Fixpoint

Now that I'm finally off the fence about applying (and yes, that's a relief), my work remains cut out for me in communicating who I am, which means, in large part, what I've done with myself. Having established what I stupidly chose not to do,⁽ⁱ⁾ it's time to have a look at the other side of this coin. I'd better plan it, or it won't happen.

Exact publication sequence and schedule remain to be determined: not that I think this is unimportant, but further work is required in order to make promises I can keep here.

The technical

This is not intended to include every scribbling of code found on my shelves, nor items I haven't yet decided to release for public consumption.

The initial articles in this series will aim to present high-level summaries of the items as they exist currently, with draft sources attached lest I be hit by the proverbial falling piano. In time I certainly wish to move toward full source annotation and signed vpatches.

• MP-WP patches: some smallish cleanups, fixes and additions currently running on this blog. (For a sneak preview, see the live V manifest).
• MP-WP Q&A: lessons learned from my deployment efforts.
• keksum: the Keccak hash function implemented in C as a standalone Unix utility.
• Gales Linux: a cross-bootstrapped, do-it-yourself, fully-static, discriminatory Linux/musl/BusyBox distribution. Includes base configuration files and scripts, a documented build process, and a simple package system with small but practical ports collection.
  • Gales Linux patches: I produced a number of patches to both base components and ports; many are self-explanatory but some will warrant discussion.
  • gksh, the Gales Public Domain Korn Shell. After trying a number of "easier" options, I identified OpenBSD's pdksh fork as the most promising target for terraforming, read a portion of the code, ported it back to Linux, and made a series of cleanups and fixes they'd been neglecting.
  • musl libc research: a summary of mailing list activity from March - May 2016, then zooming out to a list of major changes in subsequent releases, 1.1.15 - 1.1.21.
• The Real Bitcoin patches: a getrawtransaction implementation, and a much-simplified rewrite of the Makefiles for building on Gales.
• TRB Q&A: data collected and lessons learned from my efforts in TRB building, configuration, sync, tuning and operation.
• Gales Scheme: an anti-Thompsonistic, almost-R⁵RS-plus-extensions Scheme system for Unix, striving for simplicity, soundness, minimal artificial restrictions, and strict error checking.
• Scheme library: R⁵RS is a famously lightweight language spec, which is partly why I like it but has the downside that various modern-day essentials need to be reinvented in order to get anything practical done.
  • pkg.scm, a basic package import/export mechanism.
  • critbit.scm, an implementation of djb's "crit-bit tree" data structure.
  • hashes.scm, an (IMHO) elegant albeit slow implementation of RIPEMD160, SHA1, SHA256, SHA512 and HMAC algorithms.
  • bit-ops.scm, the rather less elegant support code for bitwise operations in a specified width.
  • http.scm, an HTTP/1.0 client.
  • json.scm: JSON encoding, decoding and traversal.
• Scheme integration: in order to ensure correctness, memory safety and some degree of portability in the core interpreter (which is currently written in C but wants to grow up into self-generated assembly, or possibly Ada, or silicon), inter-process communication via piped subprocess or socket has been my strategy for foreign codebase interfacing.
  • rsqlite, an RPC server interface for SQLite.
  • tlsproxy, an OpenSSL-based TLS client bridge, authenticating the server by explicit RSA public key.
  • wsproxy, a WebSocket client bridge, implementing the protocol's requisite bit-fiddling in C to provide a simplified protocol for high-level language clients.
• Gales Bitcoin Wallet, an as-yet incomplete attempt at the old wallet air-gapping problem. Progress to date and remaining challenges will be addressed. I'm presently on the hook for getting this to some degree of usefulness by close of 2019.
• yrc, a VT100 IRC client in Python 2.
• StatMaps, a no-JS OpenStreetMap tile browser, partly as an exercise in server-side web programming in Scheme.

The not-strictly-technical⁽ⁱⁱ⁾

• How I spend my time these days.
• History. I'm not sure what I'll write here, but something to do with my value structure, where I came from and how I got to where I am would seem to be in order.

And that should about cover it for now!

1. As the song goes, "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." [^]
2. I was going to write "the personal", but it's not like the tech isn't a part of me too. [^]