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Diary, November 2024



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Friday, November 1, 2024

63 years

I was born on Wednesday, November 1, 1961 at 9:45 in the morning (CET). That means that today, I will be 63 years according to the calendar and 23011 days old. But how old am I really? The tropical year, the time that it takes for the seasons to return, is said to be 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 45.19 seconds. Yesterday, around 15:56:26 in the afternoon, it was 63 tropical years since I was born. But the tropical year is shorter than the sidereal year, the time taken by the Earth to orbit the Sun once with respect to the fixed stars, namely 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes, and 9.76 seconds. That means that, today at 13:22:14 it will be 63 sidereal years after I was born. The average anomalistic year, the time taken for the Earth to complete one revolution with respect to its apsides, is 365 days, 6 hours, 13 minutes, and 52.6 seconds. That means that, today around 18:19:13 it will be 63 average anomalistic years since I was born.

Double declaration?

I have been using the C progamming language (and later C++) for more than 34 years, but today I wrote something, I cannot remember having written before and it looks like a 'double' declaration of a variable:
extern int counter;
int counter = 0;
I am big fan of encapsulation and I like clean include files that hide implementation details that are not necessary for the users of the functions given in the header file. The implementation for a certain header file depended on a global counter that I did not want to include in the header file itself, but it needed to be incremented somewhere else and initialized to zero. So, I wrote in that other location, the main file (containing the main function):
extern int counter = 0;
And this resulted in a compile error, because you are not allowed to initialize a variable that is declared extern. Next, I changed the line into:
int counter = 0;
Now, I got a linking error saying that the other external definition (in the C file implementing the header file that relied on the counter variable) was not defined anywhere. This is because although it is defined in the main file, it was not defined as extern and thus not visible on the outside and thus becoming invisible for the linker that combines all the separately compiled C programs into one executable. It dawned on me that if I would have placed the extern declaration in the header file, it would have worked because then during the compilation of both C programs it would have been defined as extern and in the main program I still would have been able to initialize it. Although it is not common to see a 'double' declaration in a C file, like the above, and even looks a bit confusing, it is actually somthing that is done all the time, because the C preprocessor put both declarations into the intermediate file that is compiled by the actual compiler.


Saturday, November 2, 2024

Colourful harvest

We got a rather colourful harvest from Herenboeren Usselere Es and I took a picture of a part of the harvest.

In this picture there are: a small puprple cauliflower, a romanesco broccoli, a fennel, two red cabbages, a green and a orange pumpkin, and a leaf of curly kale.


Tuesday, November 5, 2024

Book

At 18:40, I bought the book Prospects 2021: Mondriaan Fonds toont talent edited by Mirjam Beerman, written in Dutch, and published by Het Mondriaan Fonds in June 2021 from thrift store Het Goed for € 1.00. Before I there, I went to thrift store Rataplan. Although it seems they have more books there, I get the impression that they sell less books. These trift stores are for profit shops.


Thursday, November 7, 2024

Cubes from Sheet: 11 by 11

I have this feeling that there are solutions for all cubes from a sheet problems, where at least one piece can be placed into, exists where at most twelve squares are unused for cubes. In the past weeke, I have been searching for counter examples. The program that I used, took a long time to find a solution with less than thirtheen unused squares for a square of eleven by eleven squares. Yesterday, I modified my Exact Cover program to also support positions with multiple vectors. This is a generalization of the Exact Cover problem. The multiple positions are needed to restrict the number of unused squares to an exact number. When I tried this program on the elven by elven square with seven unused squares, it found some solutions within half an hour. The first solution it found was represented as (on a single line):

S0_1_2_13_14_15|S3_4_5_16_17_18|S6_7_8_19_20_21|e9|e10|E11_12_23_24_25_36|E22_33_34_35_46_47|W44_45_56_57_68_69|W55_66_67_78_79_90|E77_88_89_100_111_112|e99|e110|D31_32_40_41_42_52|e30|W43_53_54_63_64_74|W65_75_76_85_86_96|E87_97_98_108_118_119|e109|e120|A28_29_38_39_50_61|Z26_27_37_48_58_59|S51_62_72_73_83_94|S49_60_70_71_81_92|K80_91_101_102_103_113|A82_93_104_105_114_115|A84_95_106_107_116_117|

This evening, I checked this solution and made the following drawing of it:

