More Legs
Tomorrow will be 7 weeks since I had the hip operation. It's been
one of those "I can't believe it's been 7 weeks, but shit a lot has
happened" periods.
They told me not to put more than 10kg weight on the operated leg
for 6 weeks - but after 3 weeks of bloody crutches I gave that idea
the flick. A couple of days I walked all the way into/out of the
city - about 10km round trip - entirely on crutches but it just
seemed absurd. About a week using a walking stick but then my hand
started going numb so I mostly just hobbled around after that.
After 5 weeks I got on the bicycle. At the 6 week mark I had a
review and the surgeon was very pleased with my progress but I was
miserable with the ongoing pain and news of lifelong movement
restrictions. I'm seeing a physio on Monday so hopefully I can get
a better idea of what they are, plus maybe some exercises and
guidance on "overdoing it". So far the directions have been vague
and pretty useless although the surgeon did say I could get on the
bike again (which I had already obviously).
Mostly i'm just frustrated as fuck at this point. The pain is
taking a long time to recede, it hurts to sit, it hurts to lie on my
back or operated side - and well even the non-operated one. This is
intefering with my sleep which was already shithouse. It hurts to
sit playing playstation or drinking beer, it hurts afterwards if i
ride too much, walk too much, stand too much. It's difficult and
painful to tie my shoelaces or cut my nails. OTC painkillers don't
really do much - hell even when I was in the hospital it took 20mg
of oxycodone to do anything and they thought I was a junkie or
something. As far as I know i'll never be able to sit cross-legged
on the floor ever again - maybe that seems trivial but what am I
suppose to do, carry a fucking chair everywhere I go? How do I do
my go-to hamstring stretch when my back gets too stiff?
So i've been walking a lot anyway - it seems to help with the pain
to some extent. At the 6 week mark I started back on situps and
pushups - at least I can do those. Riding a bit when the weather is
good.
But mostly i'm drinking way too much and with the lack of sleep
being moody and sulky and feeling lonely and depressed - so pretty
much like every other spring.
One of my main haunts closed down - arsehole landlord in dispute
with his daughter even though the business was keeping things in the
black. With 4 weeks notice for everyone it was pretty shit. I
managed to make it to the closing even on crutches but it's left
quite a hole in the community and a hole in my heart every time I
walk past.
And one of my nephews was recently in an absolutely horrific car
accident - ute rolled end on end and he was thrown 15 metres from
the vehicle. By all measures he should be dead but somehow he's
still physically alive but his brain ... well things are bad. His
eyes open but nobody's home, he can't breathe or eat without tubes.
I just hope his needless suffering isn't extended by his idiot
father and stempother (they're "preppers") who think he needs to be
kept alive at all costs and it turns into another Terri Schiavo
indicdent. That's if the pneumonia doesn't do him in soon.
THR coming up
For various reasons it's been a fairly involved few months but now
life is back to anhedonia, insufficient sleep, and excess alcohol.
But in 5 days that all changes again as i'm finally going under
the knife for a total hip replacement on my left leg.
I'm resigned to it but still anxious as fuck and well just
super-pissed off that I need to have it done all from a nothing
accident 3.5 years ago. It'll be a couple of months before I
can even think of getting on a bicycle again which is somewhat
limiting as that is my main mode of transport apart from walking.
By pretty much pure chance a niece wants to move to Adelaide so is
coming to stay with me for a bit - she can help with the basic day
to day stuff that I might not be able to do for a few weeks.
There aren't any real insights on how long it might take to
recover enough to get around, cook, and clean so I will just have
to see how it pans out for me.
I didn't drink for July (moral support for a friend at the time)
and lost a bit of weight and spent a bit more effort on getting as
fit and strong as possible before the operation so physically i'm
about as prepared as i'm likely to be.
Mentally and emotionally i'm a bit of a wreck but oh well, one day
at a time.
Life and Legs ...
So life has been bumbling along. I spent too much of our
piss-weak summer blowing money on booze, had a few fun times I
guess but i'm getting pretty over it. Summer was too cold and
windy for the most part so I only went for a few longish rides,
and I think only went for a dip at the beach a couple of times.
