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I write, therefore I am

With this variation on a famous statement by the philosopher Descartes, I would like to express that the act of writing about what happens in my life is important to me.

Saturday, March , 2024

Harvest

Yesterday Conny and I walked past Herenboeren Usseler Es because an archaeological exploration was done there the day before yesterday. That was because there are plans to build a water basin/pond. Everything had now been closed again. This morning there was another issue of the harvest. What you got was determined by the number of mouths you purchased and the choice you made. I came home with (clockwise in the photo and starting at the bottom left):

For dinner we used the curly kail as a simple hotchpotch together with a salad that contains carrots and the wintercress. This week we also baked some rye bread, the pumpernickel like. It tasts like the Frisian rye bread you can buy in the store here.


Thursday, March 15, 2024

Flower half open

This afternoon, many flowers on out magnolia half opened. We had some sun in the morning, but in the afternoon it started raining. Not sure when they are going to open fully. It rather early, but not the first time that they started to blossem this early.


Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Links


Monday, March 11, 2024

Book

At 17:12:17, I bought the book The Imagination Chamber: Cosnic Rays from Lyra's Universe, part of the His Dark Materials series, written by Philip Pullman in English and published by Scholastic in 2022, ISBN:9780702315510, from bookshop Broekhuis for € 7.95.


Saturday, March 9, 2024

Being too senior

I have had job title of 'Senior Software Developer' for some time now. The predicate 'Senior' as opposed to 'Junor' is not very significant as it is my experience that almost all software developers developers are given the predicate 'Senior' after having ten years of experience. There is not a special exam that you have to take nor are there any official qualifications that you need to meet, except for having relevant work experience. I have seen that some developers, especially those you stay at a company for a long time, do not progress beyond a certain level. I have to admit there are areas in which I am also stuck in my development and might even become worse. It is simply a fact that your mental abilities do decline when you get older, which you can partly compensate by becoming wiser. There are still areas in which I am really struggling, such as deep rooted sense of insecurity. A think that some of the most important abilities of a senior software developer are: Because these are abilities where there is always room for improvement, it is not possible to be too senior in itself. But I do think that it is possible that you become too senior for a certain work environment if the organization fails to recognize your abilities and tries to impose working processes not matching your abilities. This can lead to frustration if you cannot deal with not being recognized for your abilities.

Links


Thursday, March 7, 2024

21.2°C

On February 11, I wrote that on Friday 9, the World (60°S-60°N) Daily Sea Surface Temperature reached a record high of 21.2°C. But now that is no longer the case in that graph. Now it shows that the temperature of 21.2°C is reached for March 3-6. Today, it is one year that the North Atlantic (0-60°N, 0-80°W) Daily Sea Surface Temperature has been higher than ever before on record for each day. Still a week and this will also be the World Daily Sea Surface Temperature. And it looks like this wll easily be met. It would not surprise me that it will still take four months before we do not have a new record every day.


Wednesday, March 6, 2024

Pruning

I spend some time pruning the tree in the back of our backgarden and sawed off a large branch and some smaller with dead wood. Conny helped with cleaning up all the branches. Judging from a picture from April 1, 2022, it must have been about two years ago that I pruned is substantially including sawing some large branches except for the two that went straight up, because they could not be reached from the ladder I was using. I remember that last year, I cut the top out of the largest of the two, which required me to 'climb' in the tree, and also cut one of these large branches. Today, I cut the other one. The previous time, I mentioned pruning this tree is on Saturday, February 21, 2015.

Link


Wednesday, March 5, 2024

Links


Sunday, March 3, 2024

Zonnebeek

In the afternoon, Conny and I walked to (and through) the Zonnebeek estate from home. We walked about 9.5 kilometer. The last time we walked there, it was on September 25, 2022, but that time we took the car to park it about halfway. On May 10, 2020, we also went there. It might have been the first time that I went there. Due to the abundant rain of the past month, the water levels in the forest were still quite high. At one place we had to cross over a tree trunk. I first held Conny's hand while she crossed. Next the handed me a big branch that I used to keep my balance. Below the picture looking back after we crossed the location.


Saturday, March 2, 2024

Wissinks Möl

This afternoon, during our walk, Conny and I visited Wissinks Möl, an post mill that was build by J.H. Wissink and functioned as a gristmill from 1802 till 1921 for farmers in the area. It fell into disrepair and when the ownere wanted take it down, it was moved to village Buurse with the plan to be part of an open air museum. But that did not work out. Then the plan came to restore it at its original location. That happened in 1981. We were given a private tour by one of the millers. It is quite a unique post will having three pairs of millstone. The miller demonstrated the brake and showed the extra wheel to lift up bag of wheat to the mill floor. It was an interesting tour. (A short video of the mill.)


