Manipulating Pixels

Ah, Thursday.

The weather is still nut-so, but what can I do about it? Anyway, the weather has been bad enough that I had to bring out the four laptop ``leg'' stands. I had put those away for quite a while because the angle that I was using them that allowed a better channeling of wind (tilted away from me) was screwing my wrists. The ``as-designed'' angle was really to have the laptop tilting towards me, with the rear raised higher than the front, but the problem with that was that the fan on the right side of Eileen-II would randomly sound like it was rubbing on something bad, causing some scary sounding vibrations.

Previously when those vibrations came about, I would hastily suspend Eileen-II before opening up the back cover, and try to clean out the dust. Then it got a little bit more frequent than expected, but I realised that if I left it alone for a while, the fan would eventually slow down/stop, and the next time it restarted, the vibrations would be gone.

Well, today the vibrations happened again. I was annoyed enough that I took apart the back cover and stared at the fan again. Back in the day, I would take the fan out from the casing and lubricate the moving parts, but the way Eileen-II was set up, it was very risky to take the fan out completely. But I realised that there was just enough leeway to get some lubricant in, which I did, carefully. My lubricant of choice was, of course, Vaseline, mostly because it is non-conductive. I slipped some of it in, and after putting things back together and setting up the legs ``as-designed'', there hasn't been any major vibration incident.

A win, perhaps?

Anyway, it was comfortable enough to type on, and I worked a little on LED2-20. I got the right-rectangle (rectangle with edges parallel to the screen edges) intersection sub-routine working, and with that, managed to get the ``put sprite anywhere on screen'' sub-routine working. The problem that I had to solve was that the built-in PUT graphics statement automatically fails if any part of the bitmap image exceeds the boundaries of the screen. This means that, for example, if I have a 16×16 sprite, I cannot use PUT with the upper left corner being at (−10,−10). But in LED2-20 (and other games), we should expect ``partial'' sprites to appear on screen for that immersion. My solution to this was to grab the reduced sized bitmap (and mask) on the fly and use that with QuickBASIC's internal PUT statement.

It works well enough. I did switch up the way I separated out the cases though, relying on error-trapping to handle the cases where the more time-consuming bitmap handling was required while avoiding the cycles spent on validation checking before using the PUT graphics statement in the beginning. This can be quite a time saver in the long run when considering just how often we are drawing sprites on the screen.

So at this point, keyboard handling, and basic sprite/background renderer (the background renderer is similar to the sprite handler, but without the mask) are done. I'll probably need to worry about pixel-perfect collision testing next, or think about the game data structures that I need---either way is fine.

------

In Minecraft, I dug out another row of rocks from my mine, and built a glass enclosure for my bees and flowers. I had to do that second bit because the damn bees kept on disappearing. They first disappeared because they kept on running into my lava wall (I removed that), and then they probably disappeared because they wandered too far off from my service platform and didn't return or something.

Anyway, that's about all I want to talk about for now. Till the next update.

My Head Still Hurts, But in a Different Way

That headache from yesterday? It went away this morning, came back a little this evening, and has manifested itself as general fatigue now. I really wonder if getting those blackout curtains can make a big enough difference.

It really isn't the heat alone that is the cause of all these symptoms---I think it is also related to the change between the various weather states that is causing all these discomfort.

I'm going to turn in immediately after I am done with today's entry.

I've finished reading the KonoSuba light novel series, Best of BYTE magazine compendium, and even book 4 of the Mahabharata. KonoSuba was fun, it began with a lot of potential, made its way through the situation, and ended on a plausible-enough note. At seventeen volumes though, it did feel as though the author had written himself into a corner with the main character of Kazuma. The world was built well enough to provide interesting encounters, and the main characters had some kind of character development, so it wasn't as bad as I made it sound. As this is my first light novel series, I'm really uncertain if this was the norm, but it was gripping enough that I wanted to keep on reading to know more.

Best of BYTE was a great nostalgic trip in time. The revisit of the technological trends and associated reasoning from the early days of microcomputer/personal computer with a little more detail (compared to my first reading of this compendium nearly twenty years ago) was quite eye-opening. Already I am seeing the cyclical nature of technology with greater clarity; my recent little rant was based on an article that was present within the book. The number of transistors that can be shoved into one square millimetre of silicon substrate may have increased by several orders of magnitude today, but the human-factor aspect of things have barely budged---there is much to learn from the triumphs and mistakes of the past that infocomm technology practitioners seem to be adverse to.

I'm going to be starting on God's Prophetic Blueprint by Dr Bob Shelton, and Mathematics for Engineers (2nd Edition) by Raymond W. Dull after this; the former is an explanation on Revelation, while the latter is a nice 800+-page refresher on some old school [continuous] mathematics that I used to use a lot of [in school] that I haven't touched in a while.

Alright, that's about it. I'm going to turn in for the night and see if I can sleep away this fatigue-feeling. Till the next update.

My Head Hurts

Weather's a horrible joke. It's back to being bloody hot again (interior ambient temperature of 31°C) and I now have a stupid headache.

Can't win.

I'm going to go lie down.

Till the next update.

