I’ll keep updating this article as I go, just to put stuff in all the same place.

Platforms

Cross-compiling for Linux

I’m pretty sure it’s possible to cross-compile for Linux on other OSes, seeing as everything is open-source, but I have never done it - and why would I want to? Linux is the friendliest to build on, so it’s better to use it as a build environment.

Good morning! It is still 2020, and the world is literally on fire, so I guess we could all use a distraction.

This article continues the tradition of me getting shamelessly nerd-sniped - once by Pascal about small strings, then again by a twitch viewer about Rust enum sizes.

This time, Ana was handing out free nerdsnipes, so I got in line, and mine was:

Has this ever happened to you?

You want to look at a JSON file in your terminal, so you pipe it into jq so you can look at it with colors and stuff.

…oh hey cool bear. No warm-up today huh.

Sure, fine, okay, I’ll read the darn man page for jq… okay it takes a “filter” and then some files. And the filter we want is.. . which, just like files, means “the current thing”:

Hey internet! So, someone broke into some of my accounts.

I’m taking entire responsibility for this - there’s the part where I fucked up, and if I didn’t fuck up, then none of this would’ve happened.

But there’s also the part where a series of design decisions from various vendors combined into the perfect storm for me.

And we’re going to talk about both! Separately! And calmly.

Part 1

The day 5 challenge actually looks fun!

Our input looks like this:

[D] [N] [C] [Z] [M] [P] 1 2 3 move 1 from 2 to 1 move 3 from 1 to 3 move 2 from 2 to 1 move 1 from 1 to 2

Which is a visual representation of stacks, and so, for once, we have some serious parsing to do, and that means I finally have a good reason to bust out the nom crate.

I’ve spent the past few weeks after rock 0.9.8’s release working on some of the neglected aspects of ooc, namely tooling support and performance.

My kingdom for a vim plug-in!

Well, technically, ooc.vim is a few years old, and it was even updated a few times to match new ooc features. But unfortunately, so far, it was limited to syntax highlighting.

Welcome back to the eighteenth and final part of “Making our own executable packer”.

In the last article, we had a lot of fun. We already had a “packer” executable, minipak, which joined together stage1 (a launcher), and a compressed version of whichever executable we wanted to pack.

What we added, was a whole bunch of abstractions to parse ELF headers using deku, which we used from stage1 to be able to launch the guest executable from memory, instead of writing it to a file and using execve on it.

I like how the day 14 puzzle sounds, because I think it’ll give me an opportunity to show off yet another way to have Rust embedded in a web page.

But first…

You bet your furry ass, parsing.

Parsing

The input looks something like this:

498,4 -> 498,6 -> 496,6 503,4 -> 502,4 -> 502,9 -> 494,9

And each line is essentially… a polyline: we’re supposed to draw lines between every point on the path, and that determines rocks on the map.

Hi everyone. Has it been two months since I last posted something? Yes it has!

That seems like a nice round duration, so let’s break the silence with a few announcements.

I have a new website

If everything goes well, you’re on it right now.

Does it feel okay? Take a minute to accustom yourself to your new surroundings. Identify potential sources of fresh water. Gather some supplies with which to fashion a makeshift shelter.

It’s a new day, it’s a new advent of code puzzle.

In that one, we have to apparently cosplay as an IBM mainframe and just.. crunch them numbers. This doesn’t look fun, and I can’t think of a clever twist to make it fun, so let’s try to make it short and sweet.

Parsing

Our input looks like this:

Monkey 0: Starting items: 79, 98 Operation new = old divisible by true throw to monkey false throw to monkey items new = old + divisible by true throw to monkey false throw to monkey etc