Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 14, 2023

• Game of Trees 0.86 released

  Version 0.86 of Game of Trees has been released (and the port updated): [...]

• Notes on optimizing an O(n)+C algorithm where the C matters quite a bit

  I was doing a bit of retro computing over the weekend, writing 6809 code and running it on a Color Computer emulator (because the Color Computer was my first computer and the 6809 is a criminially underrated 8-bit CPU in my opinion). Part of the coding was enabling all 64K of RAM in the machine. Normally, the Color Computer only sees the lower 32K of RAM, with the upper 32K being ROM (the BASIC interpreter). To enable all 64K of RAM, all that's needed is to stuff any value into memory location $FFDF, which can be done with “POKE &HFFDF,0”. The problem with that is once the ROM goes away, so does BASIC, and the CPU starts executing Lord knows what since the RAM isn't initialized. So the actual procedure is to copy the ROM contents into RAM, which is simple enough: [...]

• Managing Large R Codebases webinar (summary and slides)

  In October last year, I was part of a webinar to talk about “Managing Large Codebases in R” with Alex Bertram of ActivityInfo. It is a bit late to write a blog post about this, I know, but I realized I never created one to spread the word around a lot more even though I did refer to it on social media… so here you go: [...]

• Hofstadter: An esoteric programming language with concurrency, regex, and web requests

  Esoteric programming languages were a big part of learning to code for me.

  These are creative, often minimalist programming languages that push the boundaries of what a programming language even is. Could you design a language that only has 5 commands? Or is only made up of whitespace? Or where every program must be a valid image file too? It is a puzzle both to design the language and to use the language.

• Note to Self: Git Aliases

  These are the aliases you should always have: [...]

• How to generate a Base32 TOTP secret string on a Mac

  I needed a way to generate a TOTP secret using a fairly locked-down Mac. No Brew. No NPM. No Python. No Prolog, COBOL, or FORTRAN. No Internet connection. Just whatever software is native to MacOS.

  As I've mentioned before, the TOTP specification is a stagnant wasteland. But it does have this to say about the secret: [...]