Programming and Hardware Development
-
Tim Bray ☛ QRS: Matching “.” in UTF-8
Back on December 13th, I posted a challenge on Mastodon: In a simple UTF-8 byte-driven finite automaton, how many states does it take to match the regular-expression construct “.”, i.e. “any character”? Commenter Anthony Williams responded, getting it almost right I think, but I found his description a little hard to understand. In this piece I’m going to dig into what . actually means, and then how many states you need to match it.
The answer surprised me. Obviously this is of interest only to the faction of people who are interested in automaton wrangling, problematic characters, and the finer points of UTF-8. I expect close attention from all 17 of you!
-
Noah Meyerhans: Local Development VM Management
A coworker asked recently about how people use VMs locally for dev work, so I figured I’d take a few minutes to write up a bit about what I do. There are many use cases for local virtual machines in software development and testing. They’re self-contained, meaning you can make a mess of them without impacting your day-to-day computing environment. They can run different distributions, kernels, and even entirely different operating systems from the one you use regularly. Etc. They’re also cheaper than cloud services and provide finer grained control over the resources.
I figured I’d share a little bit about how I manage different virtual machines in case anybody finds this useful. This is what works for me, but it won’t necessarily work for you, or maybe you’ve already got something better. I’ve found it to be easy to work with, light weight, and is easy to evolve my needs change.
-
Hackaday ☛ The Bendix G-15 Runs 75,000 Lines Of Code
There’s a Blue Bendix in Texas, and thanks to [Usagi Electric] it’s the oldest operating computer in North America. The Bendix G-15, a vacuum tube computer originally released in 1956, is now booting, and running code from paper tape. [David, aka Usagi] received the G-15 about a year ago from The System Source museum. The goal was to get the computer running so museum patrons could interact with a real tube computer. We’ve been following along since the project began.
-
Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: anytime 0.3.11 on CRAN: Maintenance
A follow-up release 0.3.11 to the recent 0.3.10 release release of the anytime package arrived on CRAN two days ago. The package is fairly feature-complete, and code and functionality remain mature and stable, of course.
-
Daniel Lemire ☛ Simpler and faster parsing code with std::views::split
I asked ChatGPT for a solution in C++, and it gave me the following code: [...] It is pretty bad code. I do not think that any professional C++ programmer would ever write such bad code. But then, again, I could be surprised.
-
Ruben Schade ☛ Some of my ancient forks
I was cleaning out my Gith Ub account after their latest volley of spam, and I had some impressively outdated forks:
This branch is 5050 commits behind textmate/textmate:master.
This branch is 47232 commits behind Homebrew/legacy-homebrew:master.
This branch is 232760 commits behind Homebrew/homebrew-cask:master.
I’ve had pull requests accepted, but I guess I was also keeping these around for… some reason? It almost seemed a shame to get rid of them.
I’m continuing to move my stuff over to Codeberg. I believe in self-hosting what you can, but my repos are a form of remote backup for me.
-
Python
-
Net2 ☛ Password generation in Python
Everyone, for sure, must have heard or read about the number of characters that make a password secure. Experts recommend that the minimum required to create a secure password is twelve characters. Malicious programs rely on the hardware power of the PC to crack the codes.
-
-
Open Hardware/Modding
-
CNX Software ☛ STM32MP135 Pico-ITX SBC features 38x32mm EBYTE CPU module with 512MB RAM, 512MB NAND flash
EBYTE ECB10-135A5M5M-I is a pico-ITX single board computer (SBC) equipped with a small STM32MP135 Arm Cortex-A7 CPU module from the company equipped with 512MB DDR3L, 512MB NAND flash, a Gigabit Ethernet PHY, and power circuitry.
-
Hackaday ☛ Rudolph’s Sleigh On A North Pole PCB
Each Christmas, [Adam Anderson], [Daniel Quach], and [Johan Wheeler] (going by ‘the Janky Jingle Crew’)—set themselves the challenge of outdoing their previous creations. Last year’s CH32 Fireplace brought an animated LED fire to life with CH32V003 microcontrollers.
-
David L Farquhar ☛ Altair 8800 kits went on sale December 19, 1974
On December 19, 1974, MITS started selling kits for its computer, the Altair 8800. It was the first commercially successful personal computer, driven partially by its appearance on the cover of Popular Electronics magazine’s January 1975 issue. The kit cost $439, equivalent to $2810 in 2014 dollars.
-