    +--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+
    |        |        |        |##|##|
    +--+--+  +--+--+  +--+--+  +--+--+
    |     |        |        |        |
    +--+  +--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+
    |  |        |     |     |##|     |
    +  +--+--+  +  +--+  +--+--+  +--+
    |        |  |  |     |        |  |
    +--+--+  +--+  +--+  +--+  +--+  +
    |     |     |  |  |  |  |  |     |
    +--+  +--+--+  +  +  +  +--+  +--+
    |  |     |     |  |  |  |     |  |
    +  +--+  +--+--+  +--+  +  +--+  +
    |     |     |     |     |  |     |
    +--+  +--+--+  +--+  +--+--+  +--+
    |  |     |  |  |  |  |  |     |  |
    +  +--+  +  +  +  +  +  +  +--+  +
    |     |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |     |
    +--+  +--+  +--+  +--+  +--+  +--+
    |##|  |        |     |     |  |##|
    +--+  +--+  +--+  +--+  +--+  +--+
    |##|     |  |     |     |     |##|
    +--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+

I plan to refactor the code of my Exact Cover program such that it can be more easily be called from the program finding solutions for the Cubes from Sheet problems.


Saturday, November 9, 2024

Bonnefanten Museum

Conny and I visited the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht. We first went to see the exhibition Maintaining Its Spirit: Collection Marlies & Jo Eyck at Bonnefanten. I found the following works noteworthy to mention:

From the exhibition Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke: Maps of the New World I liked:

From the exhibition Małgorzata Mirga-Tas: This is not the end of the road, a solo exhibition with works by Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, I found the following works to be noteworthy:

From the exhbition Dream On, I found the following works noteworthy:

From the exhibition Collection Neutelings, I found the following painting noteworthy:

From the exhibition Truly Wicked: The Seven Deadly Sins visualised, I found the following works noteworthy (I was getting a bit tired and filled with images):

Furthermore, we walked through Studio Rossi with design of the museum building and walked around The Shooting at Watou by Folkert de Jong.

Maastricht

After we visited the museum, we walked through Maastricht taking some pictures. We brought a short visit to the bookshop Boekhandel Dominicanen, which I visited before on Sunday, July 21, 2019. It was already dark, but we took some pictures from the Sint Servaasbrug (a bridge over the Meuse river) before went to the Indonesian restaurant KapuláGa were we had the Kakanda rice table, which existsed of yellow yice, daging balado, rendang, smoor, ayam pedas, ayam opor, sate ayam, sambal goreng udang, tempe, poached egg, sayur lodeh, seasonal vegetables, gado gado, atjar, seroendeng, roedjak. We had some strawberry ice as an desert. We were very satisfied with the dinner.


Sunday, November 10, 2024

Wijlre

On the way Wijlre Conny and I stopped at the Netherlands American Cemetery and Memorial located in the village of Margraten and waled around the cemetery. We thought about the many soldiers that died during the liberation of Europe from the German occupation and how this relates to the current war in the east of Europe. We did like the design of the chapel with the window on the side.

Close to noon, we arrived at Kasteel Wijlre Estate for the exhibition Maintaining Its Spirit: Collection Marlies & Jo Eyck. I found the following works noteworthy:

We also saw the exhibition Growing Poetics by Thierry Oussou. We in particular liked the La Poessie in one of the rooms in the attic that he had filled with branches he found on the estate.

On the way home we stopt at the McDonalds in Drosten were we ordered two McPlant meals consisting of a plant based burger with french fries and a cola. This is at least the third time I visited this McDonalds. I visited it on Saturday, September 22, 2018 with Andy and on Friday, July 29, 2010 with Li-Xia.


Thursday, November 14, 2024

Exhibitions

After work, I went into the city where I visited the exhibitions at Concordia. I saw the following exhibitions:


Friday, November 15, 2024

Book

At 17:05:15, I bought the book HETHE BESTE VAN OF WIM T. SCHIPPERS written by Harry Ruhé in Dutch and English, and published by Centraal Museum in 1997, ISBN:9789073285446, from bookshop Broekhuis for € 45.00. This is a bilingual edition where the Dutch text is printed in red and the English text in green on top of each other. To read the text a transparent green and red sheet is provided in the front of the book that you have to put over the text. This book is the catalogue of an exhibition of the same name.


Saturday, November 16, 2024

Harvest

Below a picture of the harvest (except for the 2 kilogram potatoes) that we received this morning from Herenboeren Usseler Es. (What you receive depends on how many 'mouths' you are paying for and personsl choices you make.)

The picture shows:

In the evening, I made some stamppot with the lacinato kale, two small red unions, a yellow bell pepper and some sauerkraut bacon. Conny made a salad with the outer leaves of the two red chicories.


