đź‘‹ Hi, I'm David
I'm a software engineer from New York City specializing in data engineering and distributed systems. I occasionally write about technical things I find interesting.
I made a 13h game 3 years ago
Every year during winter break I try to pick an ambitious-but-doable project, with the intent to write about it after. Sometimes I finish them, but rarely is break long enough to get to this point. I figure that late is better than never, before they fall out of my head!
Baby's first Rust with extra steps (XPC, launchd, and FFI)!
During an ongoing argument in a chatroom between some folks about how “zomg systemd is ruining everything”, I decided to look at some init system history. I learned a cool tidbit of information from a HN comment1: apparently systemd’s design was inspired by Apple’s launchd. Embarassingly, I knew little to nothing about launchd, even as a lifelong Mac user. I began to play with launchctl on my local machine. Turns out that launchd does some pretty cool things: the *.plist describing a job can do more than just specify its arguments. For example, the QueueDirectories key lets you spawn jobs when files are added to a directory (how useful!). I was oblivious to this having interacted with launchd the past years mostly via brew services. With the help of soma-zone’s LaunchControl and launchd.info companion site, I was able to fiddle and figure out what various plist keys did.
From SVG to SGI FTI icons
The latest release of sgug-rse brought us launchers for RSE apps in the standard icon catalog. This was relatively easy to set up by wrapping the update-desktop-database scripts to copy stuff into the catalog directory for IRIX. With a placeholder icon set, it looks like this:
Fixing etcd in your TKG cluster
Newer versions of ESXI (6.7U3+) can run VMware’s Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. I don’t run ESXI HA at home, so unfortunately I don’t get to take advantage of some shiny features, but it does some important stuff which is why it’s the K8S I run at home:
How to write a text editor for a 31 year old computer
The Apple IIgs came out on September 15, 1986. It featured a 2.8 MHz WDC 65816 CPU (the same one that powered the SNES and other similar computers of that era, a 16-bit CPU with 24-bit addressing), 256k or 1MB RAM (upgradable to 8 MB), and an Ensoniq 8-bit stereo synth (which was a welcome upgrade from the bit-speaker of the Apple II family). For reference, the original Apple II family was built around the 6502 CPU (8 bit, 16-bit addressing), and had at most 1 MB of RAM in the IIe and II+. However, it was not until 1988 that Apple had released an operating system for the new computer that was able to meaningfully leverage the newer hardware. GS/OS was written in native 16-bit code, and more importantly, was intended to be used via its new shiny GUI.
skemata, a JSON-LD DSL
Placing schema.org dichotomies in your page allows search engines to crawl and recognize data that you are presenting. For example, this credit card review on our site can now be understood by Google, so our search engine listings display as…
G4 MDD: Debian Sid
I’m installing Debian on my FW 800 MDD PowerMac G4, and I’m going to talk about it here so you too can convince yourself that your Friday night, is in fact, probably better.