hifi by apg

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Volume 7: The Ants Keep Marching

Last week I fell asleep in my hotel room before I could write hifi for its usual publication time, so I just didn’t do it. This week, I’ll probably either fall asleep mi

Sorry, drifted off there. What was I saying? Oh yes. I had a wonderful time last week at Ricon, saw a few old friends, met a few new, and played some arcade style fighting games. And there were some great talks, too!

Among my favorites:

Now, on to some hacks!

Hackity Hacks (in pseudo random order)

Flancy — Tome Tanasovski

Flancy is a micro web framework for PowerShell! [Yes, I included something developed for Windows. I’m also a Microsoft shareholder. Ask me some time, why. – ed]

sent — Markus Teich

I’ll have to be honest, I don’t understand why it’s called “sent”, but you can’t beat the simplicity of it, so I sent it your way. sent takes a plain ole text file and turns it into a set of slides. Works in X11. Less than 1,000 newlines of C.

svgo — Anthony Starks

SVGO is a Go library for writing Scalable Vector Graphics. Lots of interesting demos, and a Go Playground like tool for exploration.

Reanimated — Timothy Pratley

An animation library for ClojureScript. [I’ll be honest, I’m including this mostly because of the logo, but I am also a fan of animation. – ed]

Scout — Charles Leifer

Scout implements a full-text searcher, using sqlite and Flask to expose a REST API. [I’d love to see a simple to deploy, statically built version of this, as easy to deploy as redis. – ed]

WOPR — Yaron Naveh

A very slick markup language for writing reports viewable by your terminal. You’ll just have to look at the screenshots. [Can you guess where the name came from? – ed]

Parinfer — Shaun LeBron

Simple and elegant weapon^Wtheory for writing Lisp source code. [I can only imagine there are hundreds of efforts underway right now to port it to $EDITOR – ed]

icmptunnel — Dhaval Kapil

Tunnels IP packets on top of ICMP echo and reply packets. [I’ve seen something like this used before to get around wifi paywalls. – ed]

curio — David Beazley

Members of the python community will recognize the name immediately as a prolific Python hacker. curio is a library for doing concurrent programming in Python that takes advantage of the new (?????) async/await syntax. [I guess I’ve been out of the Python loop for a while, but naturally async/await just desugars to some magic methods like the with statement. Surely there are lots of potential new hacks around it! – ed]

Blabr — Martin Clark and Gary Ballantyne

Scientific computing for the web.

Ariel — John Coates

It hasn’t shown up on my AppleTV [maybe ‘cause it’s not the new one – ed] yet, but the Ariel views screensaver looks really neat. This is a port of it to the Mac. [Remember the 90s when you could buy shrink wrapped screen savers? – ed]

Vibreoffice — Sean Yeh

Vi bindings for LibreOffice. Not sure why this didn’t exist before… [I can’t help myself. A better version would use emacs keybindings. har har. – ed]

clipmenu — Chris Down

A dmenu based clipboard manager.

Yet more stuff to look at

  • CPython Internals: Video lectures about the internals of the CPython interpreter. [disclaimer: I haven’t watched these yet, but they appear interesting to me. – ed]

Honk, Honk!

Well, that was a lot of hacks! I guess this is what happens when you skip a week!

I’m always on the lookout for interesting hacks, projects, pieces of art, neat papers, etc. If you have something I should see, don’t hesitate to reply to this email!

Oh! And, are you or someone you know working on a big project with an interesting story (or even a boring story, but with interesting problems)? Let me know! I’d love to ch chat with you/them.

Until next time!

Happy hacking,

Andrew