Manzi

From Jim Manzi, then President & CEO of Lotus Development Corp. (``The Productivity MacGuffin'', BYTE Magazine 1992:8 p360):

Over the last 10 years, many companies have fallen into the trap of technology for technology's sake. This has not been entirely their own doing. They have had ample encouragement from members of our industry, who have never hesitated to trumpet their latest product release with no thought to customers' business goals. In all the excitement, people lost sight of a few simple economic truths.

The first is that real value in an organization is generated not by machines, but by people. It applies not just to computers, but to the steam engine, the printing press, and the pencil. The second principle is that the greatest value is generated not by individuals, but by teams.

What he said is still relevant today, nearly 20 years later. The ``AI Winter'' of yesteryear seemed to have given way to an ``AI Spring'', but the harsh truth is that even in the current ``AI Spring'', the propensity of snake oil is just still too high. Looking at technology with a sober look can often seem to be something that reeks too much of conservatism, but that cannot be helped---even the second paragraph from a technology leader acknowledges that point.

Machines, thinking or otherwise, allow us to do things faster, and hopefully cheaper. In the engineering rule-of-thumb of ``cheap, fast, good; choose two out of three'', machines can be seen as a way of allowing us to concentrate on pursuing quality, while using such automation tools to ``cheat'' in getting the other two along the way, a means of beating the aphorism. The thing is, we are still fundamentally a human-centric society, which means that at the core of it all, the human ought to be primal in any type of decision. That's what the second paragraph of the above quote is trying to capture: that the value of an organisation (be it a company or a society) is an evaluation of the value generated by the people that make it up. If everything is a race to producing more with cheaper and faster techniques with no innovation whatsoever, then the [short-term] winners will be those who have a predominance in machine.

The second principle as highlighted in the second paragraph is a caution against treating individual people as disembodied attributes/wish-lists the way ``human resources'' have been championing, and to take into consideration how the person, as a whole, can contribute to an existing team. This means that personnel decisions in organisations ought to be taken with team-fit playing a larger role than mere matching of some reductionist collection of attributess. This also means that staff retention with respect to maintaining effective teams should be a priority over the greed of hiring the absolute cheapest and cobbling them together in the hopes that they make an effective team.

Now, I'm not saying that Manzi is absolutely right here on all things. Following the history of Lotus Development should allow one to draw their own conclusions on Manzi's leadership capabilities and how they relate to his perspective. But in this case on how technology, business, and people relate, what he says has a certain ageless truth to it for as long as our societies are to be lived in by humans.

The unfortunate thing is that in this time and age, I am not even sure if we are running societies for the benefit of humans any more. In more ways than one, it seems that we have steadily moved our societies towards supporting that of corporate personhood over the individual. Many laws across the many countries have a tendency towards prioritising giving [substantial] benefits to these corporate persons over looking out for the humans that make them up, and really, no one should be surprised at this from a purely utilitarian perspective: that single corporate entity may be ``one'', but it has the clout (capital, which translates to socio-political eventual) that can rival some of the smaller countries in the world. In other words, for any legislator/enforcer to achieve so-called ``great return of investment'' or ``low-cost high-impact'' type deals, they can do the easy thing and pander to these corporations instead.

I would normally claim that this is a major fallacy solely through reasoning that the corporate entity is still legal fiction that, if all the people in it are absent or if all the people who trade with it are gone, it will also ``die out''. But with massive automation in both physical (think robotics) and mental (think reasoning/``AI''), it becomes increasingly possible to create corporate entities that can literally take on a life on its own devoid of most human intervention.

Think about it: a self-sustaining network (or ``society'') of corporate entities that trade information/material/logistics with each other, accruing capital among themselves that need only a minimal number of people to supply the missing innovation parts until they too can be replaced, where even their ``owners'' can eventually be made up of only other corporate entities as the bootstrapping human leaders get ``digitised'' into pure institutional knowledge before they eventually die out from old age. A world of the biggest class divide: the humanly untameable corporate entities who own everything, and the humans who can only hope to lease at ever-increasing prices over ever-decreasingly available resources.

I think that we are part-way there already at this point. It seems incredible to believe that after fifty years of exponential improvements in technology, we end up having to work more hours than our predecessors to have a chance at a lesser quality of life, and to be abused that somehow we have been the greater ne'er-do-wells.

Then why do we invest so much into innovation for, if the end result is more misery? Just who benefits from all these innovation then? It can't be for God, despite how many might want to claim---everything that we have, He gave it to us first. Besides, God is all-powerful---there is nothing that we produce that he wants/needs.

So, why then?

Machiavellian

It's a little late, but here's a short one.

The past few days of ridiculous heat continued in the morning, with the interior ambient temperature hovering near 30°C at around 1000hrs local time. Then it decided to rain hard twice.

The interior ambient temperature now is still about 29°C. Remember what I mentioned about humidity and wind? Well, I think that the humidity is a little lowered, so despite the lack of wind and still-ridiculous interior ambient temperature, it actually feels sort of cooler now.

I read a couple more volumes of KonoSuba. I think I can probably finish the entire series by tomorrow. I did spend the early morning reading a few more articles from The Best of BYTE: Two Decades on the Leading Edge, again tapping into the natural light from the sun to assist in the reading off the dead-tree book. It's still largely a passive-entertainment sort of day for me, so nothing that involved heavy [intellectual] lifting was needed.

