gemini://gemini.hitchhiker-linux.org/gemlog/where_things_stand,_march

If you were to ask me two years ago where I thought I'd be in 2024 the answer would have been pretty far from the mark. But that's not a negative thing really. I'm happy with how life is going.

I think the first thing to mention is school. I started college late last year. It's fully online and asynchonous. We do have weekly assignments, but there is no set time when you have to log in and work on them. Each course is eight weeks, so after six months I will have finished three courses and have nine credit hours. I'll start taking two courses at once pretty soon to speed the process up.

I'm going for a CS degree because it seemed the logical choice for me. It's also a degree path that my employer will pay for in it's entirety. My job mostly sucks, but this is a good benefit that I wish I had started taking advantage of sooner. But at this point I've had nothing related to my major due to having prerequesite courses that need taken first. My first two courses were almost painfully easy for me, and I was beginning to think everything would be that way. I literally got a perfect score in my composition class with very little effort on my part. I don't feel like I'm that great of a writer, but having seen the work that others were turning in I guess I have to say there was a definite contrast. I can only surmise that the standards have been set accordingly to what the average college freshman can handle. But a big part of me felt as if I didn't actually earn that A grade. I was definitely beginning to view my school as a diploma mill, and then I got to Precalc.

Now I'll preface this by saying first that I graduated high school in 1995 and the last math course I took was one semester of Algebra II during my junior year. I already had all of the math credit that I needed to graduate and was at the time wholly uninterested in pursuing it further. At the time, I was spending every waking hour playing music with my friends. Math seemed about the furthest thing from my goals in life. So I just stopped doing any of the work in that class, took a failing grade for the semester and dropped it for the next term. So upon beginning PreCalculus a few weeks ago it had been a literal 30 years since my last math course, and I never did get a lot of the material that I should have before starting this course. Oh, I wasn't completely unprepared. I've used a surprising amount of algebra over the years in various hobbies such as electronics and of course programming, and I have been doing a lot of review and studying in my spare time because I knew this would be a challenge. Even so, the first week was one of the hardest things I've ever done getting up to speed.

I surprised myself really. Our first assignment was a self assessment, which I failed miserably. So I went and looked up all of the material related to the parts that I had missed and just ground through it until things began making sense. By the end of the week when we had another quiz on new material I only missed a half a point because I got the correct answer but not the way I was supposed to. Three weeks in and I've still got my 4.0 grade. I've begun considering that I might go on past the math requirements for my degree. I'll have Calculus I next year, but if things continue going well I might want to go on to multivariable Calculus. Time will tell.

Around the time my second term began my father was in the hospital with congestive heart failure and unable to walk more than a few steps unassisted. It's hard seeing the strongest man I've ever known in decline like that, and it was heart wrenching in the extreme confronting the fact that he might be gone very soon. My brother came up from Florida and my son, who was already taking a semester break from his own CS degree, came home from visiting my other kid in Minnisota. We all rallied and did everything we could to get my dad to do the same. He spent a week in the hospital and then twelve days in a rehabilitation center. My brother did a lot of work on dad's house while he was in rehab but had to get back home shortly after he was released. Since then I've been making weekly trips down to check on him and help where needed, bringing my son along for a lot of them. It's not easy to maintain that schedule while working full time, keeping up with coursework, planning a wedding and running our own household. It's just shy of a two hour drive one way, so I devote the better part of one of my two days off to the trip.

Things have a way of snowballing though, and sometimes in a good way. A large part of what got my dad into this mess is overeating coupled with a sedentary retired lifestyle. He was spending the majority of his time in his LaZboy watching TV, and it almost killed him. I've been wanting to get in better shape myself, and this gave me, and my fiancee, the kick in the pants to get into action. Along with cutting out sugar and overall eating healthier we've been hitting the gym twice a week. My brother followed suit, and he's been taking hours long bicycle trips several times a week. I think knowing that we're all doing this together has made it easier for Dad to keep trying, and every time I see him I can tell he has a little more energy and moves around easier. He's far from out of the woods, but if the trend continues then I have hope that he might live well into his 90's like our grandmother did.

Interestingly, I might have set off a chain reaction by going back to school. My dad had a fair amount of college credit when he was younger but never got his degree. He's talking about finishing it now, at 73, in engineering. His plan wouldn't have anything to do with returning to work, but just to have accomplished the goal. I really hope that he does because he's a brilliant man. My brother is also looking into taking classes.

Obviously with this much going on I'm spending far less time on software projects. I haven't completely stopped of course, but the things that I'm working on are at a slower pace and there isn't enough to want to show them off.

Here's what I can say. I've continued my slow migration away from Rust towards plain C and am finding my groove there. I haven't abandoned rust entirely, especially when it comes to projects which I started long ago and wish to keep going. For instance I finished my Haggis archiver, and I've been chiping away periodically at the package manager for HitchHiker Linux. But I've also been putting a bit of work into a utility library for said Linux distro, which I intend to put to use fairly soon.

Now, HitchHiker as the codebase stands right now has a Linux kernel with a GNU toolchain, but a crazy mix of userland utilites. There are no GNU coreutils left in the system, but I've retained a few things from the Util-Linux package. The rest of the command line utilities are made up of BSD code ported to Linux, a few Suckless utils and code that I wrote myself when I was trying to teach myself C initially. My intention is to replace most of the BSD and Suckless utilities with my own code eventually. That's where the new utility library comes in. The idea is to provide a lot of the things that are taken for granted in languages like Rust such as dynamically sized arrays and hash maps, some nice abstractions over the shittier interfaces in libc, things of that nature. I'm also experimenting with a bounded string data structure inspired by Rust's 'String' and a slice type, in order to hopefully provide a much nicer and more consistent string interface than what you get in libc. Right now that's just an experiment, but it feels interesting.

Since I already have a C implementation of Haggis, there is a possibility that the package manager for HitchHiker might be written in C as well. I have some Rust in the base system now, but I've already seen cases where portability will break out of the blue. HitchHiker is supposed to be able to cross compile from any supported architecture to any other supported architecture. In the long run I want to be able to cross compile it from any Unix machine. If my Rust code cross compiles to RiscV64 one day and then that same cross compilation stops working in a later Rust compiler then I have a major problem with that. So in the long run C might still be the better fit for what I want to achieve. That might also mean rewriting things like 'su' and my sudo replacement 'jah' to get rid of the Rust that I've been experimenting with including in HitchHiker, but both of those programs are quite small and should be easy to re-implment.

Where things stand, March 2024

2024-03-21

School

My dad

Projects

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