Recent content on Robert Ying
About me I live and work in Seattle with my wife Dr. Abra Shen , after growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area and studying in New York City. My technical interests include robotics, distributed systems, machine learning, programming languages, and databases. Outside of tech, I like cooking, reading, archery, video games, skiing, and the outdoors. Over the course of the pandemic, I also built an…
Over the past few years I’ve been having lots of fun playing with Home Assistant and home automation in general. One of the things which is underdocumented but kind of interesting is how to get air quality monitors connected to Home Assistant. I currently use two different types of air quality monitors, both made by Qingping. There are, of course, alternatives, but the Qingping devices are…
I’ve been working on my online version of the shengji card game for a little while now. One of the more interesting aspects of the game is how a legal play is defined, and the corresponding algorithm to compute that. Problem overview Shengji is a trick-taking game, which means that in each round, every player plays the same number of cards. The first player in the trick sets the…
I’ve been using Discord for gaming and hanging out with friends. However, sometimes I want to use my computer’s speakers (for friend hangouts), and sometimes I want to use headphones (for gaming). On Windows there’s a handy system tray widget which lets you change the default playback device – and almost everything plays from the default playback device! However, Discord…
An investigation into relative likelihood of various situations in the card game shengji.
A year of Kubernetes About a year ago I thought it would be a good idea to learn a bit more about Kubernetes. We use Kubernetes as part of our server orchestration at work, and while most of it is abstracted a way, it rarely hurts to know how the various foundational layers are actually like. At the time, I tried to set up a three-node cluster (two computers at home, one in the cloud), connected…
Or, why doesn’t docker stop work for my Docker image? I’ve had a Docker image which is intended to be approximately the most basic HTTP-compatible responder for a while. But, I built this originally for playing with Kubernetes, which doesn’t really give you direct access to anything. When actually using it with Docker, I discovered that it wouldn’t actually shut down…
This one’s pretty silly, but I decided I would try to use my little potato mini PC as a Samba host. And, it turns out, in the many years since I’ve configured Samba, so I forgot almost everything… and there’s some new stuff, too. These instructions were only tested on my computer, which is currently running Ubuntu 22.04. May or may not work for you! Setting up filesystem…
Advent of Code is a pretty fun December activity – an advent calendar of programming puzzles with a story tying them all together. The puzzles are released at midnight ET, which is conveniently 9 PM PT. I did Advent of Code for the first time last year (2021), and really enjoyed it. Since I became a manager I rarely get to write code for work (and try to minimize it, even so), and especially…
It’s been a long while since I’ve set up a new environment, and a long while since I’ve posted much of anything on here. Things have been pretty busy since we moved up here to Seattle, and I’ve been distracted by an endless supply of home improvement projects. Maybe some of those will make it up here! As it happens, though, I finally got on the NVMe train and swapped out…
I’ve been pretty annoyed for the last few months with using sillyfmt from the command line on MacOS. Previously, I’d just run sillyfmt with no arguments, which reads from STDIN and attempts to format whatever gets passed in. I would then copy and paste interesting snippets into the open window. Unfortunately, any large blocks of text would mysteriously truncate themselves and hang for…
Introduction This COVID-19 pandemic has left me with lots of free time spent in front of a computer at home. I’d been spending time with my friends playing various videogames online (the Jackbox Party Pack games work reasonably well over Discord or Zoom), and my fiancée suggested that we try to play tractor online… but I couldn’t find one that was easily available over the…
So, as a follow-up to the original silly-formatting post , I spent some time trying to figure out just how bad the LALRPOP-based sillyfmt implementation was. It turns out that there’s really nice utilities for using the afl fuzzer with Rust, so I hooked that up with some pretty basic heuristics and let it run for a few seconds. Then, since it turned out to be really bad , I got nerd-sniped…
In my time at Dropbox, I found myself fairly often trying to quickly read through “traces”, which were essentially developer-formatted text logged from the Dropbox desktop client. The Dropbox client was originally written back before structured logging was common in industry, and in any case setting up structured logs can add a fair bit of overhead to the day-to-day debugging…
Resurrecting GLaDOS After a little over five years, the small form factor desktop computer I built back in late 2012 refused to boot properly. For a couple of months, I resisted–I have a work-issue Macbook and iPad Pro, and I don’t play nearly as many computer games as I used to. It didn’t feel all that necessary for me to have a desktop on top of all of that. But, it turns out,…
For the past couple of years, I’ve kept a box in DelimiterVPS ’s Atlanta data center named angercore.aeturnalus.com . For just $20 a month, I had a (very old) HP BL260C blade server with plenty of disk space and RAM to run many of my random experimental projects on. Unfortunately, angercore.aeturnalus.com has been offline for over three weeks, and it’s not looking like it will…
A note from July 6, 2018 When I was in high school, I wrote a short post on building a low-cost Arduino on a breadboard. It’s been quite some time since I’ve done any significant hardware hacking, but since my old blog is mostly dead at this point I reproduce that post here I’ve burnt out a few Arduinos recently, and have found it expedient to just build my own on a breadboard rather…