I did update Eileen-II through the support assistant software that comes with her though. This included the side-loading of the new BIOS firmware, an always harrowing experience---if you brick that, you brick the whole machine with little to no hope of recovering.

In other more current-affairs type news, the ``conscientious objectors'' to vaccination against COVID-19 (or was it vaccination in general?) have raised their collective heckles against the new rules that were released yesterday, claiming that the decisions discriminated against those who were unvaccinated.

Well, no shit, Sherlock. All decisions are discriminatory in nature, with the only question on whether that discrimination along the decision boundary was morally/ethically/socially acceptable or not. And in this particular instance, it is, with the addition of some heavy-duty science in demonstrating that the vaccinated, if they do get hit with COVID-19, do tend to get less dangerous symptoms than those who are not.

I had mentioned in meatspace many times that the true way out of perpetual lock-downs from a pandemic is to have it burn through an entire population, an outcome that was unthinkable before vaccines were available, but is now plausible once vaccines are available. The only reason why we can't say things like that is because of how brutally inhumane it sounds despite it being the eventual outcome that every society needs to get through in order to be ``COVID-resilient''. This is doubly true for politicians because anyone who says this out loud will be committing political suicide through a demonstration of anti-empathy of a rather personal nature, which brings the message of how they are not really ``representing'' the voters in the starkest most inhuman sort of way.

But, just because no politican can say this out loud doesn't mean that they cannot pursue it as part of an exit strategy. And the latest adjustments of restrictions can be seen as subtly moving towards that end-state. Of course, they will not allow it to burn through the population completely out of control---overwhelming the public healthcare system is always a legitimate concern---but through what they hope to be a controlled release.

I suppose this might be the new modus operandi of the government of SIN city---instead of strong-arming people with heavy-handed laws, they just make things super annoying and rage-inducing for those who refuse to comply, maliciously or otherwise. But to be fair, this modus operandi doesn't seem to be generally applied---it seems to only be for actions that tend to affect a larger number of people at once. In situations where the target group is small, the old heavy-handed ways seem to be preferred. Which makes sense in the Machiavellian sort of way.

Anyway, I see myself staying home still for this week (other than the usual Saturday worship service at church). I don't need to go anywhere specifically, but I do like to head out to a nice place to sit, drink/eat, and read. I can do that safely from home, but after a while it probably feels nice to just head out for a change of scenery.

I think I'll stop about here for now. I might want to go cycling for a bit tomorrow---my mind's not made up just yet. Gotta get more of that kind of care-free fun going before my sabbatical comes to an end, where I need to snap back to what society expects/demands from me.

Till the next update.

Melting

Well, I could talk about the recently released speech from the Prime Minister regarding the recent developments on COVID-19, but I won't.

I'm not a news blog. Nor am I interested in being one. Something about not wanting to draw unnecessary attention so as to make it easier to ``keep it real''. Because when things get too popular/large, it becomes much harder to stay to the original roots due to the need to meet a large number of expectations.

It's funny in some ways---in infocomm tech, we are always talking about how we should be building systems that can scale out and/or scale up, but every other piece of experience that we learn from in real life seems to suggest that doing either is generally a Bad Idea. The dissonance between these two is deliciously confusing, and it has begun to show its true dangers as infocomm tech starts to encroach more directly into the living spaces of people.

I think it goes back to the epiphany that I had in my second paragraph.

Because when things get too popular/large, it becomes much harder to stay to the original roots due to the need to meet a large number of expectations.

When infocomm technology was developed and deployed to improve the flow of business-related [structured] information, it helped to streamline and optimise existing business processes. Part of the reason was the need to perform the necessary analysis of the existing [manual] process, identify the associated requirements, impose structure and logic upon them, all before a single line of code is written. That kind of analysis is largely manually done, and requires some intelligent combination of domain experts from both the business process and system sides. When there was a need to scale up/out, it was ``obvious''---the scaling was meant to handle the sheer volume of the data moving about, not necessarily to scale for new conjunctions/interactions that these data might have. So much of algorithm/systems theory is about handling such asymptotic cases.

When such disciplines first met humans in the form of expert systems (and then later on, search, followed by the dreaded ``social media''), this inherently reductionist perspective proved to be inadequate outside of some extremely narrowly defined specialties, at which point the number of beneficiaries often could not justify the cost of developing/deploying such a system. Similar arguments can be made for search engines too---early search engines were nothing more than indexes whose concepts were borrowed from regular library information sciences. Early innovations that made it [computationally] scaleable was when Google was founded with the PageRank algorithm.

But were those systems ever ``interaction scalable''? I would say... no. For if they were, then there wouldn't be a need to incorporate more and more personal-level information to bias output towards what the single person might truly prefer over all others.

It is the same with social media, after they started to expand outside of their original demographic. Facebook wasn't completely garbage when it started out---the true beginning of its fall towards population polarisation was when its user base was expanded to include more than just college students. It got worse when it started to heavily adopt advertising as its source of revenue---I claim the degradation because with advertising and associated stakeholders coming into the play, it becomes more profitable to deliberately isolate population groups enough that they form a single homogenous unit that can be marketed as a targetable audience to convince advertisers to part with their money. That said, a word of fairness is in order---I say ``deliberately isolate'', but that's a description of the outcome rather than the means; the methods were more through ``lying by omission'' to create the necessary echo chambers that would amplify that tribal feel.

