Posted on 21st of July 2024
| 783 words
As you might’ve seen in my last
post
, I’ve been
without an internet for good some time already. Still – like I mentioned in the
last post – I’ve really enjoyed my time without it. I feel that I can switch
off much better after working hours, and I still have energy to partake in
various other extracurricular activities that I hold dear to my heart, like
hobby programming projects, music, reading, sports and much more. So really
there isn’t much to complain.
Currently, my new neighbourhood does have a pretty good signal –
generally speaking. My apartment just happens to be in relatively awkward spot,
which means that it’s surrounded by other buildings. I happen to have a
relatively big balcony in my apartment as well and even in there I have
basically one bar of connectivity going on. Naturally, inside I don’t have any
signal or very little. Fortunately, I’ve been able to have just enough of
connectivity so in case some emergency or something along those lines, I’m able
to do something with my phone. But, when it comes to “surfing the web”, that’s
not much that I can currently do.
That being said, I can do just some browsing in handful of site that don’t clog
the whole bandwidth for silly updates and requests and mainly just focus on
sharing good content. So I wanted to write a small appreciation post for people
making websites that work with practically no internet at all.
TODO: Maybe gather some great examples of lite websites to somewhere?
Of course, when writing about this sort of topic, it also brings little bit of
sadness to me to see how many websites is basically unusable without a
relatively good internet. Fortunately, I live in a place where even at its
worst, I can access relatively “fast” internet and of course most of the places
– outside my apartment – is very well connected. I don’t need to go far from
my house to get basically full 5G connectivity with varying speeds (whatever
your contract at the moment happens to be). In places like Finland, 1 Gbit fiber
connectivity is getting more and more normal even in somewhat rural areas.
Germany is not on that level yet – and by many standards, very far from it –
but it’s still good nonetheless. Something like this cannot be said about the
vast majority of the countries around the world.
I kind of know the reason why something like this has happened that the
significant portion of popular websites are basically unaccessible by many
people. I think it’s largely due to this aggressive over-engineering software
engineers tend to do in their line of work. Also, I’m not innocent in that front
as well, since I’ve done my fair share of over-engineering during the years
working in the industry. Sometimes since I wanted, sometimes it was needed and
sometimes since I was told to.
But it begs an interesting question, why something like this so normal in our
industry? Sure, there are cases where added complexity to your infrastructure,
codebase, etc. has actually brought some benefits. But the amount of times that
has happened is greatly outweighed by the amount of times when it, well, just
has brought added complexity without any benefits. But hey! At least, the
engineers feel accomplished when they are able to deliver that is “complex”.
From the UX point of view, this is also quite interesting topic, since I believe
that no one in this world wants to have their app/product/software/whatever to
be slow for the users. But often, this added complexity automatically hinders
the performance of whatever you happen to we writing. You start doing more stuff
than you would need to, this can be inform of unnecessary web requests,
unnecessary computations and so on. I guess there isn’t any argument about the
fact that something like this hinders the whole UX. Which begs the question? Why
more people don’t care about the performance more in their products? You might
have an application that might have a traditionally speaking “bad UX”, meaning
maybe lots of menus, you need to press a lot of stuff to access whatever you
might be after, etc. But, if everything happens instantly, I’d dare to argue
it’s still pretty good UX, at least for many people. If then on the other end of
the spectrum, you would have a great UX, but everything is slow and has to load
lots of stuff, how good of an UX it really is at that point?
But yeah, I digress, seems that lack of internet just makes me want to write
about stuff. Any case, TLDR, write light websites.
Posted on 6th of July 2024
| 1270 words
As some of you might know, I’ve been living in Berlin, Germany for a few years
now. Wonderful city! Just what I was looking for couple years back when I moved
here. City definitely has its flaws – like does every city in the world – but
I still enjoy being here. City is definitely massive. Each district having their
own life, own people and own quirks. Spectrum is wide from somewhat poshy areas
of Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg to more hip and trendy areas like Neukolln and
Kreuzberg to more suburban areas around the Ringbahn. Of course, since I’m
mainly into various hip and trendy activities – what some might call them –
most of my time has been spent lingering around and roaming the streets of
eastern Berlin, mainly Neukolln and Kreuzberg since those were the districts I
used to reside. Due to its sheer size, there’s no way, I’ve been able to
experience all the city has to offer. Despite this, I feel that the city has
offered me tremendously.
While I’ve really enjoyed living in Berlin, one thing I can’t praise at all is
how things work in this country. So this is not necessarily Berlin’s fault,
although, I feel its also partly due to that. But more or less everything seems
to be difficult here. At least in a bureaucratic sense. Difficult in a sense
that nothing really works efficiently or effortlessly, or that’s how I at least
feel coming from Finland to this country. I’m not saying Finland is perfect in
how country should operate, far from it. I’m just saying – using a simple and
common example – that if you want to move from place to place, making this sort
of address change to your government shouldn’t be too difficult. In Finland for
example, if you want to move, there’s one URL that you go to, fill in your new
details, and send the information. Pretty easy. In Germany, if you want to
Anmeldung, you need to print your papers necessary, fill the forms, book time in
your nearest Burgeramt, go there physically, just so someone can put some stamp
in your papers. Sounds pretty unefficient, right? That’s because it is.