Despite all the booze and lack of cycling I did a lot of walking
and got fairly fit and trim. But my broken hip is causing a lot
of pain now, the joint has gone necrotic and walking irritates it.
I just keep pushing through the pain as I'm trying to ensure it's
as strong as possible by the time I have a total hip replacement -
I don't have an exact time but it should be within a few months.
I had to get an infected tooth ripped out in preparation last week
and that's still bothering me but I suppose it should heal up
soon. One expensive hole in my mouth after a root canal cracked
plus I got it taken out under anaesthetic.
Turned 50.
YaY.
Still not working.
I feel pretty burnt-out even after 2.5 years of non-work. But it
is becoming pretty boring having a whole day to fill day after
day. I spent a lot of time in the garden this year but there's
only so much time that can sink.
I'm a bit sick of going to the pub. Plus I gotta cut down the
grog before my hip op.
But it's my only regular social contact, so it's either that or
nothing. Fuck. I have too much anxiety to interact in online
communities very much, hell sometimes I can't even read SMS's from
friends.
So I've been somewhat depressed lately. A lot of that is no doubt
the impending hip operation and dealing with the infected tooth,
but really i'm so fucking lonely and see no way out of it. I
find it incredibly difficult getting close to people although i
yearn for it deeply. I get hit on by women at the pub
occasionally and at best just feel puzzled (or annoyed) and at
worst panic and freeze up.
I'm forever sleeping miserably and usally wake up abougt 4 hours
after going to sleep and then stay awake many hours before perhaps
nodding off here and there. The pain from my hip (and now tooth)
is partly to blame now. Nothing interests me at the moment, I do
a bit of hacking or play some games or lurk on reddit but it just
feels like i'm going through the motions burning up time until I
can have another shitty sleep and repeat it all again. I have the
odd enjoyable get together with mates (typically at pub) but small
things can set me off and get me down for days particularly if I
over-do it on the booze. Finding it harder to get into
conversations and often feel I don't belong.
I've been reading a lot, mostly fantasy and some sci-fi. It's an
escape, although sometimes even that upsets me.
Compilering
So a few months ago Xyhpoid contacted me about the work I did on
Dusk some time ago to see if I still had the source. Indeed I
did, but I hadn't touched it for 10 years, left it in a half-arsed
state, and can't remember much of where it was at or what I wanted
to do with it.
Still, at the moment i've got a lot of time on my hands and not
much to do with it so I started poking around again. Amongst some
minor phaffing about I decided to look at writing a compiler for
the dusk script language that compiles directly to the JVM.
It's been a somewhat interesting exercise, from parser for a
custom language to generator for class files. A probably goal is
to create a new dusk script - it will be something like a relaxed
java but with more security by limiting access to classes and
functions via white-lists.
Apart from something interesting to play another motiviator is the
dropping of nashorn from the OpenJDK. I did a quick survey of
extant JVM languages looking for something sutiable but despite a
proliferation in the earlier days of Java most have been
abandonded, and even those that haven't haven't updated to handle
the java modules system or the deprecation for removal of
SecurityManager. Another problem is that most give unfettered
access to the whole JDK in one way or another which isn't
acceptable for my use case.
Anyway some of the exploratory work is going on in
the compilerz
project. There is also some work going on in duskz but i haven't pushed
it stream yet.
JDK 20, foreign-abi
Finally updated the foreign-abi branch of nativez, zcl, and jjmpeg
to the OpenJDK 20 API for foreign native access. It's very much
untested and probably buggy but it compiles and a few things run
so it should be on the right track at least.
Most of the changes were pretty straightforward and some of the
API changes simplified a few things.
It was mostly a learning exercise to find out what has changed in
the API but I thought I may as well do them all at the same time.
I'm sort-of more interested in vulkanz but it's been so long since
I worked on it I've forgotten where I was at. So maybe i'm not
that much interested in it!
Cancelled FSF membership
So after 15 years of financial support I decided to end my Free
Software Foundation membership this year, I think it expired
officially yesterday.
There are a few reasons but none are any reflection on the FSF as
an organisation.
Primarily it's because i'm not working at the moment as mentioned
in previous posts. I'm not struggling financially or anything but
need to consider my budget. I more or less got the membership as
a birthday present to myself one year and i'm about to turn 50 in
a few days so it seems like a good time to consider the future a
bit more closely.