Being the largest social media presence on Earth (is it?), the modus operandi eventually became copied elsewhere too, or at least, those who felt suspicously empowered through the segregation in Facebook brought along their self-righteousness into every other space that they exist in, be it some other communications platform or even in real life.

What I am trying to say here isn't about bashing Facebook specifically; it's more about highlighting that while we know how to properly scale out/up infocomm systems to handle volumes of data at acceptable bit-rates, that human interaction bit is still sorely lacking, and is one big source of the paradoxical headache that comes from literate(?) people demonstrating the kind of dark-ages science-fearing bumpkin-ness that we thought we had banished after the renaissance and ages beyond that, with the added irony that they are using science (and business) powered infocomm technology to do their collective belly-aching.

The relevance of what I just mumbled with the beginning of this post will now come to light. Had platforms that connected people (like Facebook) allowing arbitrary pseudonymous connections stayed small, the expected number of ``off-the-rails radicalisation'' events is likely to be small. That's likely due to a combination of the founders' influence, and the innate self-policing nature that a small, tight-knit, group has. I trust someone because I know that someone. When the platforms get large though, it is no longer possible for me to trust someone because I know that said person; I'd have to be satisfied with trusting someone because I know someone that the person also knows, and I trust that proxying third party. The problem then is when people mistake this proxied acceptance as true trust. Because then such people, if sufficiently motivated, can then become the source of the disinformation.

I believe that finding out such bad-faith actors from the get-go without hindsight is likely to be as hard as teaching a machine to emulate the full range of human emotionns to express natural language.

Anyway, for some reason I'm really feeling it in my head right now. I think the consistent 30+°C interior ambient temperature despite it being nearly 2300hrs local time doesn't help.

Till the next update then.

Melodrama?

The itch of Minecraft came by again today and so I indulged a little by taking on a bastion remnant in the nether. I also updated my spawn-chunk based low-volume iron farm to include an item auto-sorter that would separate out the poppies from the iron ingots, sending the former directly into a composter to create bonemeal while redirecting the latter into the receptacle located at my small warehouse level. I also took the opportunity to sort my chests in my deep mine, grouping blocks according to type in the double chests, providing associated labels, and expanding the total capacity as well. I also continued to deforest the jungle biome, before retiring for the day leaving myself AFK at the mob farm to gather more mob-drops.

In other news, I have read another couple of volumes of KonoSuba.

I did have a light existential moment today thinking about how I would dispose of my items on death, but quickly realised that unless I was intending to die by my own hand, it was really out of my control. I mean, I could, in theory, write a will, but there's never a guarantee that it will be followed/enforced.

Besides, who would want a dead man's musical instruments?

Till the next update.

Matinee

A week of passivity, it seems to be.

More reading from The Best of BYTE: Two Decades on the Leading Edge, and more volumes of KonoSuba (『この素晴らしい世界に祝福を！』) read, even as I have various cached Hololive videos running in the background.

I am also thinking about writing a locally-run RSS aggregator service as a way of ensuring that I am not beholden to my cell-phone when it comes to following up on news. I find that ever since I've gone on the hermit life, I haven't really been looking at my cellphone much, and as a result, have not really looked at the associated RSS reader output. This is a little problematic not because I then become less aware of world news (look, there really isn't anything good in world news these days anyway), but that it is affecting my ability to respond to the new direction of the group study that is happening in my care group.

Since I'm staring at Eileen-II most of the time anyway, having my own RSS reader is probably the best option.

There are probably many nice RSS aggregators out there, but ever since the killing of the default RSS reader on the smartphone, I have started to get rather wary of relying on services out of my control for anything that I care enough about. I am using some kind of third-party RSS reader on my phone that is thankfully not completely screwed up, but being tethered to my phone is one of those things I don't like. Part of the reason is that transferring information out of that infernal device is usually non-trivial, as compared to the many options I have on a PC.

Anyway, that's about all I really want to talk about. Skin's been acting up a little, and the ``drying up'' of the random splotches of rash on my torso can sometimes be itching a little too much to ignore completely. Maybe it is due to the return of the hot weather---I don't know. What I do know is that the town council has again decided to have landscapers lob fertiliser into the cross-patterned grass patches that grew in between the laid out concrete that made up the parking lots again.

🤦‍♂️

Till the next update.

Messiness

There is something charming about light novels that just makes it ever so irresistible to continue reading. The pacing tends to be faster, the language (even after translation) tends to be more straightforward, and it is also fairly short as far as written works go. I mean, that's probably why I completely enjoyed my time today reading a few more volumes of KonoSuba.

But the frivolity of light novels aside, I would really want to talk a little bit more about recent happenings.

A couple of neighbourhood shops have finally wound up within the past couple of months. One was a shop that sold toddlers' apparel/toys, and the other was a home-made gelato shop. The toddlers' apparel/toys place's demise was really a matter of time, considering just how niched their particular clientele is---toddlers' clothes are probably of a higher velocity than even women's ``fast fashion'', considering how fast they grow, and how often it is to have hand-downs from others within the cohort just to stretch the dollar to ensure that consumables such as disposable diapers and formula milk can be consistently replenished.

