I’ve been working on so many projects in 2025, I thought it was important for me to make a recap, if only just to clear my head.

There are many, many, many things to go through and we don’t have a sponsor today, so I’m gonna start right away with facet!

facet

facet is a project that I started working on in March of this year — that’s right, it’s only been ten months, yet it feels like an eternity.

Let’s use the Advent of Code 2022, a series of programming challenges of increasing difficulty, to learn more about the Rust programming language.

Let’s set aside our sup project for a while.

Don’t get me wrong - it’s a perfectly fine project, and, were we simply rewriting “ping” for Windows in Rust, we could (almost) stop there.

We’re currently using the operating system’s facility to speak ICMP, which is great for a bunch of reasons: we can be sure that whatever flaws there are in the implementation, all “native” Windows programs suffer from it as well.

Putting thoughts in bits

I think about lots of things but when it comes down to writing them, drawing them, implementing them, it’s not that easy. Even with years of practice in each of these trades, it’s still an uphill battle.

Which is why I am not going to read that article after I wrote it and will go straight to publication.

Not assuming nobody cares

Another day, another problem.

This time the problem looks suspiciously like Conway’s Game of Life, or, I guess, any old Cellular automaton.

We have a map like so:

L.LL.LL.LL LLLLLLL.LL L.L.L..L.. LLLL.LL.LL L.LL.LL.LL L.LLLLL.LL ..L.L..... LLLLLLLLLL L.LLLLLL.L L.LLLLL.LL

And for each iteration:

• L symbols turn into # if there’s no # in any of the 8 adjacent cells

In Veronica Mars and password hashes, from my new Tech As Seen On TV series, we’ve explored “cracking passwords” using brute-force methods, and then using rainbow tables, which was much, much faster.

But how do rainbow tables actually work? Let’s start at the beginning.

What’s a password hash?

A very simple design for an authentication system is to store passwords in clear text, say, in a file named password.txt:

Earlier this week, an npm supply chain attack.

It’s turn for crates.io, the main public repository for Rust crates (packages).

The phishing e-mail looks like this:

And it leads to a GitHub login page that looks like this:

Several maintainers received it — the issue is being discussed on GitHub.

The crates.io team has acknowledged the attack and said they’d see if they can do something about it.

Executables have been fascinating to me ever since I discovered, as a kid, that they were just files. If you renamed a .exe to something else, you could open it in notepad! And if you renamed something else to a .exe, you’d get a neat error dialog.

Clearly, something was different about these files. Seen from notepad, they were mostly gibberish, but there had to be order in that chaos. 12-year-old me knew that, although he didn’t quite know how or where to dig to make sense of it all.

A little less than two months after the previous release, I’m happy to announce that the ooc compiler rock 0.9.8, codename columbia is now out.

The impatients can readily skip to the release notes, but for those who prefer a narrative, let me tell you why I’m excited about this release.

String interpolation

We’ve thrown around this idea a lot since the early versions of rock since we have a few rubyists in our ranks, but only recently Alexandros Naskos took matters into his own hands and just implemented the fuck out of it.

Despite their peaceful appearance, game developers actually lead thrilling lives! Here are three things I learned (or re-learned) about yesterday that I’d like to share with you, in the form of assumptions that revealed false.

VSync is relatively straightforward. Right?

As an obsessive-compulsive, bipolar, perfectionist game dev, getting your game to run smoothly on all kinds of operating systems, graphics cards, and drivers combination is something of a holy grail. Many look for it, but let’s be honest here, it never really turns out as expected.