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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.

Tuesday, March 26, 2024

Typographic Matchmaking

I finished reading the book Typographic Matchmaking: Building cultural bridges with typeface design by Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFarès. I already started reading the book on September 14, 2023 but did not get far. After having read Taras Typeface: Graduation project I wanted to continue reading it but I could not locate the book. Some weeks ago, I found it again and started reading it afresh. I already bought it on February 26, 2016. The book is about the Typographic Matchmaking Pilot Project during which five Arab-Dutch design teams created Arabic companions for Latin fonts. The book starts with an introduction and history of Arabic type followed by a description how the five teams worked together on the project and their results. It also gives some information about the ten type designers involved in the project including some samples of their work. The book also includes a CD with the fonts. It was interesting to read, but even more so for someone who has a greater knowledge of the Arabic script and the various types and of the principles of type design, both of which I am lacking. A short introduction to Arabic type design would have helpfull. I found this interesting page: Writing Systems And Calligraphy Of The World.


Sunday, March 24, 2024

Memory layout

I wrote a small C program to find out something more about the memory layout of a program that is being executed on Linux. The program returns different addresses every time it is executed. I think this is because of the address space layout randomization that Linux has implemented. It looks like two memory ranges are used. One for the stack (that grows downwards) and another for the code, the global variables, the string constants, and the heap (that grows upwards). Before the 'main' function is called the stack is filled with the values of environment variables (as returned by the env command) in reverse order, the command line arguments, also in reverse order, the array with pointers to the environment values terminated with a null value, and an array with pointers to the command line arguments, also terminated with a null value. Assuming that the parameters of main are named argc and argv then argv[argc+1] points the value of the first environment variable. The code of the program I used is:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <malloc.h>

void func()
{
    int a;
    printf("%p &a\n", &a);
}

int global;
const char *hello = "hello";

int main(int argc, char *argv[], char *env[])
{
    int m;
    printf("%p &global\n", &global);
    printf("%p hello\n", hello);
    printf("%p world\n", "world");
    printf("%p func\n", func);
    printf("%p argv\n", argv);
    printf("%p &m\n", &m);
    for (int i = 0; i < argc; i++)
        printf("%p %s\n", argv[i], argv[i]);
    printf("%p env\n", env);
    for (; *env != 0; env++)
        printf("%p env %30.30s\n", *env, *env);
    func();
    for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
    {
        char *a = (char*)malloc(10*i);
        printf("%p alloc\n", a);
    }
    return 0;
}


Friday, March 22, 2024

Natural well

In the past months, some work has been done under the bicycle path along the road called Hendrik Ter Kuilestraat where water kept on welling up in the past years. I repored something about this on Wednesday, February 7, 2018. It is at location 2 as shown in the picture I described on Thursday, March 26, 2015. I noticed that the area is dry now. But now there is water welling up at the road called Lonnekerbrugstraat as shown in the picture below. This is close to area shown in a picture I mentioned on Tuesday, April 7, 2009 as 'the second spot'. It looks like it has moved to an old location.


Thursday, March 21, 2024

Working in the garden

In the afternoon, Conny and I were busy in the the garden. We first went to a local garden center to get some more flower seeds, flower bulbs, (small) fruit trees, fertilizer, a compost sieve, and a bottle of Mrs H.S.Ball's Chutney Hot. We removed some dried flowers. I sieved some compost and used it when planting the fruit trees. We also planted some of the flower bulbs.

Links


Wednesday, March 20, 2024

How to Change Your Mind

This morning, I finished reading the book How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan, which I started reading on November 24, last year. I bought it on September 7 while attending GOGBOT. The book is about psychedelics. It talks about the history, the therapeutic and the scientific research with respect to psychedelics. The author also described four trips he took with different types of psychedelics. I understand that psychedelics have a strong effect on reducing the activity of the default mode network. I understand that meditation techniques can also surpress the default mode network. It was an interesting read. Although magic mushrooms are forbidden in the Netherlands, magic truffles are (kind of) legal and there are many 'smart shops' where you can buy them.


Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Magnolia flowering

Earlier this afternoon, I smelled the flowers on our magnolia and did not smell anything. But when I came in to the garden around 15:16, I clearly smelled the magnolia. I also noticed that some of the flowers did open completely.

Hangul

I saw that 달이_눈부신_현진이의_생일 was trending. When you replace the underscores with spaces, Google Translate translates it into: 'Hyunjin's birthday where the moon shines brightly'. I understand that Hyunjin is one of the members of the South Korean boy band Stray Kids, who has his birthday on March 20. This made me read something about Hangul, which is a rather unique writing system, a so-called feature writing system of which there are just a few.


Saturday, March 16, 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.

Link


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. Last year, on April 16, 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

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