Friday, March 1, 2024

Dune: Part Two

This afternoon, Conny and I went to see the film Dune: Part Two. I feel rather disappointed. I feel that in a sense, Denis Villeneuve, is like Paul in the book. It looks like that when Villeneuve smelled success, he could not withstand the pressure and instead staying true to the book made it into an action film of which we already have so many, one which is full of plot-holes we accept for these kind of films. I will not even start comparing the script to the book, like I did for Dune: Part One. I feel betrayed and feel that he squandered the legacy of Frank Herbert. Just some things that are the opposite of the book:

Maybe, I noticed all these changes because I reread the second half of Dune in the past month. Somehow it feels like how Brain Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson would have written the second half of Dune.

Some more reaction videos to Dune: Part One:


Thursday, February 29, 2024

Leap day

I went to the second edition of the Schrikkelfestival in and around Roombeek. The first edition was four years ago. I visited all locations. I found the following artist and works noteworth:


Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Rijksmuseum Twenthe

Conny and I visited the Rijksmuseum Twenthe to see two exhibitions. There was group of young children, probably from a school class, guided around that we tried to avoid causing us to go to the other exhibition while visiting the first. I found the following paintings from the exhibition The international landscape. Painting in the open air in the nineteenth century noteworthy:

I found the following works from the exibition Charcoal x 9 artists noteworthy:

Some other works we did see in the more permanent exhibtion:

At 12:12, we bought the book Houtskool written by Lisanne Sloots in Dutch and published by Stichting Uitgeverij Noord in 2019, ISBN:9789090324944, from the museum shop for € 27.00. We both liked the works by Lisanne Sloots the best. The book is more about charcoal than her drawings and, of course, because it has been published some years ago, does not contain her latest drawings that are on display.


Monday, February 19, 2024

Link


Sunday, February 18, 2024

Linux strace

The initial reason why I started to write a i386 emulator for live-bootstrap was to trace while files were read and written by the various steps. Last year, I developed a program for performing this analyses by processing the input files, which produces the page live-bootstrap that includes the source of the kaem_parser.cpp program. In the past days, I have made some progress on the Emulator and it now produces all executables, up to M2-Planet, which are the same as when executed through the kaem.x86 script. But the execution of M2-Mesoplanet and M2-Planet from the mescc-tools-extra.kaem result in errors. The opening of 'temporary' files with O_EXCL results errors. Maybe this is because the programs are not executed as individual processes. Even when I ignore the O_EXCL modifier, they still report errors. The current state of the Emulator can be found in the commit 544ab04c. I discovered that with the strace command it is possible to trace the system calls that are made by processes. I executed the following command in the state0-posix/src directory:
strace -f -o out.txt -e trace=open,openat,close,chmod,chdir,fork,execve ./kaem.x86
This gives detailed information about which files are read and written by the various execution steps of the kaem.x86 script. Maybe I should write a program to process the output and use it for the live-bootstrap page. I am afraid that finding out why the M2 executables are not working, is going to take some considerable effort. Now that I have found a much easier way, through the use of strace, to get the information I was initially looking for, putting energy in developing the Emulator further, seems a waste of time. Nevertheless, while developing the Emulator, I have learned a lot about the i386, the ELF, the Linux system calls, and how processes are created under Linux.


Saturday, February 17, 2024

In to the city

I first biked to TETEM art space where I saw Lingering Echoes by Sjoerd van Acker. It is a VR installation where you have to stand in the center of a viaualization of a hypercube. In the VR installation you have to track a line with your finger. The track is based on movements made by the previous person and the next person will have to track your movements. I found it rather boring. Next, I biked into the city and parked my bike in the underground bicycle parking De Graaff as I usually do. From there, I walked to Fotogalerie Objektief where I saw the exhibtion Vervormde dromen en herinneringen by Hubert van Mastrigt. Quite light hearted staged photographs, where he from an idea took photographs (a lot of himself) and made a composition of these using photoshop. From there I walked to the gallery Beeld & Aambeeld where I saw the exhibition Spring is coming with paintings by Maike Eilers. The paitings feel a bit like paint by numbers that are based on photographs where the contrast and saturation have been increased.


