Category: Technical

  • iRODS progress report Day 2(6/2/2022)

    Today I spent my time trying to get the configuration file to reload after I successfully ran the test suite. The first approach that I tried was hooking it into the Cron system. This has failed thus far because reloading the configuration on the main server causes use-after-frees (I think) due to contention over the…

  • 3D Printing

    I am not new to 3d printers. In college I helped to run the 3d printing lab, fulfilling requests to make things for various classes(at the time, the most promising was how it could be used to demonstrate anatomy with relatively cheap modifiable parts). That was around 2017. At the time the printer lab consisted…

  • Returning to simple-dots-game after a while

    It has been a while since I worked on this game. And after being away for a while, I can’t really see the sources of frustration that I felt before. They were probably residual feelings from the frustration of getting it to a functional state and figuring out the system. But there’s something that was…

  • Initial impressions of Orbtk

    I’ve been meaning to get into rust for a long time, but there were some pieces missing from the ecosystem(good rust bindings for GUI applications appear to be hard to come by), but rust isn’t like most of those other languages, it requires a different approach because many of the gui frameworks that have worked…

  • FFMPEG input/output as an abstraction

    I am currently working on writing code to support the usage pattern that I have used in the past for making animations using ffmpeg to encode video. Really though, how complex does it need to be? Well, let’s put together a wish-list: It should always shut down the pipe at the end of executionIt’s really…

  • L-Systems with shapes

    Rendering shapes is a relatively small addition to the L-System code I’ve been implementing over the last few weeks, it consists of a few manual dispatches to drawing code based on the first symbol in a sublist. The immediate alternative is using defgeneric and the common lisp object system, which is probably the correct thing…

  • Improving On L-Systems

    The simplest implementation of L-Systems requires term-rewriting, and maybe turtle graphics. We already have arbitrary computation on the execution end, but what if we could add computation on the term rewriting phase? We can get a lot more flexibility without adding an infinite number of rules. Also the last L-System post has had its code…

  • Some Thoughts on Codex, a Common Lisp Documentation Tool

    Codex is one of a small number of native documentation generators in lisp. It uses an unusual markdown format called Scriba. I have been using it to document img-genner since about 2 years ago. In those two years there hasn’t been an update for it(Actually for at least 7), but that’s not terribly uncommon among…

  • L-Systems

    L-Systems

    L-Systems are a type of fractal, well, that’s not really true; L-systems are a formalism for constructing rules for iterated systems, such as plant growth and turning those into images. But what’s interesting is that they’re actually remarkably simple to implement the evaluation of. So let’s look at one of the simpler ones, the binary…

  • Particles Tunneling Through Solid Earth

    No, I’m not going to write about neutrinos, or anything else that is ‘real’. Pixels are the particles of today’s post. Their universe is very different than ours, it is solid in all directions, it is quantized(at a different level than ours). At each moment, there are a countable number of choices. To be a…