Tag: Programming

If you usually develop your software without an IDE, it may come in handy to be able to run a custom command or two whenever a file or a group of files in the file system is modified. This post discusses entr, a small event notify test runner which might just be what you need to fill an inconvenient gap in your mouseless development environment.

Lately I’ve taken an interest in the Rust programming language. I read the epub version of the Rust book over summer and found it quite well-written and overall interesting. Recently, I got myself a hard copy that sits on my desktop for quick queries, as I’ve been re-implementing the Gaia Sky catalog generation in Rust. The reasons for this are varied, but basically they come down to hardware. We need to load a humongous amount of stars (~1.6 billion) into memory, our old server, which had 2 TB of RAM, is being replaced by a newer, faster, and smaller (memory-wise, ~700 GB) machine in which we won’t be able to generate with the current Java implementation. But this is a story for another post. Today I’m here to document the completely mouseless Rust development environment I’ve been putting together as a sort of side project, to aid in my re-implementation.

I found some time to update the Particle Physics Simulator android application (version 3.7.4) in order to fix some bugs and add a hardcoded menu button, since terminals do not have a dedicated physical button these days. Additionally, my merge request to the F-Droid data repository was accepted, so now the app is also available via the F-Droid store.

Today we are releasing a brand new version (2.2.0) of Gaia Sky with several major changes and new features. To sum up, github reports 1071 changed files, with 81672 additions and 31763 deletions. Gitlab displays a “Too many changes to show” banner, as their cap is at a 1000 files. This makes it by far the largest release ever, followed by version 1.5.0 in the summer of 2017.

Lately, I have been kicking the dust off my C++ skills, and decided to start by learning to use a library which I have been eyeing for a while, ncurses. ncurses is a C library which lets you create text-based UI programs for the terminal, in the same fashion as the gif above. Basically, you can use the terminal to implement text-based user interfaces. Since I seem to have an obsession with snake games, I figured I’d create a snake game for the terminal.

I’ve once again changed the design of the site to make it cleaner, more simple and above all, less bloated. I’ve removed a bunch of javascript code (for instance, MathJax is no longer loaded by the main template but by the actual pages that really need it). Also, I’ve simplified the color palette settling on a black on white scheme with green for links and titles.

The new design also looks better on mobile screens, as I took some care of adapting the templates for pocket devices. Finally, I changed the home page from the blog summary listing to an introduction and welcome page, and added a full blog listing page containing a list of all blog post titles sorted by date.