The home-made gelato shop though... it's such a waste. I liked that shop---I've purchased quite a few high-quality gelato cones from them over the two or three years that they have existed. They had interesting flavours, and had even brought out an interesting milk-shake drink that was based on ice-blending their gelato as well. The price point wasn't too shabby considering what they were selling, and I could see it as something that could have some staying power as a sort of hang-out place to cool off after a day's work.

The only problem was that this whole management of the pandemic just made it neigh impossible to keep things going. Restriction rules for dining in came in at seemingly unpredictable moments, with inconsistencies of rules and bad technological implementation. For those in the F&B industry, timeliness of the supply chain is of paramount importance. No matter what type of food/beverage they sell, the freshness of the ingredients that make these was a necessity to ensure that people do not get sick from consuming the foods/beverages that are made from them. These kinds of supply chains require a certain amount of predictability, partly to ensure that money/supply isn't wasted, and partly to continue complying with basic food hygiene requirements.

This can be made much worse for shops that rely on even more specialised supplies. Take my favourite sushi place for example. They use fresh fish, which requires them to be brought in from boats that deep freeze their catch as soon as possible to maintain freshness throughout the entire fishing period. Boats may come often, but the availability of supply is often booked well in advance of the boats' arrival in port. When rules on restrictions kick in with only three days to spare, such stock needs to be disposed off quickly enough, otherwise there will be a surfeit of them that needs to be accounted for using local freezers, with artificially lowered demand.

It makes things really hard to handle. It's no wonder that even the proprietor just gave up after the umpteenth restriction and just called it a day, opting (like me) to wait things out before striking forth once more.

I guess the same reasoning might work for the gelato place as well.

A pity.

Anyway, while all these nonsense were going on, a new wave of nonsense has come on---the whole ``return your tray'' movement that was somehow ``made'' into law. More precisely, the National Environment Agency (NEA) has decided to add new rules to more strongly enforce CAP 95, §17(1) in the sense of re-interpreting the offenses as stipulated in that section to include the non-clearing of dirty trays, or the remnants of cutlery and what not on the trays that have been used to carry one's food from the stall to the table after said food is consumed as a fine-able offense, as explained here.

Is a non-consumable item like a tray and associated cutlery/bowls/plates/cups considered ``refuse'' or ``rubbish'' in the sense that CAP 95, §17(1) claims? I don't know---I'm not a lawyer, but a lay reading of the relevant statute as claimed by NEA suggests over-reach of some sorts. The only way to find out for sure is to have it legally challenged, but it does feel kind of silly to push through just to find out about that. Especially in a place that prides itself on its bureaucratic efficiency and thoroughness.

Did anyone really think that the laws/rules were written without careful thought about its ramficiations?

After all, there are many more laws that exist that have broader-reaching effects than this puny one that ought to have a more direct challenge. But, ah, good luck with that. In a small place like SIN city, the issue of the principal-agent problem is much heightened. For those in the professional line, where only reputation separates one from a life-time of work and a life-time of being shunned from the professional society, this problem can cause some rather strong disincentives for those who may want to engage the service of the professional to mount such challenges. It's not about corruption... it's straight up self-preservation issues. Any client is just one case for a short period of time, but the human factor in the relationship of the professional lives throughout the entire career of that professional. It can always be said that all decisions will be made as objectively as it is possible...

...but for those of us who have 混-ed in society for a while, how many of us believe that whole-heartedly? Sure, the official response can be defined objectively, but the impetus towards the decision may come from elsewhere that is not necessarily provable/disprovable.

But let's backtrack a bit on why I find the tray return thing nonsensical. I don't know when/how did we transitioned from the ``mostly stallholder delivers your order to your table'' model into a ``mostly you self-serve'' model when it comes to ``public dining''. Was it due to the rise of the food court model that this became predominant? Because I remembered that back in the 1990s, one would usually just order from the stallholder at the hawker centre/kopitiam, tell them your table number, and then go sit the heck down. They will come by with your food eventually.

There were no trays involved. Let me say that again: there were no trays involved.

I cannot remember when the first food courts became a thing. For reference, a ``food court'' can be thought of as a primarily air-conditioned collective of stalls with seating, and operated by a company. I think that was roughly when the whole numbered tables went away, as well as the whole ``stallholders managing their own crockery'' thing. At that point, all the stallholders drew upon a common pool of serving equipment, with standardised forks, spoons, chopsticks, plates, bowls, and trays. That last item was necessary because the design of the stalls generally sequestered the stallholders behind their stalls to be dedicated cooking machines. Combine that with the lack of table numbers of rapid identification of labels, it meant that the ``self-service model'' became the norm.

Food courts being run by companies mean that they benefit from economies of scale, which meant that overall there were more of them compared to the other types of [cheap] public food places. Them operating in the air-conditioned malls throughout SIN city helped, and I suppose it was from the mid-2000s that the model took off.

Come to think of it, the food courts seemed to take the model of the fast food counter & self-service concept (think McDonald's/KFC) and expanded upon it.

I guess that it was from then on that the whole tray business became a thing.

As for tray return... sigh. Right now they are couching it under anti-COVID-19 terms (which legislation these days doesn't rely on the bogeyman of COVID-19 as a motivation?), but I guess it's really a case of...

