Vinc

Reviewing November 2024

2024-12-01T01:00:00+01:00

Reviewing November 2024

Another month working on MOROS, my hobby operating system written in Rust, with some improvements before the upcomming winter release:

Update clipboard behavior in editor (#706)
Update web commands (#703)
Improve documentation (#697)
Update HTTP server (#702)
Add network config devices (#700)
Upgrade base64 module (#699)
Improve Lisp (#684)
Fix clock API (#698)

There is now a browse command (written in shell) to view web pages, and a fetch command (written in lisp) to download files.

Some device files have also been created to manage the network from userspace:

/dev/net/gw
/dev/net/ip
/dev/net/mac
/dev/net/usage

Finally, I worked on a mascot for the OS, it's cute but it might be a little too scary:

Reviewing October 2024

2024-11-01T01:00:00+01:00

Reviewing October 2024

This month, I focused primarily on MOROS, my hobby operating system written in Rust, resulting in these merged PRs:

Use string instead of float as clock device output format (#696)
Add speaker device (#693)
List processors at boot (#692)
Create clock module (#691)
Create memory module (#690)
Add mandelbrot program (#689)
Refactor vga driver (#688)
Add VGA graphics (#687)
Free process memory on exit (#686)
Ensure uninitialized data is zeroed when loading binary (#681)
Update panic handler (#680)

The most notable feature is the introduction of a graphic mode, with a framebuffer and a customizable palette. I started by coding a program to display BMP images and later played with a cool program to visualize the Mandelbrot set. New device files were added for that:

/dev/vga/mode
/dev/vga/buffer
/dev/vga/palette

Additionally, the following device files were also created or updated in other PRs:

/dev/clk/boot
/dev/clk/epoch
/dev/clk/rtc
/dev/speaker

I undertook significant internal refactoring and I experimented, not quite successfully yet, with relocating the kernel to higher half memory and activating multiple processors. More on that later.

During the month I also created two PRs to improve Geodate, my lunisolar calendar with decimal time and I spent time solving LeetCode problems in Ruby and MOROS Lisp to stay up to date as I will soon conclude this funemployment period and seek my next full time job. If you're hiring a senior/staff dev with Ruby or Rust expertise, please let me know.

Reviewing September 2024

2024-10-01T02:00:00+02:00

Reviewing September 2024

CloudCheck

The first week of this month was spent wrapping up my work on CloudCheck, a project I've been contemplating since early 2023 to help small teams reduce cloud waste. The MVP and the landing page are complete, but I didn't succeed in finding enough people interested in trying the service or providing feedback.

I tried to work on customer discovery during the previous year, but a failure to make enough progress pushed the project to the back burner. Eventually, I decided to spend up to a month coding it anyway to see what would happen. I confirmed once again that "if you build it, they will come" is not true. However, the time spent on the project was not wasted. I got up to date with the latest Rails version and applied many product ideas I had learned over the past two years.

I found CloudCheck useful for monitoring my servers and reducing my cloud bills, so I'll keep using it and see where it goes. However, I won't invest more time working on it without user feedback.

MOROS

After that, I switched back to MOROS, my hobby operating system written in Rust. In comparison, talking about it and finding people interested is much easier. I worked on many small features to improve it during the month:

Add /dev/vga/font device (#653)
Replace base64 command with encode and decode (#654)
Add kind syscall (#655)
Update hash command (#656)
Add diff command (#657)
Add search to editor (#659)
Add a line mode to the editor (#660)
Add chess puzzle (#662)
Add write --parents option (#664)
Add pkg command (#663)
Improve option parsing (#665)
Add scrollback buffer support (#627)
Add search to viewer (#666)
Fix usage of CSI sequences for scrolling the scrollback buffer (#667)
Fix userspace heap address (#668)
Improve process code alloc (#669)
Align cursor after scrolling in the editor (#671)
Use ptr::copy_nonoverlapping to load binaries (#670)
Update Rust to nightly-2024-09-01 (#672)
Add special alloc_error_handler for userspace (#673)
Fix binary loading (#674)
Add more restrictive mapping on page fault (#675)
Enable userspace memory deallocation (#676)
Copy memory on instruction fetch page fault (#677)
Add geodate program (#304)
Fix shell autocomplete command path (#678)
Add geocal program (#679)

I'm particularly happy about adding scrollback buffer support, allowing me to scroll up in the console and no longer be limited to what was last printed on the screen. Adding a search mode to the editor and some ed-like commands will also make me more productive inside the OS.

