geeks it appears, I queued up early to see Avengers Endgame.
Queuing for Endgame This was taken around 10pm as we waited for the one past midnight showing. For once I walked in pretty unspoiled and it was well worth the wait. I can’t go into what I liked without spoilers but can say that I was surprised, I laughed a fair bit, I teared up and was just plain wowed in parts.
Read more»
Thanks to mpk today I learned that vim can work with scp “urls.” So vim scp://remote-host/kittens.txt works kind of as you’d expect. It can edit existing files - and for zsh tab completion will work here - or completely new files.
By default it’s going to edit files relative you your home dir - you’d need to do a double slash to edit a file from the root dir.
In the new site design I wanted a subtle and simple tag cloud. I initially did it by ordering tags in the footer by how common they were. However alphabetical order exists for a reason, so it was clear that wasn’t the best choice.
Tag clouds normally show popularity with font size. Not being a huge CSS person, I hadn’t realized font size was another thing you could specify relative to everything else - but you can!
Read more»
I use gandi for all my DNS needs and while I used to run my own dns it got tiresome after a while. So a long time ago I switched to using gandi to do it. Back then they had an api I was able to manipulate rather easily with python.
But a few years ago they changed to a new api and I put it on the long finger to migrate over.
Read more»
OpenSSL 1.1.0 introduced some incompatible changes for symetric encryption. I use it for some code repos to store secrets in lieu of other options. It works just fine for a single developer, but obviously doesn’t work very well beyond that.
Recently those projects started breaking and I wasn’t sure why. The commands I used to encrypt and decrypt were, respectively, as follows:
1 2 3 4 openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -pass "pass:$SECRET" \ -in .
Read more»
In Google there was (and possibly still is) a tool called “sourcerer” that let you browse through a repo. One nice feature it had was that deleted files and directories were shown struch through in red - and you could even follow down deleted dirs.
I’ve long wanted that view of a git repo. And today while digging through a rather old, imported work project it turned out that was useful to have.
Read more»
I’ve mentioned before this is a static site so how is it there’s now a search function. The magic of javascript!
I’d seen a search box on hugo sites so I looked around and found these two articles 1 2 on adding search and they each built on each other using lunr.
I tweaked the index building to try and squash it down a bit. The javascript I use to build the lunr prebuilt indexes (search/index.
Read more»
I was reminded of this article which is a nice little example of how to use shell tools in Unix to solve problems faster than if you were to “write a program.”
You’re still coding in shell, it’s just that each “line” is a pretty powerful function. Plus each function has a pretty simple interface: it will take a text stream and some positional or named arguments and it will produce two text streams (one is usually “the output” and the other is usually an “out of band” stream) and an integer.
Read more»
A further update to my original and updated retirement posts.
Since I last wrote on this topic I chatted with two pension plan advisors in the course of setting up my company pension. One interesting thing I learned is that for the best tax benefit for an Irish pension, the goal is a €800,000 pension account. You can withdraw 25% tax-free up to a maximum of €200,000.
As a US citizen who is also subject to US taxes - which do not recognise 25% tax-free withdrawals of pension funds, I’m not clear what the consequences are.
Read more»
This year it seems that everything that was ticking along just fine is suddenly breaking. Which is annoying. This week was a home git mirror.
My network connection is, at times, rather slow. Sometimes it even disappears. It’s therefore kind of nice if I have copies of code bases locally. I have a script that does this just fine and it’s worked for years.
Starting this year it started to bog down the server I ran it on.
Read more»