I actually don't know what it is a case of. That's very strange. Is it some kind of morality statement hidden behind hygiene (mind you, there are cleaners who were/are hired to clear the tables before/and at present), a statement of patriarchical power, a pet peeve, a ``slippery slopes'' type set up?

I don't actually know.

What I do know is that I have gone on long enough with this post, and it is time to hit that publish button.

Till the next update then.

Milquetoast

Yet another day of hiding in the apartment as the world around me burns for one reason or another.

Today's a passive sort of day. I didn't play any games, not even running Minecraft in the background AFK-ing while the auto-sorted chests fill slowly with mob items, nor did I work on LED2-20. I read a couple more chapters of Luke under analysis in the ESV Study Bible, read a couple more articles from The Best of BYTE: Two Decades on the Leading Edge, finished reading Thaïs, and volume 1 of KonoSuba, and am about slightly under half-way through for volume 2.

Thaïs is a tragedy. While the epynomous character ascends through her reconciliation with her previous baptism under the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, the protagonist (Paphnutius) himself who started as being holy eventually became a backsliding Christian when he discovered that his quest to evangelise to Thaïs had mutated into a devolution of his original morals and ethics, becoming plagued with demons and the like after delivering her to the nunnery. While not scripture, it is a parable of sorts to remind ourselves that even the truest of believers must be constantly aware of how the world affects them, and to be honest to both oneself and to God to ensure that one does not backslide to falling back into sin. The story ends on a cliff-hanger of sorts, where Paphnutius finally realised his sin, but does not provide the resolution on whether he had come back from that or not. There were bits of discussion among the pagan philosophers amidst Thaïs, but they were really more of a sidetrack that contributed little to the main story---think of it like how Victor Hugo went on various tangents explaining/describing his pet topics while writing Les Misérables.

Apparently Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp had outages for a few hours while I was asleep. That was... surprising, but it didn't faze me much. As I had mentioned in reply to someone who was kind enough to share with me the news:

Besides, it's not like anything of value was truly lost when those services went down. 🤣

Which is true. Facebook was never a ``serious'' thing, no matter how seriously they want to take themselves (they have to---it's literally their business). Instagram is a cesspool of attention-seekers selling the pleasures of the flesh for the most part, whether it is lust, gluttony, or general envy/covetousness. And Whatsapp... oof... where to start? Mis-information central, spam central... with vague communication uses. I mean, don't get me wrong, I like me some instant messaging systems that allows short (both in length and duration of validity) messages to be sent. But it is a terrible medium for conducting ``serious'' business in, since it is bloody impossible to hunt down references the way that email can handle in a more effective manner. And it being a misinformation/spam central comes from the ease of forwarding all kinds of rubbish-y messages without a safe means of checking them; that last bit, I blame it on the form factor of being primarily accessible over a smartphone. Smartphones aren't exactly conducive for rigour in any sense of the word---that ``tap'' versus ``long tap'' distinction makes it very easy to trigger off the wrong gesture, compared to the ``left click'' versus ``right click'' that one can do in PC-land.

I am thankful that my hard-ass personality has more or less ensured that the people who do have ``my'' Whatsapp contact do not abuse it the way that I have heard from the nightmares shared online; one of the perks of being who I am, eh?

I think that's about it for now. Maybe I'll complete volume 2 of KonoSuba tonight before heading to sleep. I don't really feel like doing anything active today.

Till the next update.

Mumbles

Hmm.

It's a slow-ish day today. I built the automated bamboo farm at my mob farm in Minecraft, bolstered the defenses at the nether-portal in the jungle biome in the overworld, reconstructed my ``Adventurer's Shovel'' to not have fortune enchantment (the original one was generating 100% flint instead of retrieving the gravel---it was bad because gravel was more useful for concrete making, while I had a surplus of arrows, thus needing less flint than expected), and harvested quite a bit of jungle logs from the jungle biome itself.

I also thought a little bit about how to reduce the number of screen pages that I would like to use in LED2-20---I think I might have a viable solution, but it will require testing.

Apart from those, I was just doing some reading here and there: the analysis of Luke in the ESV Study Bible, and a bit more of Thaïs while waiting for my head shave.

Anyway, I was just thinking, I know that I wouldn't want children for a variety of reasons, but I could never figure out if I would like to be on the look out for a spouse. Over the past few weeks though, I had been thinking about it on and off, realising that as time went on, there were fewer and fewer reasons on why I should have a spouse. I am not fearful of responsibility, but I am realising that given my mental state about the world, probably the last thing that I want to do is to increase the number of ties I have with the world through the union between me and some female. It wouldn't be fair to me, nor her.

But things like these, i.e. involving interactions with other people, are largely outside of my control. They are, however, well within the control of God. So if God wills it, I will end up with a spouse, and if otherwise, so be it. I just need to keep my faith and trust in His plan, and do what I can with whatever I've got, gifts by grace, or otherwise.

It's freeing in many ways. Reduction of the need to worry too hard about how to accomplish things on my own, even in the face of situations that are completely out of my control. This is especially true in the face of this pandemic where the normal order of things are generally on the brink of being upset, where much of the past knowledge that we have is even less capable for predicting what is happening next. The sins of the past are fast catching up to us, particularly so for the morally questionable decisions that were made in the bid for quick, short term gains.

