Most importantly, I deep fried cocktail weiners. The dog is ecstatic about this, because he eats more than I do usually when I make them.
Oh, yeah, so, apparently people exchange goods and services for money, and then use that money to pay their bills and you can’t indefinitely not work because people are made to work. So, I took a new contract to get momentum going on my personal projects. Can’t say where or for who, I’ll just say that it’s an exciting project.
In other news, if I even have readers, they’d notice I pulled down a bunch of posts, mostly related to my diatribes about market movement and acquisitions. My life is complicated.
I’m still burned out. But I’m being burned out in a smart way. I am still pretending I have any control over my life’s direction. It seems like I do, but, nothing about it would indicate that except for brief, convenient explosions of determination.
Big new updates in the pipeline for Examplar. I’m looking at a rename of the product once a new feature is worked out related to logging. Candidate name is “Rex”. Mostly because everyone thinks “Examplar” is a misspelling of “Exemplary”, which, it is not, but, I’m tired of explaining it, and rex is easier to type on a terminal, so, it’s more considerate to potential users. I am fully aware that its “sword in the stone” logo– which was supposed to be a play on words for “Excalibur” and “Examplar”– is not consistent with a Latin/Greek name — but fuck it, it’s my party and I can cry if I want to until I end up sharing that party with others, if it ever gets that far.
Rex is good though, it’s kind of a shortener for “rectifier” or “requirements” or “requisition”, all of which play well into the terminology for the system itself. Plus it sounds cool. I think it sounds cool, anyway.
The logging issue with Examplar is stupid and complicated. In C++, system() handles I/O redirection for STDIN/STDERR/STDOUT for executed processes, which is good, but, if you want per-task logging controlled by the calling process, that’s a problem. So, there is the exec() family of calls which all do similar things, but, I/O redirection gets complicated if you don’t want to break libcurses compatibility. Not important for early builds, but, if you want to use curses dialogs for user input during the build process, that is problematic. And in the case of Examplar’s primary use case, Foster, we do.
On the bright side, this appears to be the last feature needed for Examplar’s completion, allowing it to emerge as Rex 1.0.
Regarding Foster, I’m going to be playing with both a non-multilib x64 and arm variant using ulibc and busybox. I generally view busybox as a form of software pollution, but, there are all these kinks to work out with the gnu cross-tools and gcc toolchains that are getting in the way of laying down the foundation for this so that those problems can be solved, and this is a reduction in complexity that allows isolation of problems to be solved.
I’ve been in self isolation from the COVID-19 pandemic since October of 2019. I have no real thoughts on that. I’m enjoying it.