A lesser part is that it's an organisation based in the USA and
their political action is necessarily focused there - given i'm in
Australia it has a fairly weak impact locally.
I also feel (rightly or wrongly) that when I joined the focus of
the FSF was primarily on the GNU project - i.e. the software
required to achieve their political goals, and now the focus is
more on the political side of software freedom in general. I
acknowledge this is reflecting a change in the software and
political atmosphere over the last few decades; and further
something that needed to happen. However I think my time and
resources would be better spent elsewhere.
I guess I also think $US 3500+ was a pretty significant amount of
money and I think i've more than done my part as a lowly pleb of a
private citizen given there are multi-billion dollar corporations
who owe their existance to what the GNU project has wrought.
Formatting menus
Update 1/20/2023: So the bar manager decided to try to use
it, but in the end gave up. Chrome has a rendering bug in print media
that pushed the gin list to the next page immediately after the title.
Given the css and html is so simple there isn't anything I could do to
fix it. Even without that the process of generating HTML, then
printing to PDF, then running it through a bootklet generator before
finally sending it to the printer is just too much hassle.
I was at the pub a few weeks ago and saw the bar manager
updating the drinks list. The process seemed tedious and error
prone, he seemed to be positioning page elements by hand, so
that alterations required more work. I don't even know what
software he was using - he later mentioned google docs but it
would have to have been the slideshow program because none of
the others work like that. Looking closer at the menu there
were multiple formatting issues - inconsistent margins,
indenting, even a few typos ("Rosè" being the most onerous).
Seemed there should have been a better way ...
But after working on the problem quite a bit over the last few
weeks i'm not sure there really is. I have some solutions but
they require different skills to use.
Latex2ε
My first thought was using latex to generate the menu. I've
played with it over the years but never used it much so it took
a bit of trial and error but eventually I came up with something
that worked pretty well. It could read the price lists from
tab-separated-values files, I had some macros to control layout
of individual items, I used the options package to allow
fine-tuning on individual sections and so on. I even wrote a
minimal table
editor in Java to simplify its use and worked out how to get
it all running in windows.
Latex can be frustrating as fuck, there's some weird
environments that don't nest, arithmetic is messy, it's hard to
read. But you can also do some cool shit, e.g. I created a
brand logo that will properly typeset in any font because it can
work with the glyph metrics directly.
I had to disable or work around many of latex's typesetting
facilities such as hyphenation and paragraph layout but it
produced high quality output and could create an A4 booklet
print directly.
But to be honest, it's just not a good enough user-experience.
It demands far too much knowledge to modify anything but the
list of prices and even though it's simple to adjust things like
font sizes the absolutely useless error reporting from latex
just doesn't make it practical. And I also found out they don't
really have the setup anyway (although i'm not sure if that's
just a miscommunication since I seem him using laptops with
windows all the time).
HTML5?
So I went back to the drawing board. I tried using HTML+CSS but
Firefox didn't seem to support enough fine control on formatting
for the task - and always added unacceptable headers and footers
at print time.
I discovered that texlive has
an online formatting service
so started working toward a solution that would utilise that. I
installed a local copy of
the server
software (seems unmaintained and insecure but it works well
enough) and worked out how to invoke it.
Then I basically went on an epic side-quest to catch up on about
20 years of web development that i'd thankfully missed during my
software engineering career. What a weird collection of
technology, bizarre toolkits, and shitty jargon (e.g. pollyfills
= fills cracks in walls vs pollyfilla fills cracks in a
browser's javascript implementation).
Along the way I learnt about a bunch of technlogy:
- LocalStorage;
- IndexDB (neat ... but not really suitable);
- Modules;
- Custom Components (because of the way templates work
they're not anywhere as useful as they could be);
- DOJO (Wwhy? Just ... why?);
- PetiteVue (It's sort of cool but the documentation is miserable).
Although I still skipped some of the more prominent stuff like
node.js or jQuery.
In the end I chose to use PetiteVue and modules came up with all
the parts I'd need to make an application of it:
- A spreadsheet-like table editor;
- A graphical layout editor using drag and drop;
- Various I/O like saving/loading locally, cut and paste;
- Tabbed panels.
