Previous Up Next

Diary, February 2026


Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
  1   2   3   4   5   6   7
  8   9  10  11  12  13  14
 15  16  17  18  19  20  21
 22  23  24  25  26  27  28

Thursday, February 5, 2026

GNU Mes replacement for x86

I am now at the point that I have a replacement for stage0 of live-bootstrap that does not depend on the GNU Mes compiler for the x86 target. On January 27, I had already shown that I had written a C-compiler that could compile the Tiny C Compiler version 0.9.26. In the past week, I got all other utilities that are needed to compile the Tiny C Compiler from the source files copying the structure that is used in live-bootstrap repository. In the future, I might make a clone of that repository with my alternative for stage0. With this, I have theoretically completed tasks 2, 3, and 4 of the project. I might still need some additional testing, fine-tuning, and documenting.

Friday, February 6, 2026

AI building a C compiler

Yesterday, Anthropic announced that they tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler in Rust and it in two weeks and burning the equivalent of 20.000 USD in tokens produced a working compiler. I still believed that AI would not be able to write complex program such as compilers, but appearingly, I am wrong. I scanned through the repository, primarily read the documentation, which I presume was also generated, and discovered that it covers more of C than what I have implemented in my C compiler for replacing the GNU Mes compiler used in live-bootstrap. I should be noted that they did use a very large set of unit tests to let the AI generate code for. This is a kind of ideal situation, because in practice it hardly ever happen that such sets of unit tests are available when a new piece of software is available. There is a method called test-driven development (TDD) where you first write unit tests for each part of functionality you want to implement. So far, I have not really worked with AI agents, not believing in there usefulness, but now I think I should maybe look into it more. It will definitely have an impact on software development in the coming years.

Monday, February 9, 2026

Polygons problems

A few days ago, I came across the article Any-Angle Flow Field Algorithm for Navigation on Reddit, which made me think about similar algorithms I worked on related to finding the shortest path between two points in a 2D plane that is limited by polygons on integer points. It made me also think about the Clipper2 - Polygon Clipping Offsetting & Triangulating library, which is used in many slicers for 3D printing. (The triangulation function is new to me, but it does not surprise me at all, because it is very close to the other functions.) Algorithms to combine polygons (to calculate the union, intersection or difference) have to calculate the point where two line segments cross. If the end points of the lines have integer coordinates this does not guarantee that the intersection also has integer values, because it involves a division and because a division only returns an integer when the numerator is a multiplicate of the denominator, which is often not the case. One solution is to 'round' the intersection to the closest point with integer values. This could change the area of the polygon. So, how to deal with this? One could define that two polygons are equivalent when they cover the same grid points (with integer values). With cover we mean, points that are either inside the polygon or on the polygon. In that case it is possible to construct a combination of two polygons, but it will probably increase the number of line segments that are needed. I fear that the algorithms to implement this is far from trivial to deal with all possible cases. It is easy to define which grid points should be included into a combination of two polygons, but if the number is large, it could be difficult to construct a small sets of line segments that enclose all those points. It is possible that a combination operation results in disconnected collections of points that require multiple polygons.

Wednesday, February 11, 2026

Undertow

In the evening, I went to the opening of the exhibition Undertow with work by Judith Schepers at artist collective B93. It was an interesting exhibition. Some of the works are:

I took a postcard with a reproduction of Labyrinth, which shows a labyrinth with a key at the center between the underground roots of two trees standing close to each ohter, and a small button with the name Cas Klaver.

Saturday, February 14, 2026

Loving Art

I went into the city and went to see the exhibition Loving Art at Creative Broedplaats Enschede. The official opening is this evening at 19:00, but they opened at 14:00. I liked the following works: (I overlooked the work by Rosanne de Groot.) I talked a bit with some of the artist presesnt.

Sunday, February 15, 2026

2 cm snow

Yesterday, it was already on the news that we would get lots of snow today. During the night the temperature at Twente Airport dropped to -8.2° Celsius, which is rather cold for this time of the year. Today, the day started with a clear blue sky and a lot of sunshine causing the temperature to go up to 4.2° Later in the afternoon, she sky became more and more clouded. Around 20:00 in the evening, the temperature dropped to around zero and it started to snow. Around 22:00, I measured about 2 cm of snow on a surface about the ground. The ground was also covered with snow, but maybe not that high.