The true question is, will we learn from these mistakes and choose resilience through forging a new social/cultural contract, or will we end up doubling down and digging ourselves deeper into morass to allow those who have benefited from before to continue benefiting while we all suffer the consequences.

Today, more than ever, we are at the cusp of a watershed moment in SIN city. I pray that God will grant us all the wisdom to proceed in the direction that He wills, and may He be merciful and allow us to continue existing despite all the challenges like how we have existed before.

That's all for today. Maybe tomorrow's gonna be a different day.

Mind & Minecraft

I spent much of the day reading, completing The Inner Game of Music: The Classic Guide to Reaching a New Level of Musical Performance by Barry Green, and W. Timothy Gallwey, and starting on Thaï by Anatole France, translated by Robert B. Douglas.

Why Thaïs? One word: Méditation by Jules Massenet. That piece came from the opera that was inspired by Thaïs, and had piqued my curiosity about the source material. And so, began reading it I have.

------

I spent some time adjusting my storage for my twin sugar cane farm located beneath the main kill-floor of my mob farm. Previously, the output of the farms were piped via hoppers directly into a 2 double-chest storage system with a double-chest buffer in between. The problem was that the rate of production of the sugar can farm was closer in order of magnitude to that of the arrows (or about two-thirds that of the bone), and so the 2 double-chest storage system was insufficient. I had set up the more sophisticated storage for the other items that come from the mob farm, and wanted to upgrade the one for my sugar cane twin-farm as well.

The only problem was that I built my twin-farm ``too low'', which meant that I need to somehow move the sugar cane upwards so that it can be gravity fed into the storage system.

Unfortunately, there are just too few ways of moving items upwards compared to moving them downwards or even horizontally. There were two major designs that were cheap enough to build: a dropper elevator, or a upward water elevator. A dropper elevator is a bit more costly than the upward water elevator since it requires 6 cobblestones per dropper, and more importantly, I have experience building an upward water elevator over the dropper one. And so it was decided that I would do that.

Much of the time was spent trying to get it just right. The full source-blocks water column could be held in place without leakage by the wall of chests and hoppers, but their geometry made it exceedingly easy for any entities tossed out by the dropper into the upward water column to get stuck there. The entities getting stuck is also random, since the launch velocity from the feeding dropper into the water column is all over the place. I tried minor tweaks here and there to improve the trajectory, but to no avail.

So I had to isolate the water column itself, and manoeuvre the chest/hopper stack around it. It took me a while, since I had to rebuild that part of the storage system and ensure that redstone signals were not contaminated in the limited space, but I managed to get it to work.

The screenshot is after I spent a little bit of time rotating the finally-working model so that it sits flush and can have the little item-frame sign show up similarly to the rest.

I also spent some time building a melon farm from the melons that I had found from the jungle biome that I had tracked down. The next thing that I would like to do is to build a bamboo farm and feed it into the storage system below the mob farm, and think about how to fix the spider farm so that I can get the string production going as well. I also need to figure out how to grow the cocoa beans that I found in the jungle biome, and maybe explore more of the biome itself as well.

Alternatively, I could build a nether-rail to connect to the end-portal. Hmmm... choices, choices, choices.

Anyway, that's all I have for today. Till the next update.

Main-Loop Accurate Delay

I talked in the earlier post for today about trying out a stochastic approach towards computing the number of vertical retrace cycles needed to enact a specific main-loop processing rate. What I missed out is a lot on why.

Think of the main-loop using any conceptual framework: I'll use OODA because it corresponds closely to what the main-loop of a game does. Roughly, we process user input, update internal data structures, draw sprites and/or compute collision, wait for vertical retrace, flip page, in that order per iteration of the main-loop. For most of the time, each successful iteration through this main-loop counts as a frame of [logical] video output.

The easiest way of programming the main-loop is to lock-step the physics engine (typified here as ``update internal data structures'' and ``compute collision'') with the actual rendering pipeline. That's why for many older games, when the frame rate is unlocked to allow hundreds of frames per second (fps), the physics can get... wonky.

I know I say older games, but truth is, this particular main-loop design is easy to build and thus shows up almost everywhere. Anytime a ``frame-rate dependent physics engine abuse'' type bug/feature shows up, this should be the first thing that comes to mind.

This is also a reason on why some games seem to react more quickly when the frame rate limit is raised.

But I'm not here to talk about the merits of lock-stepping the physics with the rendering pipeline. I'm just assuming that it is the case.

For consistency in behaviour, it is often a good idea to limit the processing rate of the main-loop. This means that it is necessary to ensure that each iteration takes roughly the same time, which means padding it with some sort of delay mechanism. I'm working in retro-world, so I have few modern day options like using a high-precision sleep() command that gives micro-second precision. In LED(II), I used empty FOR-loops, relying on a pre-main-loop calibration process counting up the number of iterations to complete in a given amount of time---this is in contrast with the prevalent method then of counting a fixed number of loops and determining the duration takken, a method that led to ``divide by zero'' errors when run on fast enough PCs (we're talking the difference between the program running well on an 80386 and having a ``divide by zero'' error on a Pentium I).