I also just recently read from the news how Germany was excited to have
digitalised their medical patient information so that more stuff would happen
digitally instead of manually. Making it easier to share medical history from
doctor to doctor. Sounds amazing! Of course, something like this has been
implemented in many different countries for 20 or so years, but hey, Germany is
in no rush!
This sort of a ranty-detour gets us to the whole topic of today’s post about
living without internet. So I just wanted to write some words down on how I feel
after some undisclosed amount of weeks that I have been without internet at
home.
This all started mainly due to the fact that I just happened to move into a new
place and naturally I wanted to move my internet contract into the new address.
Of course, naive and blue-eyed me thought that it would be pretty
straight-forward. I just change the address, configure the router possibly in
the address in case something needs to be done and that’s about it, right? Well
of course not. Turns out, for some reason, there needs to be a internet
technician come to your place and turn on the connection for you. Okay, sure.
Interesting that it couldn’t be done remotely, but hey let’s go with it. But of
course to make it not so easy, the technician isn’t able to find my home, which
is interesting again since they know the address. Also, of course they could’ve
just called me but that’s too much to ask I guess. So there’s an another try,
but with the same result. Oh, and did I mention that there was two weeks between
these attempts so it not like that they tried it again in a short period of
time.
Okay, I start ranting again. Back to the topic. I wanted to jot down some
thoughts that I’ve encountered while living without an internet. Turns out, I
have really enjoyed my time! I’ve written in my blog about my “struggles” with
for example social media and how it used to grab my attention almost wholly. But
generally speaking, it feels that everything I tend to online, tends to be more
on the excessive end of the spectrum. Call it excessive use of YouTube or other
various places filled with endless amounts of content. I just feel that I tend
to sink vast amount of hours in these sort of places, without getting much in
return. While I’m not saying they are all bad, they certainly have good bits and
pieces here and there, but the vast majority just feels – like someone might’ve
put it already – brain-rot.
With these undisclosed amount of weeks that I’ve now been without internet,
naturally, I’ve been away from all them. Even the cellural signal is quite weak
in my new apartment so I haven’t been able to use them via it even that much.
Fortunately, I’ve been able to keep in touch with family and friends with the
little signal I’ve had at home and in case I’ve really had to use internet for
something, I’ve had just to leave my home to find Wi-Fi, which also has been
quite good for me, since I’ve a habit of going “monk- or hermit-mode” quite
often.
I also recently changed jobs so fortunately I haven’t been in on any on-call
rotation so I haven’t really had the need to work from home. Also, the new
apartment has been quite close to the new office, so it hasn’t been too big of a
hassle to go there daily. Even that – to my surprise – hasn’t been too bad.
Why it’s to my surprise is the fact that before this I really never went to the
office. This employer or the previous ones. I wouldn’t say the office that we
have currently is something extra-ordinary that I would really want to spent
time in there, it’s still nice, don’t get me wrong. I’ve never really just seen
myself as this social butterfly who can effortlessly manage themselves mingling
around in an office environment. So, I’ve always just enjoyed working from home
more.
The lack of internet at home has really shown itself in my life in the form of
vastly increased productivity on the stuff that I value. I’m not saying that
some sort of ultimate productivity is something that everyone should strive
towards – which seems to often be the case in various toxic “hustling culture”
ideas – but I’m more so approaching the topic from the point of view of how
much time you really can use in the stuff that brings something positive and
beneficial to your life. In my case, it has shown itself in the form of
increased productivity for example in exercise, making music, writing, reading
and also programming passion projects. I.e. more or less most of the stuff
outside personal relationships and health that I find to be important in my
life.
So now I’m just spitballing with the idea of really not just getting any
internet to my home. Of course, if the current job situation would allow
something like that. Considering all the good effects I’ve seen in my life AND
considering the fact that it would be just one less thing to worry my head in
German bureaucracy, I don’t really see negative side in this.
Posted on 14th of June 2024
| 350 words
Behind the scenes, I’ve continued to develop Sila quite a bit, but
unfortunately, it seems that some of the design – or better lack of – choices
I made during the early initial development has started show their flaws. So,
I’ve decided to go back to drawing board to do some of the design flaws better
this time. Also, with a new/old language.
Originally, I wanted to start writing this compiler in Common Lisp mainly due to
the reason of just purely liking the language. And nothing has changed in that
front and I still love working with it. I’ve just run into a situation, where I
happen to need quite a bit of C++ and also LLVM. So this naturally got me
thinking that maybe I should look into just rewriting my compiler in those.
Another reason was the fact that I just recently got a new Apple Silicon machine
and most of the compiler was written for x86-64. So now I would need to write a
new backend for aarch64, which is why LLVM started to look like a feasible
choice.