Friday, February 16, 2024

Links


Wednesday, February 14, 2024

Wolkenwereld

In the evening, I went to see the exhibition Wolkenwereld (Dutch for cloud world) at B93 with works by Rein Rodemeier and Philip de Vreugde. Philip de Vreugde had the following works on display: Rein Rodemeier had the following works on display: An interesting exhibition.


Monday, February 12, 2024

Found the bug!

This evening, I finally found the bug in the i386 Eumlator. I had switched the operands of some of the compare instructions. Most compare instructions are used to test on equality and in those cases switching the operands does not matter. But in one place in the code, a compare statement was used to take the maximum of two arguments, but instead it was calculating the minimum of a zero and some positive numbers, which always resulted in zero and causing all unions to have a size of zero. I figured this out with the help of Section 17.2.1 ModR/M and SIB Bytes of Intel 80386 Reference Programmer's Manual. I also discovered that the CMP_XXX_YYY macros defined in cc_X86.M1 of commit 18bd9d2e are not consitent. It looks like this has been fixed in the latest version of the file, which is now using the GNU Assmbler syntax. The fix is implemented in the commit b7a80666. Now the Emulator.cpp program stops at executing the M2-0 executable because it does contains a section header, unlike all previous ELF files that did not have any section headers. I did see that the objdump program can disassemble the ELF file. It looks like it does need the 'symbolic' information from the sections to disassemble an ELF file.


Sunday, February 11, 2024

21.2°C

Last Friday, the World (60°S-60°N) Daily Sea Surface Temperature reached a record high of 21.2°C about six weeks ahead of the yearly maxiumum. Since March 13, 2023, now almost a full year the daily sea surface temperature has been breaking records every day with an average of about 0.2°C. It looks like this anomaly is going to be the new normal. The same is true for the North Atlantic (0-60°N, 0-80°W) Daily Sea Surface Temperature. The Daily Surface Air Temparture, World is also breaking records, except for a short periods in December 2023 and the first half of January 2024.

Dune, Chapter 35

This morning, I finished reading Chapter 35 of Dune. I am rereading the last half of Dune as a preparation to going to watch Dune: Part Two around the end of this month. Chapter 35 is about the fight of Feyd-Rautha on the occassion of his birthday. From trailers we know that this is going to be in the film and that also Margot Fenring is included, but I wonder if there is also room for the complex back-story with the machinations of Thufir Hawat. In the past, I had the tendency to quickly read this chapter as I felt that it was distracting from the main story of Paul becoming the hero, but now that I am getting older, I begin to appreciate this chapter more and more, but it is a rather clever chapter with many layers.

Some reaction videos I watched in the past months:


Saturday, February 10, 2024

Harvest

It was lovely spring-like weather as I cycled to Herenboeren Usseler Es and I found myself completely relaxing, aware of the stress I experienced last week (mostly due to work). I saw that people were busy placing poles in the field. The lower part of the land was quite boggy and the path to the barn was quite muddy. (What you receive from the harvest or can take with you at the time of delivery depends on the number of mouths you pay for each week and your own choices.) I brought the following home (seen below in the photo, starting at the bottom left and going clockwise): There were snacks made with rye. I opted for the unread rye that is partly infected with ergot. When I cleaned some of the grain this evening, I did not find many grains affected with it.


Tuesday, February 6, 2024

Debugging the i386 Emulator

In the past month, I continued working on debugging the i386 Emulator. (The attempt to use revng did not help me further.) I have been developing the program M1_Emulator.cpp in an attempt to generate a C++ program from a M1 file. I also wrote the program sdiff.cpp to compare the program generated by Emulator.cpp and M1_Emulator.cpp (see commit 9fe05336). This helped me discover some bugs. I discovered that both program do not yet generate code for the 'call eax' instruction, which makes a function call to the function where the start address is found in the eax-register. This probably explains why the program generated by Emulator.cpp behaves differently than the execution of the emulator itself. Hopefully, I will be able to make some progress on debugging the emulator.


Monday, February 5, 2024

Collatz sequence

I got some question related to the Collatz sequence. It explained the rule and defined the endurance as the number of steps that are needed to arrive at 1. And then said: Consider all positive integers smaller than 10,000,000,000. Sort the 30 numbers with longest endurance. Because I felt that it was going to a very long time to perform the calculation, I implemented an algorithm in JavaScript such that the person asking the question could run it himself. I read that for 9,780,657,630 and 9,780,657,631 the endurance is 1132. Just click the button 'run' to start the algorithm. The program starts with 9,999,999,999. The output is updated ever time when 1,000,000 values have been calculated. The first line shows the lowest value for which the endurance has been calculated. The rest of the lines shows the number with the highest endurance with the endurance between round brackets. If all the numbers above 670,617,279 have been calculated and the lowest value is larger or equal to 949, the answer will be shown.


