Patching with BitBake
BitBake is a build
environment that is commonly used to build embedded linux systems that consist
of the Linux kernel and a set of user-space programs that run on that Linux
kernel. It is co-maintained by the Yocto Project and the OpenEmbedded project. The development environment based on BitBake is
causually refered to as Yocto. BitBake makes use of configurations files that
can contain scripts, which are interpreted by some Python scripts. The syntax
is somewhat crypic and also has changed in the various versions, which becomes
clear if you find some example scripts from a few years ago. It took me some
time to figure out how to patch the Linux kernel with the help of a BitBake
script. Creating the patch file with quilt program was not the hard part, but figuring out how to apply it to
the right packages. It turned out that the name of the .bbapend file
should match the name of the package, where the version number can be replaced
with a '%'.
Book
At 16:48, I bought the book mages et réalités d'une jeunesse
à Bruxelles : foto kanal 2010-2012 = Images and realities of youngster
in Brussels = Beelden en realiteiten van jongeren in Brussel made by Kurt Deruyter and Platform
Kanal, written in French, English, and Dutch published by Agence de
développement territorial (Bruxelles) in 2012,
ISBN:9782960106947, from Het Goed for
€ 4.99. I bought this book, because inside the cover it has a map refering to pages in the book.
The Parametric Nature of Life Systems
I finished reading the graduation thesis
The Parametric Nature of Life Systems by Falera van Balen, which I started reading on July 11 after I received it
on July 8. Although this is a thesis for a Bachelor
Design BA degree, the quality of this book, in my opinion, exceeds what one
would expect for such a degree both with respect to depth, breath, and
scientific (technical) content. Although I am already familiar with many of the
topics covered in this book, I very much enjoyed reading the book.
Seed pods in magnolia
This afternoon, Conny spend some time pruning
some plants and this evenig we looked around and Conny noted a seed pod in
our magnolia. When we looked further, we discovered
some more. Conny found two seeds on the ground below the magnolia. The little
plant that I reported about before has
withered and we fear that it has died. We will train again with the seeds from
the pods that we try to harvest the coming days.
Yellow beans
Tonight, we ate yellow been, also called butter beans here in the Netherlands,
which is related to green
beans and not to the lima beans. This morning we received these in the harvest distribution
of Herenboeren Usseler Es. Last Thursday, I
picked up 30 kg of potatoes. Herenboeren also had a better-than-expected potato
harvest, but there was not enough space to store them all. I also received this
morning (which depends on the number of mouths you buy and personal choices):
- Two eggplants
- Two tomatoes
- Yellow onions (1 kg, I estimate)
- Two large leeks
- Four small heads of broccoli
- Two parsnips
I also picked (cut) about 35 French beans and about 20 snow peas. Among the
herbs, I picked two sprigs of basil and about eight sprigs of spent coriander,
the seeds of which I harvested at home.
Reworked table
For the talk I plan to give next Saturday
at Hackfest 2025, I reworked a table about the
relationship between the number of solution of a puzzle and the difficulty of
the puzzle. First of all, I have adjusted the numbers from absolute numbers
to relative numbers, such that 100 indicates the value one would expect.
Secondly, I have adjusted the size of columns and rows to the total number of
puzzles in said column and row. (It was not possible to divide the puzzles
evenly over the columns.) Thirdly, I coloured the background with a grey scale
where the darkness matches the height of the number. This does show that there
is an inverse relation between the number of solutions (on the vertical axe)
and the difficulty (on the horizontal axe), but that it is not very strong.
Hackfest 2025
I went to Hackfest 2025 in Enschede. It was
held at a different location then last year.
This year it was in the Performance Factory close to the Twentsche foodhall. I walked around a lot and talked with visitors and
people at the other stands. I had brought my fractal puzzles with me and
several people played with them. I also explained people a bit about the
products of KITT Engineering that were at
display. At 14:30, I attended the talk The story and maths behind the
Spherical lamps by R3GB, similar to the one she gave at WHY2025. At 16:30, I gave the talk How to make your own fractal jigsaw puzzles. I had dinner at the foodhall
and talked with some more people. In the evening, I attended the ByteJam /
live coding.
Open Monument Weekend
This weekend it is Open Mounument Weekend (which is part of European Heritage Days) and today I visited two location in Enschede, both
related to art. The first was Robson, where I at Galerie Dédé
Grützmacher where works by Karin Wijland were on display,s. Next I saw
the exhibition GRAFIEK25 with works by
Jolanda van
Harten and Rudi
Bastiaans. The second location was a former school, that is now Minkmaat Ateliers where a number of artist have there studio. I liked the
paintings by Manon
Leeflang and photographs by Loeske
Bult. I also saw the kinetic devices made by Peter Geerts that I
remembered having seen at the University of Twente when I studied and worked
there from 1981 till 1990. He was also involved in (some of) the TARt festivals. I was quite happy about this, because for a long time, I
did not know who made these art works that I remember to have enjoyed very
much when they were on display. I also remembered devices that made music.
After this, I went to a meet-up for volunteers for the GOGBOT festival that take place from next Thursday evening till Sunday
evening. I have enlisted myself as attendant and I will have a shift everyday.
We were given a small volunteer handbook with all the necessary information.
Nine chestnuts
Conny and I went for a walk in the afternoon. On
the Helmerstraat near the crossing with the Borgweg, I found a chestnut sill inside it outer shell. I could easily open it. It had a
rather large chestnut inside and a very small one that fell on the ground. We
collected some more chestnuts. One more from it outer shell.