Sunday, November 17, 2024

Cooperative, polling operating system

I have been thinking about a tiny cooperative and polling real-time operating system that works with static, single instance tasks. ESP-IDF is based on FreeTROS, a real-time operating system for embedded devives. Although FreeTROS is called real-time, it has some dynamic behaviour due to dynamic memory allocation and interrupts. Nowadays, many peripherals are connected through serial communication busses, such as SPI, I2C, and I2S, where there are often multiple slave peripherals are connected on a bus. These peripherals often have complex operating modes that can be adjusted through control registers, and possibly also complex behaviour patterns. This has an impact on the real-time behaviour of microcontrollers that communicate with these peripherals. If you do not want to use interrupts, it means you have to use polling to see if an interaction with a peripheral has completed. If you develop an application that interacts with several peripherals, it is logical to have some kind of layering in more device oriented tasks, coordinating tasks, and more high-level tasks. If you do not use operating system like functions like queues, this results in tasks polling the completing of lower-level tasks. To avoid excessive polling, which takes a lot of resources, I have been thinking about a number of queue based approaches to avoid polling. Tasks often make use of finite-state machines, which are usually implemented with case-statements. If these are not compiled to branch tables they performance is lineair to the number of cases. To work around this, one could use functions for each of the states and cause the right function to be called for each state. This does match with the idea of tasks. I have started writing some code as an experiment: TinyCoPoOS.c. I also have been thinking about program generating the code for all the functions given a tasks declaration.

Planting fruit trees

In the afternoon, I helped a bit with the planting of fruit trees at Herenboeren Usseler Es. When I arrived the others just were taking a break, because some of them already started at nine in the morning. I mostly dug holes at the places where a tree had to be planted. Twice we had some rain. The first time with some hail and at 14:30, there was a rainbow. I am looking forwards how the trees are going to grow in the coming years.


Tuesday, November 19, 2024

Wet snow

This afternoon, for some hourse there was wet snow falling from the sky. While it was snowing, some of it stayed on the grass a bit Still would not count this as snow. During the period it snowed, the temperature dropped to almost zero degrees Celcius.


Wednesday, November 20, 2024

Snow

This afternoon, it snowed again and this time stayed on the grass and on cars. I estimate that at least 1cm of snow fell. The snow that stayed did not melt away in the evening, like it did yesterday.


Thursday, November 21, 2024

Sauerkraut

This evening, we had our first home made sauerkraut that Conny had made from savoy cabbage and white pointed cabbage, which we have received in the harvest of Herenboeren Usseler Es. It tasted nice. So, it was quite a succesful attempt to make home made sauerkraut.

The Overkill Festival: Opening night

In the evening, I went to the opening evening of The Overkill Festival. It was held again at a different location than last year. The main location is at The Performance Factory. There I saw the following works: Around ten, I walked to the Black Brick location, where I saw:


Friday, November 22, 2024

The Overkill Festival: Playfull Friday

There was some snow during the night. It did cover more than last Wednesday. In our garden the ground was not totally covered. The snow was already melting, causing waterdrops to fall from the trees. From what I saw on some roads, it looked like the snow did fully cover the grount. I arrived a little early at Het Vestzaktheater (Dutch for 'the vest pocket theater') for 'Playful Friday.' This year the theme is 'Radical Joy Resistance.'

At 10:16, as the opening of the day, lead by Zuraida Buter, who also acted as the curator, we stated to play with Play-Doh creating a sculpture named 'Joy' on the floor. It would stay there for the whole day.

At 10:30, Helen Kwok and Chad Toprak with a live connection from Melbourne showed things related to the theme: Sites of Resistance: A Walk Through Narm (Melbourne). It is 37°C there. They showed how people connected ribbons to the Evan Walker Bridge to show their solidariy with the people in Gaza. While walking through the city they showed places where protests and rallies were held and where playful activities were organized. They also showed pictures of these events and activities. Really an interesting way to give a talk from the other side of the world.

At 11:38, Jugar Jueguitos and Resistència VideoLúdica gave a workshop about Downpour game creation app. They are from Catalonia and Galicia, two surpressed cultures within Spain. With Downpour it is possible to create simple games without having to write code. That is why they have been using it for developing games.

After the lunch break, at 13:37, Nathalie Lawhead (Website, blog) gave the presentation A Tiny Talk About Tiny Tools. The started to talk about some old tools:

This gave her inspiration when creating The Electric Zine Maker. It has very strange tools and tools within tools. No tool is useless. She mentioned some other little tools: She likes these tools because you can export the result to a single HTML file that, for example, can be intergrated in Unreal Engine. She has used this in several of her games. Interesting resources for creating games are:

At about 14:10, due to some technical problems, Aran Koning gave the talk sok-Worlds, sokpop and other sok-stories. He is one of the four members of the sokpop collective and he created sok-worlds, a tool to create worlds with pictures and text. He showed us some sok-worlds, among some favourites: Crousant Moon, Dysphonia and Bart's Zoo. He then continued his talk by walking through 'boring world 10' by arni.

