Weeknotes 2021 W52
Happy new year!
It’s still week 52 of 2021, even though we’re in 2022 already. Weeks are weird. Rebelliously doing their own thing. Not caring about established year conventions. Relatable.
Parsing is still an interesting problem! For my budgeting app prototype, I’m happy with the combination of Ragel and racc for lexing and parsing, respectively. These two tools should make it considerably easier to switch the implementation to a different language later on, with a minimum of changes.
I might switch to a different language for my budgeting app project, because I won’t be able to write it in Ruby if I decide to build a macOS app for it. Writing cross-language implementation is difficult but having a mostly reusable lexer and parser limits that pain.
It’s been such a good decision to not build this budgeting prototype as a macOS app. It would be far too big of a challenge to learn Swift, SwiftUI, AppKit and Xcode, as well as figuring out good UX for the app, and figuring out the rather complex business logic.
I converted the closecontact web site to Nanoc and removed all the JavaScript. Still working on updating the copy so that it’s clear that it is no longer up and running. Next steps are shutting down all infrastructure except the web site itself.
RIP closecontact. You were a worthy project and you’ll have a special place in my heart.
Bringing my Ruby projects up to date with Ruby 3.1 and Monterey has proven to be a pain. The libv8 gem fails to install on Monterey, and Nanoc with a ThreadError because it synchronizes a mutex in a finalizer somewhere in the ref gem.
In Skyrim, I’ve turned down the combat difficulty, because I don’t find the combat interesting, and the regular difficulty gets more in the way.
Skyrim, as I expected, is also immensely buggy, though luckily not in game-breaking ways. People stuck in trees, rocks, people hovering in mid-air, etc. You get the idea.
Satisfactory is a fun game, but what I’ve created is such a drain on my CPU that the framerate drops to unusable levels. So, I think I’ll park it for now and wait until things magically improve.
I got a copy of Red Dead Redemption II on sale, and it’s good fun. It’s a huge game and it feels like a “GTA but western” — not much of a surprise, given that it’s a Rock Star game. It’s really high quality, in contrast to Skyrim, which I’m playing at the same time.
In movies: Matrix Resurrections is excellent. And has a ton of queer subtext.
In TV: I finished Inside Job and it is great. I stopped watching Emily in Paris because I just can’t get myself to continue with it… I think it got to the point where it’s just not my thing anymore.
Interesting reading:
- Preventing Log4j with capabilities (Justin Pombrio) mirrors my thinking about A globally available filesystem is a security liability. I was low-key working on a capability-safe programming language, but dropped it because I just don’t have the time.