28 Aug 2022
It’s hard to overstate how important email is in our modern world. Even as hip new platforms like Slack &co. gain traction in the workplace, so much communication takes place in a crusty old medium that’s outlived every purported “email killer”. Where does it get its staying power from?
Email predates much of the Internet as we know it today. Its current incarnation first emerged in the early 80s, though it has roots in earlier forms of digital messaging from as far back as the 60s. “Email” is roughly three related protocols: SMTP, “Simple Mail Transfer Protocol”, which deals with the sending of mail; IMAP, or “Internet Message Access Protocol”, which allows mail clients to fetch mail; and POP3, or “Post Office Protocol”, an older mail fetching protocol largely superseded by IMAP.
...
11 Aug 2022
Something I learned today from a coworker: if you turn your monitor sideways, subpixel anti-aliasing gets completely broken. This isn’t as much of an issue on today’s high-dpi displays, but for anything lower than a 4k screen, the effect can be noticeable.
...
1 Aug 2022
This week I created a custom build of the Iosevka font. I’ve used Input Mono for a long time now, and was very happy with it. However, it was missing a few glyphs that I wanted to use. Moreover, I didn’t have a license for the Input font to use on e.g. my blog. Iosevka is stupendously customizable, so I thought I’d see if I could get something close to Input’s styles.
...
27 Jul 2022
This is an experimental type checker/inferer for a simple lambda calculus. All the source for this may be found on my Codeberg repository.
...
20 Jul 2022
Today I figured out how to add a tab-bar to Emacs. I didn’t like having it in the mode-line: it gets duplicated for every window and my mode-line space is precious. In contrast, the right side of the tab-bar was always blank.
17 Jul 2022
I’m not on many social media platforms these days. I like it like that. I mostly follow some academics and people who post interesting stuff. I post only occasionally, usually to show off my recent hiking exploits. I’ve come up with some rules for myself (all subject to change) about what I post.
A post must meet all the following criteria:
4 Jul 2022
μKanren (“micro-Kanren”) is a tiny, embeddable logic programming language. It’s easy to understand and implement in almost any language. It’s a great case study of an embedded language: unlike other common “embedded” languages like SQL or regex, which normally are represented as just plain-old strings, μKanren takes more advantage of the host language’s features.
I recommend reading the original paper: it’s short, well-written, and easy to understand.
I did a write-up which you can read on Codeberg. The README is my set of notes that I made while walking through the implementation of the paper, and the repository contains an implementation in Racket. I’ve included some fun use cases like a type checker/inference engine that takes up only 37 lines of code!
...
2 Jul 2022
Brief update on the blog: I had been running a custom fork of the Anatole theme; it diverged pretty heavily, and I found a nice way to customize the CSS. Behold! The new-and-improved blog.
Some of the new extensions to Anatole include the ability to set a static page as your profile; I’ll do this and include links to lists of publications and whatnot. This should make my blog a better place for my professional/academic life.
...
2 Mar 2022
I have a hard time keeping these terms straight:
- liveness vs. safety
- soundness vs. completeness
This is intended as a short guide for myself; maybe someone else will find it useful too! Note that this is all to the best of my knowledge and understanding at the present time; if there be faults, they be the faults of myself. I welcome correction and clarification if I am wrong.
Liveness vs. Safety
#
Liveness and safety deal with properties of a system. Contrast that with soundness and completion, which are adjectives about analyses.
...
18 Dec 2021
A collection of what worked well and what didn’t in classes that I took this semester. This is partially for me to record what things reduced friction for me as a student so that one day, should I become a professor, I’ll be able to run the lowest-friction class ever!
...