Next, Afra Willems gave the presentation Polished vs 'Primitive' - Resistance through multilingual visual styles. She told that she was surprised when she heard that the graphics of the game Thunderbird Strike by Elizabeth LaPensée was judged as unprofessional by game critics. She noted that these critics use words like sophisticated, polished, and high-end to describe the graphics of games. Is that what makes it professional. The mainstream style is technology oriented. She felt that this was an example of colonial ideas with respect to visual styles. She mentioned some quotes from the books Monolingualism of the Other or, The Prosthesis of Origin by Jacques Derrida and Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon about the surpressed and the language used by the oppressor. She mentioned three non-mainstream games that dealt in a different way:

(The above summary was based on notes I made during the presentation. I am to blame if I have mispresented her intentions.)

The next talk, (re-)Act through Playful Resistance in Digital Spaces was given by Jisoo Lim 임지수. The notes I took:

Around 16:15, Claire Kwong gave her presentation Prototyping with Touch and Intimacy. where she spoke about her games which encourage people to move and touch. She askes some people from the public to play her earlier games. She explained how she arrived at her game Between. She also asked the public for ideas for games that encourage people to touch each other.

The program ended with Pablo F. Quarta playing the game The Quiet Year with the audience.

The Overkill Festival: Second evening

In the evening, I went to the main exhibition room again. There I:played the following games: I looked at Casual Games for Protestors. Then I waited for the music performance AV set by Jim Zweerts. I sat on the ground, closed my eyes and got into a kind of meditative state during the performance. Below, a picture I took during the performance.


Sunday, November 23, 2024

The Overkill Festival: Day three

During the second half of the afternoon, I joined the Consensual Hacking workshop by Melanie Hoff, which due to number of participants became more of a presentation about consent. Only after the workshop, some people sat together to some 'real' consensual hacking, where, if I understand correcly, Melanie allowed others to log into a laptop through ssh. I had to go home for dinner.

In the evening, I went again to the main venue, where I sat at one of the tables and talked with some of the other participants, while in the background listening to the music program. At the end of the evening, I went to the Sick&Sexy short films program with films selected by Menelas Siafakas. It was in a small screening room with fifthy seats, which (almost) filled-up completely. The following short films were screened:

It was an interesting experience to watch these short films together with other participants from the festival.


Sunday, November 24, 2024

Into the city

At the start of the afternoon, I went to the main venue of The Overkill Festival. It was rather quiet and I sat on one of the tables and worked a bit on this website. I also listened a bit to the SickFem “Having fun with synthesizers” workshop. I walked through the city because I wanted to look for something in a shop. I did find it, but there was a long waiting line, and I decided to come back another time or order it from the webshop. It has been a long time ago that I walked through the city center on a Sunday, but I felt it was really busy. Maybe it was due to high temperature of today, which really exception when compared with the low temperatures that we had last week. Maybe it caused by Storm Bert that is causing trouble in Ireland and United Kingdom. At Twenthe Airport has gone up to 17.4° Celsius, which breaks the previous record of 13.9° on this date in 1951.

I went to Concordia where I first looked at some people playing with the Joystick. Next, I talked a bit with Kira Fröse before I listed to the artist talk of Marthe Zink and her. Some people say that art should speak for itself, but it is my experience that when artist talk about their work and how they create their works, it makes you look at the works with a different eye and it often increases your appreciation. I had not realized that combinations of the works by both artist had been placed in circle shaped spots when watched from the correct location and that the colour of the spots was related to the works, often a colour found in both works. I really enjoyed the artist talk which was organized as a talk between the two artists and the organizer.

On the way home, I saw some impressive clouds in the sky, and I took the picture shown below.


Wednesday, November 27, 2024

Laurie Langenbach

I finished reading the book Brieven, dagboeken en een geheime liefde by Laurie Langenbach, which I started reading on September 26, the day I bought it. The book is part of a large series of (auto)biographic books. The book contains a short biography, a collection of letters and diaries, and the novel Geheime Liefde (Dutch for Secret Love) by Laurie Langenbach. The novel was about her being secretly in love with the Dutch chess player Jan Timman. She did not mention his name in the novel, her debut novel, but he was quickly identified after the novel was published. The novel did not receive good reviews. There are good reasons that this was due to it strong autobiographic content written by a young woman talking openly about sexuality. I found it an interesting read and making me want to read more from her. She wrote a lot of articles for various underground and mainstream magazines. I have not found a list of everything she wrote.


This months interesting links


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