Somewhat random ramblings and personal updates.
I will split this up into two parts: The Boring Problem The More Interesting Problem For good programmers, none of what I say will be a surprise, but I want to write this down regardless, because I realized that I am severely underutilizing "consistent Terminology", causing me to run into "The More Interesting Problem" too often in my codebase. The Boring Problem Generally speaking, you want your…
It's only Tuesday evening, but boy this is already a busy week! I am in the progress of making some (minor) changes to the site: First of all, I have added separate "Other" page to the top-bar, which contains a contact mail (hopefully in a format which will not flood my inbox with bot messages). When I first created this website, I just wanted to have my own little corner of the Internet where I…
Theme Song for my day (taken from here ): Family uses outlook calendar for events Fix phone not syncing the events properly (phone setting randomly turned itself off 5 menus deep, very cool) Problem: I'm not using my phone much, but it's my primary source for these events / schedule I can check the outlook web view, but the website is so clunky and slow that I want to keep this to a minimum (and…
Quick warnings/notes upfront: Heavy spoilers. The game is entirely free on either Steam or Itch . The game (and thus this post) contains unfun themes such as depression and suicide. All of my notes & thoughts are mostly unstructured. I have been thinking about this game for a bit and just need to get things out of my system. I have extended my website generator to embed some music tracks from the…
Quick rundown on my living situation: Still living with my parents. Not too proud of that as a 25 year old guy, but at least I'm able to build up my savings I suppose. Making some good progress on losing weight, still got ways to go though. Still working my 40h full-remote job. Comfy, but lots of stuff to do. Progress on personal projects has been kind of random, but progress has been made…
You know, I'm not really a fan of Linux. Usually, shit is completely fucked when you plug something new in. On the flipside, once everything is setup & configured in the most cryptic way possible, things generally keep working. Not this time though. The Situation I programmed a simple blackboard application to be used with my tablet. The idea is not to do anything serious in it, but to have a…
A quick introduction: If you want to program a graphical application for linux, your primary choices are using either X11 or Wayland. According to Wikipedia, X11 had its first release in 1984. X11 follows a client-server-model. I assume it's because the whole computational environment, was very different back then. If you have a central server which is doing all of the heavy lifting, while the…
A friend of mine recently had an usual request: He would like to have a way to listen to all of my piano recordings without manually switching tracks every couple of minutes. Imagine my shock when I learned that this poor dude is actually listening to them (??? no idea why). It's not like I record a new piece every week, but I feel like I'd still be annoyed if I had to manually update this "master…
What Is This Post About? In the programming language C, you can access the members of a struct by using the dot-operator: // Struct definition typedef struct my_type my_type; struct my_type { int MemberA; char MemberB; }; // Accessing the members of a struct in some function void PrintMyType_ByValue(my_type MyStructInstance) { printf("my_type members: \n"); printf(" MemberA: %d\n",…
I feel bamboozled Became chubby Decide to at least move a bit more Day 1: 10k steps Day 2: 15k steps Day 3: Right foot hurts too much to take a longer walk DUDE. I'm already too lazy to do proper sports, but now my body is bitching about taking a fucking walk? It's walking . Humans are designed to be able to walk, no?
Turns out: Tech problems become infinitely more annoying once you have a fulltime job. PC does fucky shit when under full load, like completely freezing ignoring all USB input, such that even replugging doesn't help until reboot audio being muted / crackled / etc Used to only happen very rarely, but it's getting noticably worse PSU dies oh, maybe it was that old thing, not able to deliver enough…
TLDR: The code was using a suboptimal data layout, requiring conversions to other formats for intermediate processing and back the memory layout was wasting most of the cache lines used Links: I used Excalidraw for the visualizations If you want to learn all about how to program for modern desktop CPUs, checkout ComputerEnhance . The AMD Documentation Hub . I didn't actually read much from there,…
Super spontaneous post, a short announcement in order to hold myself (more) accountable: I will try to perceive / talk to myself in a more positive light, and I guess we'll see how that works out and where I end up. Everyone keeps saying that you shouldn't belittle oneself, but for some reason I never thought about why . My intuition tells me it's because there's a fine line between "reasonable…
I recently got the simple question of how the years I spent at university changed me. Like a well adjusted human being, I responded to a question consisting of eight words by writing several paragraphs about my expectations, the reality, university vs school and so on. I'm going to borrow from that schizopost and try to summarize my thoughts on this in a (somewhat) more organized fassion, as I…
When I work on my personal projects, I program in C using a small amount of libraries for specific things. To compile, I use a unity-build: Everything is compiled within a single compilation unit; the main .c -file includes other .c - and .h -files. This vastly simplifies the compilation process, such that my "build-system" is just a single build.sh -script. While this approach works fantastically…
Dreams are a funny thing. I remember dreaming "in a normal frequency" when I was a child, but that sort of stopped when I was a teenager; that is, dreams were a rare occurrence for me (less than once a month). Way later during university, some weird dream caused me to start a dream journal on a small notebook. Apparently recalling the dream(s) immediately after waking up helps a lot with having…
So I found this Baguette Recipe that I really liked ( link ). It's very easy to do, is not labour intensive, tastes pretty good, and it consists of very few ingredients. The only thing I was struggling with was the "fluffyness" of the baguette. The original recipe used more water, but I couldn't reproduce it, even after experimenting a bunch: Amount of yeast? Didn't seem to change much. Amount of…
This morning I stumbled upon a piano track on youtube. I thought it sounded both easy and pretty, found sheets for it online and gave it a shot. It's a super easy to memorize song, so after an hour (maybe two?) I also recorded and uploaded it to the site this evening. Is it difficult to play? Nope, it's really not that impressive. But I was certainly not able to do that when I started playing the…