Friday, February 2, 2024

Rotterdam

Today, I went to Rotterdam. I first visited the De Slegte bookshop. After this I travelled by metro to Schiedam, where I visited the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam. There I first saw the exhibition: Yayoi Kusama. The Dutch Years 1965-1970 I found following works noteworthy: Furthermore, I found the following works in the museum noteworthy:

Next I went to the exhibition Raidiant Voids at Katoenhuis and organized by TECART. This exhibition was the primary reason for me to go to Rotterdam. I liked all the works on the exhibition.

I met some people from Enschede. The Undetermind showed the text 'IKEDA MODIFIED' (refering to Ikeda map) and the equations:

I walked past Rotterdam Photo '24 and went inside to have a look. I found the photographs by the following photographers noteworthy: Guido Castagnoli, Kai Weise, Evgennii Petrushanskii, Emilie Kothuis, Olena Denysyuk, Frédéric Rennes, Dan Hallman, Daura Campos, Amit Lennon, Agostinho José, Paula Rae Gibson, Michelle Blancke, Damian Noszkowicz, and Won Kim.

Finally, I went to Art Rotterdam. There I found the following artists at some gallery noteworthy:

From the Prospects of Mondriaan Fonds:


Tuesday, January 29, 2024

Link


Monday, January 29, 2024

Link


Friday, January 26, 2024

Link


Sunday, January 21, 2024

Links


Friday, January 19, 2024

Amsterdam

Today, I went to Amsterdam. Some things that I had hoped to attend, did not work out. But I was surprised with other things. I train, There was still some snow left over in most parts of the country. Even in Amsterdam, I encountered some slippery spots. In the train I spend some time reading the book How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. It gave me some things to think about. It surprises me a little that some people after a psychedelics trip come to the conclusion that consciousness precedes matter, while it so clear that the trip was triggered by a chemical compound working on the brain.

I first went to bookshop Het Martyrium, which used to have a great selection of cheeply priced books. But it looked like the shop was reduced to half of it size and there were no cheaply priced books anymore, From there I walksed to FOAM. Just over the bridge over De Keizersgracht, four people were studying lichens on the stone wall with small magnifying glasses. It might be that they are from the Dutch Bryological and Lichenological Society. At FOAM, I saw the following exhibitions, together with lists of photographs I liked:

Next, I went to De Slegte bookshop. At 14:13, I bought the book Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany written by Uwe Schütte in English and published by Penguin Books on Wednesday, August 17, 2022, ISBN:9781802060980, for € 8.95. I discovered that the McDonalds at Muntplein was temporary closed. I wanked toward Spui. Every Friday there is an openair bookmarket there. I saw some interesting books but they were a bit oot expensive for my liking. I visited the American Book Center and around three o'clock in the afternoon, I walked to Galerie Ron Mandos. I had understood from several websites that several galleries were having an opening afternoon, starting at 15:00, which was the primary reason for me to travel to Amsterdam. But the gallery was closed. I continued to andriesse & eyck to see the exhibition Woorden Weelde. There I heard that the opening was at five 0'clock and that I was too early. I had a quick look at the works in the exhibition and did not see any works by Peter Struycken. I did see three works by Carel Blotkamp. (Later, I realized that one of those might have been based on a work by Peter Struycken and that that might be the reason he was included in the exhibition. It might also be that I did not look carefull enough.) After a short chat with Zsa-Zsa Eyck and a proomise to return at five, I left again. I visited the bookshop Architectura & Natura. Many interesting books but all quite expensive. I went into a search for a McDonalds. I had a 'Chili Chicken' at the McDonalds at Nieuwedijk 70. From there, I walked to bookshop Scheltema Boekverkopers. I felt that the rasmj department was a little bit more organized. I was getting tired and decided not to return to gallery andriesse & eyck and instead I went to De Bijenkorf to look at the book section there, because I had received a gift card that I could spend there. I did not find anything interesting to buy. I walked over to Julia's where at 17:52, I ordered a medium Penne Pesto Pollo with the voucher that came with the day-trip train ticket that I had bought. (I usually use such a day-trip ticket when it is cheaper than the regular train tickets.) In the train, I continued reading in the book, but at one point (probably when I had to show my ticket), I skipped a lot of pages, which I discover only much later. I also started working on this at my Aspire Acer notebook.


