Reader David Gregory has achieved, via some clever cross-compilation magick, a working FFA port for DOS (mirror).

The “imagen” utility included with Hevea, a LaTeX to HTML translator, suffers from a subtle bug in combination with certain versions of of Ghostscript and ImageMagick, where the output of the former (a bitmap image) is pumped into the latter (for trimming / resizing) via a Unix pipe. For buffer-related reasons which ultimately remain a […]

A draft vpatch for full “cement” support in TRB. This vpatch These vpatches succeed the previous one. draft_asciilifeform_cement_support.kv.vpatch draft_asciilifeform_cement_support.kv.vpatch.asciilifeform.sig revised_draft_asciilifeform_cement_support.kv.vpatch revised_draft_asciilifeform_cement_support.kv.vpatch.asciilifeform.sig Note that the syntax for makecement has changed, and now requires the starting as well as ending block height: Usage: LC_ALL=”C” ./bin/bitcoind makecement 0 723000 cement_723000.txt The loading of cement must be explicitly enabled […]

A vpatch to produce “cement” for TRB : asciilifeform_makecement.kv.vpatch asciilifeform_makecement.kv.vpatch.asciilifeform.sig Usage: LC ALL=”C” ./bin/bitcoind makecement 723000 cement_723000.txt This took less than 16 seconds on my test machine, and produced: cement_723000.txt.gz (PGP Signature) i.e. : 0 000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f 1 00000000839a8e6886ab5951d76f411475428afc90947ee320161bbf18eb6048 2 000000006a625f06636b8bb6ac7b960a8d03705d1ace08b1a19da3fdcc99ddbd 3 0000000082b5015589a3fdf2d4baff403e6f0be035a5d9742c1cae6295464449 4 000000004ebadb55ee9096c9a2f8880e09da59c0d68b1c228da88e48844a1485 5 000000009b7262315dbf071787ad3656097b892abffd1f95a1a022f896f533fc 6 000000003031a0e73735690c5a1ff2a4be82553b2a12b776fbd3a215dc8f778d 7 0000000071966c2b1d065fd446b1e485b2c9d9594acd2007ccbd5441cfc89444 8 00000000408c48f847aa786c2268fc3e6ec2af68e8468a34a28c61b7f1de0dc6 9 000000008d9dc510f23c2657fc4f67bea30078cc05a90eb89e84cc475c080805 10 […]

Recently, I learned that at least one of my readers is dissatisfied with my current favourite “open source license”. For him and any others like him, I would like to propose a new one, and offer to “relicense” under it any of the VTronic items I have published on my site (strictly by explicit request, […]

There are innumerably many reasons for writing a computer program; but, to my knowledge, the publication of its source code is nearly always motivated by one of these three: I. Subordination: “Open Source.” Some of the earliest — and arguably, highest quality — computer programs with openly-published source code were developed inside conventionally-structured organizations, by […]

Recently, I received a tip that some Linux users saw rubbish in place of certain Unicode glyphs appearing in the FFA series (in particular, in Ch. 14.) If the following two rows of symbols do not appear recognizably-identical in your WWW browser: ← → ⇠ ⇢ ⌊ ⌋ … the following fix is likely to […]

Cryostat is a Fits-in-Head minimal (~700 LOC, including comments) static library for adding safe and reliable persistent storage to Ada data structures. It makes use of memory-mapped disk I/O via the MMap() system call, present in Linux (kernel 2.4 and newer) and all compatible operating systems. This mechanism permits efficient work with persistent data structures […]

This article is part of a series of hands-on tutorials introducing FFA, or the Finite Field Arithmetic library. FFA differs from the typical “Open Sores” abomination, in that — rather than trusting the author blindly with their lives — prospective users are expected to read and fully understand every single line. In exactly the same […]

I have recently built two new WWW mirrors containing certain publicly-available software: 1. Historic Gentoo Distfiles. I have been using Gentoo for nearly all Linux-related work since 2007. It was “the lesser of evils”: to my knowledge, no other Linux variant ever offered a comparable level of rodenticidal control, while at the same time providing […]