A number of PRs are related to process memory, and I made some progress in running more complex programs. Notably, my lunisolar calendar geodate does a lot of astronomical computations that tested the alloc and free syscalls. I had to introduce some workarounds to get everything running, and the result is not bug-free. I'll have to do it the right way later.

Finally I added a basic package manager called pkg to download files that are not bundled with the kernel image.

Reviewing August 2024

2024-09-01T02:00:00+02:00

Reviewing August 2024

This month was dedicated to CloudCheck, a project I've been thinking about since early 2023 to help small teams reduce cloud waste. Many startups lack dedicated devops or the time to continuously monitor and optimize their server usage. I've experienced this issue firsthand in previous jobs, and it's also easy for hobbyists to forget a server running in the clouds and keep paying for it for a long time.

I built a simple MVP using Ruby 3.3 and Rails 7.2 (released this month) to monitor my AWS and DigitalOcean accounts. Over the course of the month, I added generic cloud support so it could also be applied to the Proxmox servers in my homelab and various Raspberry Pi servers around the house.

I went down a rabbit hole exploring the /proc filesystem on Linux to get the necessary metrics for auditing a server. I created a simple bash script that can be called by a cron job every minute to send a plain text file to an API. The API then does some computations, sometimes with previous metrics, to derive system load and uptime, CPU and RAM usage, disk and network IOPS, and more. I also learned how the Linux filesystem has evolved to provide more comprehensive data over the years.

After spending enough time on the MVP, I switched gear to create a landing page for the service. It's basic and will need further improvements, but I'm satisfied with the initial result.

The challenge now is finding some early adopters to test the MVP and provide feedback for improvement. The MVP will be free, and, if possible, will remain free for hobbyists to help terminate forgotten cloud servers. However, marketing is hard for devs, and I don't have a significant audience on social media to promote the project.

So, at the end of the month, I decided to take a break from that task and instead spend a few days creating another Ruby on Rails app allowing people to send emails to the AIs made by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Mistral instead of using their respective web apps. These AIs helped me write the content for the landing page, but it was a frustrating experience that is now much easier with this new service. I named it Goodbot.club, and we'll see where it goes.

Anyway, if you manage cloud servers and are interested in trying CloudCheck you can sign up for early access, and I'll be happy to read your feedback.

Reviewing July 2024

2024-08-01T02:00:00+02:00

Reviewing July 2024

At the end of June and in the first part of July, I resumed working on my old idea of a conlang inspired by Toki Pona, Lojban, and Polynesian languages. I decided to name it Faeke, and I spent a lot of time looking at Samoan, Maori, Tahitian, and Hawaiian dictionaries to build the root words of the language. It was fun! I'm now freezing the conlang to try making sentences with what I have for a while, and next time I'll build a little website introducing an alpha version of Faeke.

After that, I had a great time with shortwave radio on my RTL-SDR. I put a long wire between the garden shed and a tree and could listen to a lot of stations from America, Africa, and Asia. I had not done this in many years, and it was a surprise to hear China broadcasting from so many frequencies.

I also experimented again with a tin can gasifier stove for my green tea break late in the afternoon. It's interesting to boil hot water with just a few twigs without producing any smoke once the stove gets going.

Not much coding; it felt a bit like a summer holiday at home.

Reviewing June 2024

2024-07-01T02:00:00+02:00

Reviewing June 2024

This month was mostly dedicated to MOROS 0.10.4, which I released on the summer solstice, with an additional fix for an issue with block bitmap area calculation that didn't make the cut. It is a breaking change that I will merge before the next release.

I also updated Nyx, the bedrock platform to build MOROS, based on Alpine Linux and Rust. I added a server mode to Chatai to have access to GPT-4 from MOROS via a computer running it. On the same topic, I updated Fetch, an HTTP/0.9 server and proxy to HTTPS, Gemini, and Gopher, which I use from MOROS in the same fashion.