Tuesday, January 16, 2024

Snow

Yesterday, there was some snow in the morning. It was not covering the ground. I guess there was at most 1 cm of snow on the table in the back garden. During the day, we had some snowing but it did not stay and most of the snow that fell earlier, melted away. In the evening there was some more snowing that partly stayed. This moring there was about 4 cm of snow on the table in the back garden. The snow was also on the plants and trees. Conny took some pictures. One is shown below. The snow did not completely cover the ground. There was a little snowing during the day. Most of the snow stayed. It is going to be cold this night.

Trying revng

This evening, I had a look at revng, which is a static binary translator that analyze an ELF binary and emit an equivalent LLVM IR. I was hoping it could help me in my (very slow) process of debugging the emulator I have been working on. I installed and executed it with the following commands:
git clone https://github.com/revng/orchestra
cd orchestra/
./.orchestra/ci/install-dependencies.sh
pip3 cache remove orchestra
pip3 install --user --force-reinstall \
    https://github.com/revng/revng-orchestra/archive/master.zip
orc components
orc clone revng
orchestra update
orc install revng
orc shell
(orchestra) revng translate ~/git/Emulator/x86/artifact/cc_x86
Which produced a message asking me to submit a bug report and include the crash backtrace. I submitted a bug report as issue #345. I hope I have done this correctly.

Then I got the idea that maybe I should execute all the steps in parallel with the emulator to see when it deviates. That might help me locate the bug.

(More)

Sunday, January 21, 2024

Link


Sunday, January 14, 2024

Taras Typeface: Graduation project

Yesterday and the day before, I read the graduation thesis Taras Typeface by Omaima Dajani (on Behance). I learned about the Taras typeface on Tuesday, July 4, 2023 when I visited the KABK Finals. I understand that the Master Type and Media is one of the few masters in Europe that focus on type design.

It was an interesting thesis to read. In the 'Conclusion and Reflection' section it says: "This journey has taught me that the more I know, the more I realize how much more there is to learn, and that every door that is opened leads to new doors." This also has been my experience with every subject that I encounter. Through reading this thesis, I learned a little bit more about Arabic typefaces and sensed something of its complexity, although I cannot read or write the Arabic script. Around 2015, I became aware of the special properties of the Arabic script when I had to implement right-to-left text with Uniscribe.

The Taras typeface is a modern Arabic typeface, designed specifically for editorial use. It combines classical aesthetics with contemporary elements, drawing inspiration from the intricate details of the Thuluth style. Thuluth is an Arabic script variety of Islamic calligraphy. The typeface comes with five weights and a light and a heavy abstract version. On page 100 of Section 04.3 it describes how Dajani tested the abstract versions and I thought it was a really clever way of doing it. Although she writes that the results of the experiment are limited and cannot be generalized, I still find that the six findings she reports, make it sound like it is quite solid.

On page 49 of Section 03.1 a Thuluth calligraphy sheet written by the calligrapher Yaser AlAshry is given. The text explains how the words are slightly slanted down (in the writing direction). If I understand the written text on page 54 correctly, it looks like the last (part of) letter of each word is written under the first letters of the next word. That is an interesting way to signal word endings, one that I did not know about yet. I always find it interesting to discover some new unique property of a language or script. This also made me realize that the font rendering engines (for OpenType, TrueType and such) are maybe too limited for script like the Arabic script. The function of a rendering enging is to take a text, convert it into glyphs, position those relative to each other and rasterize them. I wonder if there are already good rendering engines for Arabic calligraphy or if there are font engines that support some of the features found in calligraphy, such as the slanting found in the Thuluth style.

I presume that writing a thesis like this takes quite an effort especially if you want to incorporate samples of all the different versions of the font design and, in some places, annotate these to clarify what has been changed between these versions.

Some interesting links I found in the past days related to the subject of the thesis:


Saturday, January 13, 2024

Harvest

This morning I walked to Herenboeren Usseler Es. I had a pea soup that was being served in a paper cup. I also had one Vegter's Roll, a kind of krumkake, with whipped cream, a traditional new years treat. This time the harvest was not very big. (What you get depends on the number of mouths you are paying for.) I brought the following home: They can be seen in the picture below:

Link


Thursday, January 11, 2024

Introduction

Diaries
March 2024
February 2024
January 2024
Decmber 2023
November 2023
October 2023
2024
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2022
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My life as a hacker
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Pluim

Puzzles

Hamilton cycles
cutting sticks
Califlower fractal
more...


SARS-CoV-2

Tracking
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nextstrain.org/ncov



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