Null character inside null-terminated string
The standard library of the C programming language implements Null-terminated strings, which means that the characters of the string are
placed in contiguous memory locations and terminated with the null-character,
which is usually represented with the integer value 0. In the C-programming
language it is possible to include null characters inside a string constant
using the sequence "\0". The Tiny C-compiler makes use of this to store all preserved keywords into a
single string constant (terminated with two null-characters), which is
processed by a special loop that create 'objects' representing these keywords
before any C input files are processed. This required me to make some
modification in the programs for the C compiler
I am writing as an replacement for the MES-compiler used in Live-bootstrap. There was a bug in the Stack C interpreter that took me a
lot of time and that was related to the incorrect handling of constant strings
with null-characters. This required the length of each constant string to be
stored because the length cannot be derived from the first null-character to
be encountered when traversing the characters in the string. The Tiny C
compiler could have used an array of strings to represent the list of
preserved keywords, but that would have removed an interesting test case for
constant strings with null-characters. The interpreter did help me solve some
other bugs as well.
GOGBOT: Day 1
This year I am volunteering again for the GOGBOT
festival. In the evening, I took the role of a guard/guide at Concordia
where there was a small exhibition with three art works and where short movies
related to this years theme where shown. I sat mostly outside at the door to
welcome people and inform them. The three art works, all related to
doomscrolling and/or
brainrot, are:
GOGBOT: Night 2
During the night, I was on watch for the 'oude markt' (Dutch for 'old market')
where the open air part of GOGBOT was held.
The following art works are on display:
In the afternoon, I went to TETEM art space to
see the exhibition related to GOGBOT. I
quickly walked into the room with the CAOS installation that I had seen
before twice. Next, I spend some time looking
at Promise Me Something Silver by Isaac van den Aker. I listened to Tuned Voices by Ieva
Jakusa, which I had seen before on July 4.
This time, I sat down and took the time to listen to it from the start to the
end.
At Rijksmuseum Twenthe, I watched the
exhibition Nowhere But Nature. There I saw the following works:
- Drone in Search for a Four-Leaf Clover, Sputniko!, 2023.
- Landscape with Watermill and Herding Farmers, Barend Cornelis Koekkoek, 1852.
- Establishing Eden, Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács, 2016.
- Night Soil - Fake Paradise
(Trailer),
melanie bonajo, 2014.
- Watershed
(Tough Love), Mark IJzerman, 2025.
- Internet
Explorer, Jurre Latour, 2023.
- Performing a Landscape, Jan Robert Leegte, 2020.
- Eye
of Silence, Charles Stankieveck, 2023.
- Nightfall
Hymn, Eady van Acker.
At Concordia, I saw
In the Grote Kerk, I saw:
In the evening, I stayed as a guide at the art work Whispers by Calin Segal. This
work has five AIs debating with each other on a subject or question given by
the public. They are all stereoptypical personalities with their own
hobbyhorses often responding to statements made by the previous AI instead of
the subject or question. It looks like the order of the AIs is selected at
random. At the end there is a sixth AI deciding which AI of the five gave the
best answer. After having heard many debates, it gets a little boring to hear
the same phrases and reaction patterns repeated, but still sometimes there are
very funny interactions. This installation shows both the weaknesses and
strengths of AIs. I did not hear many totally nonsense responses, but only
mistakes, like the lady stating the God created the Pokémons.
GOGBOT: Day 4
After my fifth volunteer shift (the fourth was yesterday evening) at
GOGBOT, which was at the Grote Kerk, I looked
at the following art works:
Next I watched the following two short films at Concordia:
Antifa
The Dutch House of Representatives followed suit the USA government by accepting
a motion to request the government to designate Antifa as a terrorist
organisation (the motion in Dutch). The government can deny to implement such requests,
for example, when it is not possible with the current laws. Laws are proposed
by the government and have to be voted by the House of Representatives and the
Senate to
become effective often from a specified date to allow the various government
bodies to implement them. It is rather clear that the motion cannot be
implemented and thus also not enforced with the current laws and regulations
with respect to terrorism. For this reason the acceptance of the motion is
rather symbolic. The motion was submitted by the political parties
Forum for
Democracy, Party for Freedom, and the Farmer-Citizen Movement, which are all considered radical-right parties.
These parties do not have a majority in the House of Representatives, meaning
they needed the support from other parties. The dominant right wing party in
the Netherlands, the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy, also voted for this motion,
which can be considered as another sign that they are leaning towards the
radical-right more and more. Although the text of the motion states that and
anti-fascist cells are active, threatening politicians, disrupting meetings,
intimidating students and journalists, and not shying away from using
violence, the National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism is warning more
for extreme right groups. Last weekend there was a large demonstration of
radical-right supporters and somewhere between 1200 to 1500 people started to
riot, shouting fascist, racist, Nazi, and anti-Semitic statements, and attacking
the police, journalist, and even the head office of the Democrats 66 party by throwing stones through the windows. Of course, all
political parties expressed their disgust of this, but when some left-wing
party leaders said that the riots where politically motivated, members of the
People's Party for Freedom and Democracy blamed them for causing division.
Bring Your Own Beamer
I went to TETEM art space to attend the
Bring Your Own Beamer (BYOB)
event. (BYOB was founded by Rafaël Rozendaal.) This time I did not have the opportunity to join
in the event like I did on February 2, 2018 due
to other obligations this afternoon. I bought a ticket for € 5.00 and
got five tokens that I was allowed to donate to the projects I liked most. The
makers of those projects would get one Euro for each token at the end of the
evening. I saw the following projects:
Into the city
I went into the city, but did not stay very long, because I had forgotten to
take my chain lock with me, and I did not like the idea of my bike only being
chained and only locked with one lock. At Concordia, I saw two exhibitions. I only had a casual look at the video presented at the
exhibition Landscape, Disrupted with the following videos:
The other exhibition was Over de Brug.with works by clients with an
intellectual disability of Aveleijn Atelier Meera.
This months interesting links
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