Ossa Sepia

'Who's that?'

Since the question in the title comes up with some regularity, I'll write out the answer here for everyone to see and for myself to have it at hand when next needed: It's most likely for your own sake that you'll need to run some sort of Linux, especially…

Promptly and on demand, that's how things are moving in Eulora2.

Regrinding is, at core, an attempt to give new expression to an older result so that it's not merely referenced 1 but actually integrated into the modern context and thus given a new life as an active part of new developments.

This article builds up on the existing, well-iterated specification of the communication protocol, aiming to detail the new developments and to provide a place for current and relevant discussion going forwards.

~Referencing, of course, the previous version of EuCore and even that very beginning of creating a useful structure to it all.~ As I've opened up a test environment for helpful people to give a go to the latest client, they are likely to benefit as well f…

More than a year after the sudden death that left so many things up in the air, it's time to make a straight cut to let all these things go and take stock otherwise of what is rather than what it might or could have been.

The prize for having a clean environment (not merely code, nor even limited to code) is refinement of precisely the most intellectually pleasing sort: getting to uncover and solve interesting as opposed to tedious problems.

The walls and spires in question are those that still stand of that old Roman settlement called Eboracum, known at the moment simply, if not necessarily better, as York.

Programming turns inside out the traditional fitting of the square peg in a round hole: in the computers' binary worldview, it's the randomly generated sphere struggling to fit in a deterministic square grid.

Like everything else in Eulora 1, the tips greeting newly connected players brought new life to an old form, generally turning common and stale anything on its head quite irreverently and with great effect.

Killing two birds with a stone here, I finally found the way to painlessly and easily produce blog articles out of code-writing, too, since writing of code is still writing after all and I really don't see any reason why those writing today's literature -…

Scratching that itch of a more useful visualization for a given set of patches, I've added to VaMP a view aimed at the more important people in a patch's life: its readers!

Given a directory 1 as input, VaMP will loudly complain and promptly exit if it finds any invalid files or directories in it, meaning specifically any of the following: empty files, duplicate files, non-ordinary files, files not ending with a newline, non…

On an unexpectedly sunny day at the very end of February, we jumped on a train and headed for Bath - a small town that shares with Reading the same straightforward approach to naming and relatively little else otherwise.

Jacob Welsh: Where do you think the Worse is Better approach falls between the two poles you describe?

Around 1950, in the very early age of computers, Alan Turing split the ungovernable digital world along the fitting line of a test, into two parts: on one side the established inhabitants, unquestionably human; on the other side, the newly arrived computer

It has meaning.

From far away, through clear air, I hear from deep within a tower's chest the rhythmic strikings of its heart-like bell and mellowed out by distant sounds it seems to me that stillness courses through my veins, not blood.

Upon encountering something unexpected, the child laughs heartily and then asks for a repeat.

"After reading deep in the bowels of code..."

I grew up during the final gasps of a scientifically created (and therefore better!)

This started as a comment below Hannah's article, The Tragic Flaw, but it kept expanding and adding so many links that leaving it there seemed more like an abuse of the comment box than anything else.

~This is my translation of a 2010 article on Trilema: Respectul.~ Man being a social animal, it follows that each person will live among a certain group of other people.

For all the apparent silence that surrounds in the online any text anchored in enough context to require some sustained effort to comprehend, the machine nevertheless keeps accurate logs of all the clamoring it dutifully kept out of the way.

~ Bitcoin and computing are these relentlessly innovating fields that continuously reinvent themselves so thoroughly and so quickly that they just about caught up with a description by I.

One of my roots that's been itching lately goes back to those old hills that roll one after another, ever higher, as far as the eye can see, until they get high enough to be called mountains - the Carpathians.

Under the wispy white clouds and clear blue skies of summer, the sea moves lazily back and forth even as it sharpens and grinds as patiently as ever the future sand out of its current stock of defeated shells and hard, honey-coloured pebbles.

Since there's nothing better than heavy, real-life use to test any new tool, my 2 weeks old VaMP got to handle already all the various small and large, light and heavy, straightforward and even utterly gnarly codebases that I care about currently.

For code that is important to you, for code worth reading and not merely executing, for code whose history and references are meaningful and whose authors you'll *want* to know, interact and work with, there is now VaMP.

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~This is my translation of a 2011 article on Trilema: Dezavantajele finantarii ~ As an entrepreneur, one of your best possible moves is to obtain external financing.

One more outrageous than the other and NSFS 1 to boot, here are revealed several shocking facts that most of the press seems to be still unaware of: 1.

This is how the unexpected end feels right now, like a suddenly severed link to source and to essence.

After mapping the old diff, the next step was to implement the new diff at file as well as directory level and then to implement the opposite operation too, namely the application of a patch.

The best part about the old diff implementation from Unix's diffutils package 1 is that it's visibly the result of a thinking process (as opposed to merely key-pressing) and otherwise relatively short by modern standards.

Claimer, disclaimer, motto and all else: I do NOT want to write an Ada compiler.

The best thing about crowds is that they are entirely and unfailingly predictable - in other words, just as easily avoided.

Since I am by far the most experienced user of V, I have therefore also first-hand experience with all the different ways in which *all* implementations of V so far (v.py, v.pl, v.sh & vtools) fail in practice as soon as applied to any production code base

The initial work only expanded in scope in the intervening years to the point where it ended up covering pretty much everything, from end to end encryption, rsa-based authentication and a new protocol for client-server communication, to flexible file tran…

~This seems to turn into a mini-series of sorts, see the previous example of passing dynamically allocated arrays from Ada to C~ In true ladylike fashion, Ada deals with the unmentionable -but useful, darn it- dirtiness of pointers by calling them somethi…

It tends to happen mainly at night, sometimes at dawn, when some incongruous and unexpected sound would be so ill-fitted to the immediate reality and so well-fitted instead to some past place and time that my whole perception would just flicker and sudden…

This past week I worked on a significant refinement of Eulora's data hierarchy, that core structure used to fully describe for the client the game's endless, complex and ever-changing world.

When everyone is so unique as to aim to invent out of thin air their own sort of normal urelated to any constraining reality around, the world looks, at best, like this: As soon as everyone stops being unique and tries for a change to be simply normal at…

Eulora's legacy client requires no less than 12 image files to create just one sector of the whole wide world and this piles on, of course, the megabytes transferred and stored under the generic label of "art assets".

While Eulora's communication protocol can handle easily the transfer of any data files that the client might need, the size of such files still matters, mainly from a user perspective 1 - large files take time to transfer and nobody wants to have to wait…

The idea behind the Diamond Square method (DS) is deceptively simple: take a set of pseudo-random values and keep mixing (averaging) those on symmetrical positions, storing the result of the mixing at the symmetry centre, while decreasing and rotating the…

In a rather prissy manner and for all its significant advantages otherwise, Ada has this very annoying habit of glossing over and leaving *silently* to others - most usually and for historical reasons to C - essential bits and parts that are needed but do…

The GNAT in question is any version of a bunch really but since all of them are inflated to a monstruous 360M size even when archived, there is perhaps no surprise that most of that code is better left unused if one can't directly discard it.

~ This is the very loose English version of an article of mine written in 2011. ~ I don't give money to beggars and I never did, quite deliberately.