Wednesday, February 18, 2026

Books

At 16:04, I bought the following two books from Rataplan: At 16:28, I bought the following two books from Het Goed written by Frida Vogels in Dutch and published by G.A. van Oorschot B.V. for € 3.25 together: I already had seen these two books some weeks ago, but was not sure if I should buy them, because I do not know whether I will ever find the time to read them. I have not been reading a lot recently. I also do not know what is the added value of reading books, except for relaxation or killing time. I still can not resist the tempation to buy books and extend my book collection.

Saturday, February 21, 2026

RSS feed

Someone asked if I did have RSS feed for my website. I extended my chkhtml.c program to generate an RSS file, the file: rss.xml, based on the information available on my home page. The descriptions with the items are generated from a comment starting with Descr: that are removed when the file is uploaded. All the items also need to have a GUID. First, I just generated random GUID's using the code found here. Then I decided to generate it fromt the link. I arrived at the following statement: 
	v = 12582917L * v + v % 12289 + ch;
The variable v is a 64-bit unsigned integer and for ch the next (cyclic) character of the link is used. The value of v is used for generating the next 'digit' of the GUID until all are generated. You could also view this as a hash function. I got the two prime numbers from good hash table primes.

Thursday, February 26, 2026

Crocuses

Below a picture of the crocuses in our front garden. They opened in the past days. Yesterday, there were record temperatures in the rest of the country. At Twente Airport the temperature went up to 16.7° Celcius, but that did not break the record from 2019 for this day. Today, the temperature went up to 17.4°, which does not break the record of 19.3° from 2019 for this day. It looks like spring has started with temperatures higher than normal.

Friday, February 27, 2026

Sickhouse Warming (Day 1)

In the afternoon, I went to the opening of Sickhouse at their new location. They have organized the Overkill Festivals. Last year, there was no Overkill festival, because they had to evacuate the old location and were still refurbishing the new location, which we opened with a small festival today and tomorrow. Because I went into the city, I first went to see the exhibition FIA (Fine Art Intelligence) at photo gallery Objektief. At Sickhouse, I attended the afternoon panel talks.

Feminist media, Feminist practice

The first panel talk, the panel members first gave an introduction. Christie Morgran talked about Softer, a movement for softer digital futures. It is based in both Copenhagen and London. They also plan on having an event in Amsterdam, possibly with Valerie Fuchs. They had an online event with Mindy Sue along side the Soft Robot event that was held last week. Next Vanity Roxane talked about The Fem Dem that she started to empowering woman. She mentioned Open Source Radio, where they curate music, and Nieuwe Electronische Waar, as some of the things she was/is involved with. As the last panel member, Juliette Lizotte introduced herself. She is involved with Hackers & Designers in Amsterdam. She talked about two projects: Sisters of the Wind and Harri Kanta, which was shown on Overkill 2024. During the panel discussion, Christie remarked that she noted that technical tutorials, such as for example. for 3D modeling, are ofthe hyper masculine.

ALT-Tech for Alternative Futures

Roos Groothuizen calls herself a media artist who cares about human rights. She talked about a DIY alternative for digital doorbells that upload footage to servers and are used for surveillance. See instructions in English for building one. Pablo San Gregorio is a game designer, who has one of his creations in the exhibition, and an aspiring artefact artision. He wants to know how things do work and how they are made. Sunjoo Lee talked about her Electric Garden project that involves microbial fuel cells and one of the projects she did at Creative Coding Utrecht. Rein van de Woerd talked about permacomputing and about self hosted websites.

Finding, Building, Claiming our Space

In this panel Tessa Wiegenrinck (photographer), Alicia Breton Ferrer, (from Roodkapje Rotterdam), Marie Janin (from Sickhouse), and Jasper Schütz and Reinier (both from Studio Complex Enschede were asked questions about their art spaces.

Exhibition

In the exhibition at Sickhouse the following artworks, installations, and/or games were present:

I also saw the book Deep Simulator Ag in the 'library'.

Drift performance

Around 20:00, I watched the performance of Maggie Khorrami with her installation Drift, a sound and light interactive installation. During the performance she controlled the music with “RAGΞN", a wearable instrument — a body extension built with Conductive Rubber Cord Stretch Sensors that translates movement into sound. Interesting.

Saturday, February 28, 2026

Sickhouse Warming (Day 2)

Today, I attended the second day of Sickhouse Warming. I primarily went there to watch movies and documentaries. I saw: I left the premises twice in between the screenings: One time to visit two bookshops in the city center and one time to go home for dinner.

This months interesting links

Home | January 2026 | March 2026