20/11/2017

I've been changing and improving my website for a while now - I seem to be really enjoying it. The latest changes are an all-white color theme and the blog improvements which include navigation buttons for the pages. I'm really loving the system I have in place for generating the static pages, however the python script for it is messy and needs to be re-written. That's a project for another day.

You can keep up with my websites changes here.

14/11/2017

I've spent most of my life, from primary school all throughout high school as a quiet, shy kid. I spent the majority of the time at school alone and never since I was 10+ had interactions with "friends" outside of school. I didn't have friends, I don't think I have since I moved from Melbourne as a small child. There were people i'd call my friends, but they weren't at all. Recess break, lunch - i'd spend this time following those groups to not look like a complete outcast, but I didn't really care about them. In my later high schol years (year 10+) this began taking a toll on me - I wanted to have people to care about and talk to, but I didn't know how to approach anyone. This was a big part of why I finally broke and gave up on school at the end of year 11. I'm yet to tell anyone this - nobody really knew why I gave up. I gave excuses, and while they were factors in my decision, they certainly were not major ones. I remember my last day at high school vividly and the moment I snapped. It wasn't premeditated - I had no plans to do it, but I was sent over the edge. People will assume bullying was a factor, it wasn't and hasn't been since I can remember. People generally liked me, I don't know why, I assume my reserved and quiet nature played a big part. Although people only really approached me when they needed help with something computer related, I was always the go-to guy in classes, maybe I avoided bullying because I was useful.

From year 6 onwards I was always a mid-high grade student. I never caused trouble, I never did anything wrong. My work was always good and on time. I was never really faulted. Funny side story, during 9th grade I had an asignment to hand in, I did a terrible job, and I knew it. I didn't want to hand that in. It was a Photoshop based project, I had opened the .psd file in notepad and deleted a section of the file, resaved it and approached the teacher about my suddenly corrupt work. They had me get the IT guys to try and solve it (they were never going to solve it) and I was eventually let off from handing in the project.

One of my final projects to complete year 12 was handed in a week or so ago, and it was bad. The project itself was around the creation of a C++ application for CS:GO data tracking - the application was fine, I had actually already created it myself as a hobby project. The failing work was the written side that the school actually cares about. It was rushed, done in a fraction of the time I should have spent on it and was of terrible quality. Today I was told this in a passive agressive way over email by my teacher, and it felt really good. I've handed in something that was bad and they made sure I knew it. I call this a success. They require me to work on it further and want to meet with me about it, too bad for them i'm not in town for a few more weeks.

I have lost my passion for programming - it's gone and has been for months. Who knows what the road ahead looks like. What do I enjoy now?

I don't care about school, I don't care about achieving my SACE. I'm not going to finish in 2017.

4/11/2017

While not a hobby I outwardly put on display in real life, I often enjoy watching anime every now and then. I've started and will continue to add and mantain a list of series I consider worth checking out.

You can view the list here.

Everyone has their own taste in entertainment and mine may not be the same as yours, and that's ok.

25/10/2017

For a number of reasons I wont put into a blog, i've temporarily moved to Melbourne to stay with family. This has given me the opportunity I need to get my work done and move on with life.

10/10/2017

Over the last few days I have been exploring new applications to switch up my workflow as things have become stale and boring. The two changes I have made so far are with my window manager and terminal emulator.

Window manager: Formerly, and for a long time I used i3 as my window manager. Now I have made the switch to dwm. dwm in its default configuration is pretty great, however the last few days I have made some small changes and additions that really make it my own. Unlike i3, dwm uses a stacking layout. A stacking layout consists of two areas on your screen, a 'master' area and a 'stack'. A master area is a portion of the screen you are most often focussing on, for me, it is the left half of my screen. I generally keep one window in the master area. The stack is the right half of my screen and consists of the windows I want to see, yet don't need my full attention. This is often my IRC client and terminals.

Configuring dwm is done entirely inside a c header file and any changes need to be compiled, which means to apply them you need to restart X. This is at first annoying, however over time I have become use to it. It makes me double and triple check my changes, I like that. Terminal emulator: Previously, I was using lxterminal, now I have switched to st. The configuration workflow (like every other suckless tool) is the same as dwm. I don't have much to say for st yet as I have only just begun using it, however, so far my workflow is identical, all my shortcuts work (once added) and I am not having any difficulties.

Since originally writing this post I have adopted the use of two other suckless applications: surf and tabbed.

Surf is a minimalist web browser that comes with no bells and whistles. Like most other suckless applications modifications are made in the source files. This browser doesn't support tabs and is intended to be used one website at a time, however there is a way around this, sort of.

Tabbed is an application that allows multiple instances of an application to be controlled within one application, providing surf with tab like functionality.

Suckless applications are so far really high quality and everything I want.

30/9/2017

Following my departure of playing CS:GO and most of its communities I needed something new to fill my spare time, of which I have a lot of. For a while now I've been watching gameplay of osu, considering its target audience, it was only a natural transition.

I began playing opsu, an open source osu client written in Java. Opsu is a great alternative to the (currently) Windows only osu, however, I eventually wanted to experience the real deal.

Following a fantastic tutorial for installing osu on Linux via WINE by Francesco149 I was able to experince the real deal. Comparing opsu to osu is unfair, however differences are very apparent, the most obvious for me was input lag found in opsu. However, I didn't notice it until I tried osu.