But then I ran into a mess trying to combine these parts into a
single scope with petite vue and the lack of documentation
became a real problem. I did manage to solve the problems but
it became tedious and boring and I simply lost interest.
Another issue is it still requires hosting somewhere.
Google Apps Script
So I looked into various was of using google apps. I'd rather
just use Free Software but it would be interesting to contrast
with something proprietary anyway. This was still frustrating
as fuck as there are two apis for everything (e.g. Spreadsheets
vs SheetsApp) and trying to navigate the documentation just
sends you around in circles. Worse is that the documentation
page renders wrong in firefox and with the fonts I use so it's
hard to even read.
I spent about a week creating an apps script project that could
talk to a collection of files - a spreadsheet with data, a doc
with templates for items and a doc with the overall layout -
only to find that it's simply impossible to insert a column
break in a document programatically. This is a total
deal-breaker as there is no other way to control the layout so
it would break the formatting - e.g. splitting a pair of rows
that should be presented together like the drink name and a
description.
A workaround would be to have put both columns into a table and
then use the javascript to distribute the values across both
tables but I was trying to avoid having to special case template
handling in the code. And I was so pissed off with finding out
the limitations I basically turned it off and went for a walk
and haven't revisited it.
One thing I found is that the google docs api isn't really
geared to this type of thing - it's solving the very different
problem of a distributed multi-user editing environment. This
impedence mismatch made it a pain to work with.
The other pain is the abysmal fucking editor you're forced to
use in Apps Script projects. It fucking pops shit up over your
text almost every time you press a key, and even if you learn to
ignore that incredibly irritating obstruction you have to hit
escape all the time anyway as otherwise the cursor keys aren't
moving the cursor but sliding down a menu - so you're CONSTANTLY
hitting escape to close that shit out of the way. And then when
you try to use it the Javascript autocompletion is also a
complete joke and the popup documentation is either missing or
hard to read. The formatting tools are miserable. It doesn't
seem to know what the fuck a tab character is. It doesn't
handle primary selection at all.
And anything apart from editing is so slow and takes too many
clicks.
And I still I was wasn't sure how to turn it into a standalone
app, hosting, and the authentication stuff is weird.
Google Sheets and Apps Script and HTML5
I decided to revisit HTML and see if i could get enough control
to generate a good printed output via CSS. And it turned out
you could - well mostly could anyway. It fucking also has
issues with column breaks but they could be worked around. And
you need to edit about:config to stop Firefox adding headers and
footers - but hardly anone uses Firefox these days anyway.
I first implemented it as a web-app associated with the
spreadsheet. I ran into all sort of issues because the apps are
run inside a sandboxed iframe. Made it hard to debug and
completely breaks printing.
But I suppose the long story short is I got it to work. In the
current version the apps script pops up a dialogue box which
inserts a html file. The HTML file does all the processing to
insert the data into the page template which is a html template.
A button opens a new window with a printable version or lets you
save it a a standalone pre-formatted html file.
It's pretty slow - it takes longer to retrieve the data than it
did to run latex - but the output is acceptable.
The Result
Summary
Latex is still king for generating printed output, but the user
experience just isn't there for anyone not prepared to spend a lot
of time learning how to use it which is an unreasonable expecation
for the general public outside of authoring books.
Web development still sucks donkey dicks. It's slow and
frustrating. The debugging experience is crummy. The online
tools are a pain to use. Everything is too blindingly white -
or if they have an alternative theme it's both too black and
psychedelic. Javascript is a weird language - you can certainly
do some pretty interesting stuff with it but it's so easy to
abuse.
CSS is very powerful but still let down by implementation issues
no doubt due to it's complexity.
I'm mostly astounded at the amount of human effort that has been
put into 'Web 2.0' then 'HTML5', and this is what they
came up with? But that's what I think about C++ too.
Having said that, it had it's moments of fun like any coding
exercise - through exploration, implementation, and finally
refining the implementation and details.
Server News
I just upgraded the server from a rather out of date ubuntu to
debian. Seems to have gone mostly smoothly so far although I
haven't quite finished reconfiguring everythying.
This is more or a less a test post of blogz.