I act grumpy at a lot of things: Software, games, movies, books - you name it. You might have even read about me trash talking certain games [0] . Lately, I have been thinking about stories and their relationships with the types of media they are presented in. And I think this, to some extent, covers the difference between experiences that I will continue to remember for years, and e.g. games that…
This one is for all the independent artists out there: For the love of god, fix your fucking audio mixing! I found a random ass Indie band. You know, one album released a few years ago posted a banger album never to be heard of again But I think this is the third time where I listen to some artist on bandcamp, whose audio is fucking clipping . Producing music, especially if it isn't a cover, takes…
It's a sunday evening, I have roughly an hour before I want to head to bed, and I'm bored. A bunch of things have happened since my last post, so it's time for a life update. Finding Work After slacking off for a few months at my parents' place, I finally started to look for a job at the beginning of this year. And I have to admit: looking for a programming job with a computer science degree…
It's the end of the year, and I feel like I'm as grumpy as ever. I am a bit scared of my current development, especially when it comes to my current taste in media in general. Why? Because I find it harder and harder to find things which I'm not annoyed at. Persona 4 Persona 4 is the favorite games of a close friend of mine. The reviews speak for themselves: 97% of ~56k reviews are positive on…
Someone on Twitch mentioned this C++ Committee insanity, and I feel like I'm going to explode not writing this down. I already posted a wall of text to two friends of mine, so I might as well save this here. The Proposal Someone did an official proposal to the C++ specification to zero-initialize memory of all objects using "automatic storage duration". To the best of my knowledge , this means…
Here's a small update on programming related stuff. Code Formatter I think pretty much every developer has heard about the "Tabs vs Spaces" debate before, which only shows one thing: Development tools are pretty bad. A good IDE should be able to just handle either encoding and display the indentation as the user desires. Given that I recently decided to try out using an indentation width of 2…
I spend most of my time on the internet on the same webpages: Reddit YouTube Twitch Apart from searching for shit, that's basically it [0] . Even if I start counting websites I visit occasionally, the list of websites remains manageable - a stark contrast to the idea that the web is decentralized and full of wonders of things to explore. Some people are trying to revive the old days of the…
It's been a while. First, a quick status update on my life, before I cover some of them in more detail: Finished by bachelor thesis Moved out of a student apartment complex back into my parents' place Currently looking for a programming job (or rather I should be looking, but I'm lazy) Improved my programming skills and I'm currently taking the Performance Aware Programming Course Programmed on…
The official Python implementation is dogshit slow; although you can argue that one can use implementations like PyPy , which is mostly a drop-in replacement with significantly better performance way better performance . Regardless, the few times I actually use Python (for e.g. quick and dirty data processing / visualization), there's is a surprising amount of friction and pitfalls despite it…
I've touched (not properly used) a few programming languages over the years. But holy hell do I despise C++. Let's go over a few things which are awful, in no particular order of madness. The C++ specification is not freely available [0] . You can get drafts of the specification for free (and hope for the best that no important changes are made to the final release). This is good enough in…
Given that humans communicate with each other every single day, we sure are incredibly fucking bad at it. It's one of the few things which makes me irrationally angry, so I might as well put my anger into this wall of text. The latest incident on my end happened yesterday. I received a text message saying: "Can you please give me a call? It would be important." I'm not exaggerating: Never in my…
I have been struggling to get (seemingly) important things done, stick to my schedules, stay productive, ... ...which is kind of a common theme in the few posts of mine. But today I stumbled upon a lecture / speech by Alan Watts , which kind of addresses this inner fight in an interesting way [0] . I'll try to summarize the bits which were most important to me: First the obvious: Other people…
There's no fucking way "the year of the linux desktop" will ever come given the current shitshow that is Linux audio jungle. Let's start with a quick overview of audio systems. There is: OSS ALSA JACK PulseAudio PipeWire The bottom layer is basically formed by OSS and ALSA. Apparently ALSA has replaced OSS, so ALSA is the thing actually making Linux play sounds at the end of the day.…
Man it's way too late for this, but here I go. First things first: What have I been up to? What is my progress on things? I finished the book "The mythical man-month". That was a good read, would recommend to other programmers / people interested in programming. This book helped me gain a new perspective on the creation of software, the intrinsic difficulty creating these systems and more. I'm…
I am not as productive as I'd like to be. And it's not like I don't have things to do; if anything it's quite the opposite. I'd like to... Do more programming Finish up an emulator Get a rudimentary debugger to work Write a C parser to have more useful code tools available Maybe a compiler? Maybe an IDE? Get more into embedded system stuff. Maybe some bare metal? Assembly? Get better at playing…
My dreams, generally, are an incoherent mess. They aren't realistic (visually nor story-wise), they aren't cool, and I don't get much out of them. I used to have a little notebook as a dream diary, but as I ran out of space I kinda just stopped doing that. Besides, I usually wake up in the middle of the night at least once, and getting yourself to write legible notes while still half asleep is…
Here is the classic rambling: Computers used to be slow -> Internet was slow Computers are ridiculously fast now, but the internet is still dogshit slow Everything is full of javascript and is completely broken without it Copious amounts of cookie consent banners Using an adblocker is basically mandatory I'm going to skip all of that and instead just focus on the experience I had when creating…
As a professional procrastinator, there is always a list of side-projects laying around. One of these items is a website: I always wanted to create a website which serves as my own cheat sheet , because my memory is utter garbage and some of these notes might be helpful to other people as well. Given that I just got some ancient computer up and running which serves as a git-server/NAS I thought:…