Recently, I released a piece of software called jocalsend , to great acclaim. In that post announcing it, I wrote, I plan on writing a follow-up about the design and implementation of jocalsend, but that's going to be a much longer and even-more-niche-interest post, so I'll just skip that for now. It seems that now the time has come to fulfill that promise. If the nittty-gritty of the…
Jocalsend: a peer-to-peer file sharing program using local IP subnetworking Recently, I released a program called jocalsend , which is a play on " LocalSend ". LocalSend is, in its own words, "a free, open-source app that allows you to securely share files and messages with nearby devices over your local network without needing an internet connection." You can think of it as a sort of "we have…
nebkor-maelstrom , a simple crate for writing Maelstrom clients Recently, I started working my way through the Gossip Glomers distributed system challenges 1 , and as usual wanted to use Rust to do it. There are a few off-the-shelf crates available for this, but none of them quite hit the spot for me. As a result, I wrote and released a new crate for writing Maelstrom clients, nebkor-maelstrom .…
Hitman counts your hits, man. Recently, someone in a community I'm part of asked the following: I was thinking about how we used to have website hit counters in the 2000s and I was wondering -- has anyone put a hit counter on your personal website? Some people had, it turns out, but many had not. Among the had-nots was me, and I decided to do something about it. The bottom line up front is that…
Presenting Julids Nebcorp Heavy Industries and Sundries, long the world leader in sundries, is proud to announce the public launch of the official identifier type for all Nebcorp companies' assets and database entries, Julids . Julids are globally unique sortable identifiers, backwards-compatible with ULIDs , but better . Inside your Rust program, simply add julid-rs 1 to your project's Cargo.toml…
A one-part serial mystery post-hoc prequel I wrote recently about switching the types of the primary keys in the database for an in-progress web app I'm building. At that time, I'd not yet done any benchmarking, but had reason to believe that using sortable primary keys would yield some possibly-significant gains in performance, in both time and space. I'd also read accounts of regret that…
Mise en Scene I recently spent a couple days moving from one type of universally unique identifier to a different one , for an in-progress database-backed web-app . The initial work didn't take very long, but debugging the serialization and deserialization of the new IDs took another day and a half, and in the end, the alleged mystery of why it wasn't working was a red herring due to my own…
A sundry collection of intellectual property, some less intellectual than other Something I firmly believe is that it's important to make jokes in any medium. Here at NebCorp Heavy Industries & Sundries, despite occasional dabbling with the physical , we work primarily with software, and software is one of our primary corporate humor channels. Below is just some of our work there, from least to…
A birthday wish Last summer, I wanted to get my wife something nice for her birthday. For many years, she had expressed an occasional and casual desire for a topographic carving of the state of California, where we live, and I thought it might be something I could figure out how to get her. In the end, after many dozens of hours of work, five weeks, and several hundred dollars paid to a…
Congratulations: you've arrived at the one-stop destination for all news about and instructions from NebCorp Heavy Industries & Sundries. Here at NebCorp HIAS, we (I) take our (my) obligations very seriously, and that means ensuring all cogs (you) are fully conditioned and equipped with only NebCorp-approved technology. Remember, "Consumption Is Mandatory!™"
Last things first I'm going to cut to the chase: I could not find a way to choose uniformly distributed random points inside the volume of a unit sphere that was faster than picking one in the 8-unit cube, testing to see if it was inside the unit-sphere, and trying again if it wasn't -- but I did come real close. But that's getting ahead of myself. Before we come to the stunning conclusion, there…
In which I commit to anti-capitalism I want to start this with a little story about working at Industrial Light & Magic. For those not in the know, ILM is the visual effects studio that George Lucas started in order to make his indie space-adventure movie, Star Wars , a tale of a man who became absolutely corrupted by his power and was, thankfully, eventually destroyed. When the movies came out,…