After a few months of using a mouse I ended up purchasing a tablet, specifically the HUION H420. The tablet is incredibly cheap and works amazingly. It took a few weeks to get up to speed with speed and accuracy compared to what I could do with a mouse, and I am now vastly better than I ever was. I had real difficulty learning how to hold and use the pen however, mainly because I write with my left hand and control the mouse with my right. My right hand has never written before and didn't understand how to use a pen. I deemed learning how to control the pen in my right hand easier than using the other with a pen due to my left hand knowing how to repeatedly press button with speed and accuracy over years of gaming.

I still suck at the game however, but it's mighty fun.

Osu! profile

As a passing tip, put a little piece of velcro on both the side your monitor and the upper part of your pen, it's a great convenient place to store it when not in use.

3/9/2017

Yesterday upon restarting this server everything went to hell. OOM killer began killing processes regardless of the >1gb ram available and no in-bound or out-bound connections were working. I don't know at what point I screwed things up and the uptime on the system was >200 days. Instead of hunting down the problem, I decided reinstalling the operating system was the best choice.

I spent the entirety of yesterday setting up my email server, IRC, ZNC etc and only today am getting around to doing the small things.

This is the first time I've ever needed a backup, and thankfullt my prior preperations for a disaster scenario paid off.

Things lost
a few hours of email
a few hours of IRC logs
months of Slack logs

Argh, the Slack logs, this annoys me the most - seeing as it was a somewhat recent addition to my backup routine I hadn't put them in a directory that is included in my system backup (I don't let the backup script backup the backups, recursion to the Nth degree) and this is where I stored my MongoDB dumps. I feel like an idiot, but, in the scheme of things this is a very minor loss. I manged to get my entire email collection and IRC log restored, I am very glad about that.

This was an amazing learning experience and allowed me to test my backup system in a realistic scenario, and all things considered, it worked really well. Now to improve it.

I do have the raw /data/db MongoDB directory however, if I can learn how to restore it from these files, I will be a happy man.

Later edit: Well, i'm dumb, the mongo databases were never located in /data/db, so I considered them lost. Today I thought that maybe my default db location was different, and indeed it was. So now I have everything and have put my logging script back on hourly. I lost an entire month of logs, but oh well.

27/8/2017

My previous website relied heavily on php/databases to deliver content, it was slow and did not render correctly inside my terminal web browser.

For these reasons I created my own static website generator using Python. The script is configurable using a cfg file.

You can find the project on Github

Wanting something to do today I created a clone of Conway's Game of Life in C using ncurses. The project can be found on GitHub.

Surprisingly i've never looked at learning how to count in binary, so, the other night I did.

Binary is a base 2 counting system, meaning you have 2 numbers available, 0 and 1. Most humans use base 10 (give this some research, interesting stuff), the numbers 0 through to 9 and considering we've grown up with thsi technique, it's easy to us. I was surprised at how simple it is to count in binary utilising your own base 10 knowledge.

For this post we're going to be using 8 bits (which equates to one byte, better known as a single character like 't'). A bit is a single 0 or 1, so 8 bits equates to something like this '0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0' which is the number 44.

But, how do those seemingly random 0's and 1's equal 44? This is where things get fun.

each of those bits (8 either 0's or 1's) equates to a number, this number is doubled for every bit, for example, using 4 bits the value increases like '1, 2, 4, 8). However, in binary these numbers are REVERSED '8, 4, 2, 1', the most significant number on the left.

Let's set our our 8 bits in order to equate 44:
128 64 32 16 8 4 2 1
Now, let's place our 0's and 1's in their correct position:

128	64	32	16	8	4	2	1
0	0	1	0	1	1	0	0

Now, for each column with a 1, add them together:
32 + 8 + 4 = 44. This is the binary representation of 44.
With these 8 bits we can count from 0 to 255 (entire ASCII table), awesome.

So with this knowledge and a little practice you can begin to count using binary pretty easily. But, now you want to spell out words, well, you can do that too.

ASCII is a character encoding standard that is utilised in computers to convert decimals (previously binary) into characters us humans can understand. Using an ASCII table we can do this conversion ourself manually.

Lets utilise the lowercase english alphabet, as shown in the ASCII table the lower case 'a' is represented by the number 97 and the lowercase 'z' being 122, filling in the gaps we have the entire alphabet. Take note that the uppercase alphabet is represented from 65 to 90. Knowing this, writing out our name for example using binary is extremely easy, however quite time consuming. Let's do my name, 'daniel'.
01100100 = 100 = d
01100001 = 97 = a
01101110 = 110 = n
01101001 = 105 = i
01100101 = 101 = e
01101100 = 108 = l
Let's plug these numbers into an online binary to text converter such as this free website and input the string "01100100 01100001 01101110 01101001 01100101 01101100". Pretty simple in the end.

You can also utilise a neat trick designed to allow converting binary to text quickly. Take the last 5 bits of data ignoring the first 3, for example '01100' from the character 'l' above. Add the rows with 1's together, in this case 8 and 4 which equals 12. Now what is the 12th letter of the alphabet? That's right, 'l'. This trick works for both upper and lowercase characters, the difference being the first 3 bits of a lowercase character are 011, while for uppercase characters it is 010.

I created an 8-bit binary counter using Qt and C++ in order to practice my counting, it provides a real-time calculation of your number. You can find the source code here.