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Truly headless draw.io exports

Dec 31, 2021

16 min #svg · #electron · #chromium · #ftl-infra

I love diagrams. I love them so much!

In fact, I have fairly poor visualization skills, so making a diagram is extremely helpful to me: I’ll have some vague idea of how different things are connected, and then I’ll make a diagram, and suddenly there’s a tangible thing I can look at and talk about.

Of course the diagram only represents a fraction of what I had in mind in the first place, but that’s okay: the point is to be able to talk about some aspect of a concept, and so I have to make choices about what to include in the diagram. And maybe make several diagrams.

FFI-safe types in Rust, newtypes and MaybeUninit

Sep 30, 2019

12 min #networking · #icmp · #win32 · #rust · #ffi

It’s time to make sup, our own take on ping, use the Win32 APIs to send an ICMP echo. Earlier we discovered that Windows’s ping.exe used IcmpSendEcho2Ex. But for our purposes, the simpler IcmpSendEcho will do just fine.

As we mentioned earlier, it’s provided by IPHLPAPI.dll, and its C declaration is:



IPHLPAPI_DLL_LINKAGE DWORD IcmpSendEcho(
                   ,
                   ,
                   ,
                     ,
   ,
                   ,
                    ,
                    
);

The iterative nature of art

May 27, 2013

1 min #lifestyle · #perspective · #gamedev · #life

“Some people don’t understand the iterative nature of art, design and game design.”

“Instead, they try to reach the final version on the first try and get frustrated when it’s not as good as they thought.”

“Aim for the best you can, but know that you will have to iterate, work on it again. Know that it’ll get better on the next step!”

NeverJam: the game jam jam game

Jan 30, 2013

2 min #gamedev

Our January project was ambitious: a 2D puzzle game, a-la lemmings with a twist, with big and numerous levels. And of course, all using our homegrown tools, from the compiler to the level editor to the UI system and game framework.

However, January ended too soon, and, sleepless nights notwithstanding, I had to resolve to publish something completely different. It was a good occasion to get to know Twine.

Binding C APIs with variable-length structs and UTF-16

Nov 05, 2019

19 min #networking · #rust · #ffi · #text-encoding · #win32

Okay, I lied.

I’m deciding - right this instant - that using wmic is cheating too. Oh, it was fair game when we were learning about Windows, but we’re past that now.

We know there’s IPv4 routing tables, and we know network interfaces have indices (yes, they do change when you disable/enable one, so ill-timed configuration changes may make our program blow up).

Migrating from warp to axum

Nov 15, 2022

9 min #rust · #axum · #ftl-infra

Falling out of love with `warp`

Back when I wrote this codebase, warp was the best / only alternative for something relatively high-level on top of hyper.

I was never super fond of warp’s model — it’s a fine crate, just not for me.

The way routing works is essentially building a type that gets larger and larger. One route might look like:



     bye = warp
        warppath
        | |  name

Advent of Code 2022

Dec 02, 2022

3 hours 12 min #rust · #advent-of-code

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

Don't shell out!

Dec 31, 2021

1 hour 40 min #rust · #image-processing · #static-linking · #ftl-infra

In this series, I change a critical component of this website’s asset pipeline from “just calling a bunch of external tools” to statically linking with everything I need to process assets. It involves autoconf, CMake, Meson, CI, pkg-config, and some code crimes.

Reading files the hard way

Aug 31, 2019

1 hour 6 min #os · #rust

Everybody knows how to use files. You just open up File Explorer, the Finder, or a File Manager, and bam - it’s chock-full of files. There’s folders and files as far as the eye can see. It’s a genuine filapalooza. I have never once heard someone complain there were not enough files on their computer.

But what is a file, really? And what does reading a file entail, exactly?

Catching up with async Rust

Dec 25, 2024

20 min #rust · #async · #traits

In December 2023, a minor miracle happened: async fn in traits shipped.

As of Rust 1.39, we already had free-standing async functions:

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pub async fn read_hosts() -> eyre::Result<Vec<u8>> {
    // etc.
}

…and async functions in impl blocks:



impl HostReader {
    pub async fn read_hosts(&self) -> eyre::Result<Vec<u8>>

Falling out of love with warp

Falling out of love with `warp`