Of course – at least in my opinion – going back to C++ from Common Lisp is in
many ways a step back. I love utilising Common Lisp’s dynamic nature pretty
thoroughly and especially when working as a solo developer, it offers great
perks. Due to this, I played around with the idea of just generating LLVM IR
from Common Lisp without using the LLVM API directly, but then decided to go
with the C++ API route, mainly since I just wanted to refresh some memories of
C++ and also at least by doing that, I get exposed to the LLVM API completely.
Which I find beneficial, especially when trying diving into LLVM more.
Decisions to start over are never easy, but often necessary for progress. By
doing this, I tend to address some of the shortcomings of the initial design.
But also since I’m going with LLVM, I can also focus on some of the more
interesting – to me – problems in the compiler construction.
Posted on 26th of May 2024
| 639 words
Every once in a while I like to play around with Emacs themes. Of course, mainly
due to yak-shaving and procrastination reasons and nothing actually valid. But
it’s fun nonetheless, although occasionally very tedious. Tedious in a sense
that Emacs tend to come with a lot of different faces, especially if you happen
to use more than a few third-party packages.
Defining a custom theme in Emacs
Emacs comes with couple relatively straight forward way to set custom themes in
the function custom-theme-set where you define the name of the theme and then
the faces you want to modify:
(deftheme fancy-theme)
(custom-set-faces
'fancy-theme
'(default ((t (:foreground "black" :background "white"))))
;; [... and so on]
)
You’re also able to control on what sort of displays your custom theme should
support. For example, if you want to use theme in only terminals that support
minimum number of 16 different colors, you’re able to define that like:
'(default ((((class color) (min-colors 16)) (:foreground "black" :background "white"))))
Of course that can be slightly verbose, so often you might see custom themes to
be set like:
(deftheme fancy-theme)
(let ((class '((class color) (min-colors 16))))
(custom-set-faces
'fancy-theme
`(default ((,class (:foreground "black" :background "white"))))
;; [... and so on]
))
But it still tedious since there is a lot of faces and there can be lot of
variance between the faces so often if you want to write your own full fledged
theme, it’s better to explicitly set all the faces that you plan to use. Mainly
since, if the face is not set in the theme it’ll use that lastly set face for
that face in question, so if you session has used multiple different faces, it
can lead into some funky color combinations.
Currently in my Emacs session – which is relatively light package-wise –
amount of currently set faces equals to 869.
This is why, I decided to write a simple Emacs Lisp helper function to dump all
the currently set faces to a buffer where you can copy them to your own theme at
will. I also made it so you can simply just dump the faces from a give package
if you only care, e.g. about Magit’s faces.
(require 'cl-lib)
(defconst theme-dump--buffer-name "*theme-dump*")
(defconst theme-dump--default-format-string "%s %s ")
(defconst theme-dump--string-format-string "%s \"%s\" ")
(defun theme-dump-current-faces (pkg)
(interactive (list (read-string "Dump faces from package (leave empty for all packages): ")))
(let ((faces '()))
(dolist (f (theme-dump--filter-faces-by-package pkg))
(let ((attr-str ""))
(dolist (a (face-all-attributes f))
(setq attr-str
(concat attr-str (theme-dump--format-attr-str f a))))
(push (if (not (string-equal attr-str ""))
(format "`(%s ((,class (%s))))\n" f (string-trim-right attr-str))
(format "`(%s (( )))\n" f))
faces)))
(let ((buf (get-buffer-create theme-dump--buffer-name)))
(with-current-buffer buf
(erase-buffer)
(insert (mapconcat 'identity faces))
(local-set-key (kbd "q") 'kill-buffer-and-window))
(split-window-right)
(other-window 1)
(switch-to-buffer buf))))
(defun theme-dump--filter-faces-by-package (pkg)
(cl-flet ((pkg-face-p (face)
(cl-search pkg (symbol-name face))))
(if (not (string-equal pkg ""))
(cl-remove-if-not #'pkg-face-p (face-list))
(face-list))))
(defun theme-dump--format-attr-str (face attr)
(unless (equal (face-attribute face (car attr))
'unspecified)
(cl-typecase (face-attribute face (car attr))
(string (format theme-dump--string-format-string
(symbol-name (car attr))
(face-attribute face (car attr))))
(t (format theme-dump--default-format-string
(symbol-name (car attr))
(face-attribute face (car attr)))))))
Essentially, this just gets all the faces with face-list and either returns
all of the or filters them by package name if you want. Function prints the
faces into a new buffer in a format that is already suitable for new custom
themes:
`(magit-section-highlight ((,class (:extend t :background "grey95"))))
`(magit-section-heading ((,class (:weight bold :extend t))))
`(magit-section-secondary-heading ((,class (:weight bold :extend t))))
`(magit-section-heading-selection ((,class (:extend t :foreground "salmon4"))))
`(magit-section-child-count (( )))
;; and so on...
The printed faces can then easily be copied to custom-set-faces for your
possible new theme. Faces are also backticked by default, in case you want to
change faces to use variables instead of hardcoded names.
Code is in public domain and also available in
sourcehut.
Posted on 24th of May 2024
| 8 words
Bret Hart saving the day in code review.