In LED2-20, I'm using a different method: use a known higher-precision timing mechanism as the workload in a busy-wait loop instead. In this case, I'm relying on the VGA port of 0x3da that yields a return time of exactly the vertical retrace duration. The duration is well-documented: for my selected screen mode, the vertical retrace rate is 70 Hz, which has a vertical retrace duration of 0.014 s. Comparing this to the 18.2 Hz of the built-in timer, it is nearly 4× more precise.

This delay per iteration is not necessarily constant, since it depends on how much time the actual main-loop workload consumes. I do have a low-precision timer (the 18.2 Hz one) running as an event trap in the background that helps me recalibrate the delay according to the actual number of iterations fully completed in between the timer interrupts, and it is from there that I discovered that the loop count was wildly unstable. I dug in and realised that I faced the problem of needing delays that were more precise than 0.014 s. Is it possible using this fixed clock of 70 Hz?

The answer is yes, if I'm allowing myself to expand my definition of the target delay to the average delay over time. So if I need a delay of about 0.05 s which requires 3.5 ticks of the 70 Hz, I can achieve it by counting 3 ticks 50% of the time, and 4 ticks 50% of the time.

A wholly deterministic method to obtain the same result can be seen in the theory of pulse-width modulation (PWM), but I cannot do it since the delays can change between recalibration, but PWM needs a defined pulsing cycle. Moreover, the function that translates the duration in floating point seconds to screen ticks does not use any static variables to assist in tracking the pattern for the pulsing cycle [for the additional tick].

Hence, using a random number is the best ``independent'' sort of way. The idea is to return at least the smallest integer number of 70 Hz ticks that do not exceed the delay duration, and add 1 tick to it with probability equal to the remaining fraction of a tick that will yield us the correct one. The principle is therefore similar to that of PWM, except that I replace determinism with a stochastically-driven behaviour instead.

It seems to work as the main-loop processing rate is definitely within the range of whatever I set it to be after one recalibration cycle.

That's enough for now.

Momentum

I'll keep it short as it has been a short day of few (but time-consuming) things that happened.

I read some more commentaries within the ESV Study Bible, after which I spent some time making safe my paths to the nether-rail and the nether-rail itself. I went to church, and now I'm home, thinking about a stochastic mechanism to get sub-vertical refresh rate precision given the 70 Hz hard limit, while watching Gawr Gura's Minecraft stream in the background.

I've also updated my stream cacher to use yt-dlp instead of youtube-dl because it has fixed a critical bug involving bad timestamps for video streams that last longer than 2 hours. I have also tweaked the incantation used for caching these streams to use the 480p quality (true resolution of 854 px×480 px) instead of 1080p because I seem to run it in my vertical side-screen (horizontal width: 1080 px) more often these days while I am working on either writing, coding, or gaming on the main [horizontal] screen. It seems like I am in the active phase again, compared to that time period where I was doing more reading instead.

I used to not do that stream caching bit because of the bug in youtube-dl, but have returned to it recently because the web browser-based Youtube viewer simply consumes too much resources to render the video. Caching it through downloading and then running it through VLC Media Player is more resource efficient, not to mention a finer grained control over the speed-up (that's how I can watch several multi-hour streams within a day). Doing that in the web browser-based Youtube viewer makes it consume even more resources, and also puts it at the mercy of the server download rate.

Anyway, that's all I have for now. Till the next update.

More Minecraft Fun

Oh hey, look: it's Friday, and simultaneously the start of October. We are fast reaching the end of this tumultous year, and to me, it feels as though I've only just begun this new chapter in life.

I spent much of the day pottering about in Minecraft, adjusting the item auto-sorter to use five double-chests (that's 5×54 slots×64 items per slot, giving a total item capacity of 17280 items) with associated hoppers to handle some of the higher rate loot that the dead mobs drop (I'm staring at you, skeleton with the expected number of bones being roughly 1.5×4.5=6.75 per group spawn. I added two more items to the item auto-sorter, hoping to get a spider farm working simultaneously, but the set up I created had issues that I didn't know how to resolve. Using the original gravity-type set up similar to my existing mob farm, I had spiders spawning, but they seemed trapped in the 2×2 holes, refusing to fall. I switched over to a side-spawn flow-pushing set up, but that didn't spawn any spiders at all. I am a little disappointed, and have abandoned that for the moment.

I also adjusted the item auto-sorter to route the unneeded zombie flesh from the dead zombies into an automatic trash can---it's a set up that uses a redstone clock circuit to pulse a dropper fed with items through a hopper which will drop each item into a cauldron of lava, the last of which would destroy the entity by removing it out of the game. The clock circuit was needed because the dropper only operated on a change in redstone signal, which meant that a simple unmodulated redstone signal from a lever was insufficient.

I also improved the way to get up and down between the main mob farm floor and the storage floor that contained the warehouse, item auto-sorter, auto-trash can, and the automatic sugar cane farm.

After doing all that I, I decided on a whim to build the nether-rail that I talked about. That was completed in a jiffy, considering that one block in the nether corresponded to 8 blocks in the overworld. So that 2.7k+ block railway that I built while exploring my way to a deep ocean biome became a much shorter 300+ block nether-rail. That distance compression comes at a price though---travel through the nether is more dangerous than in the overworld. For instance, the main way to get structures destroyed in the overworld is carelessness with regard to creepers. The mobility of the creepers is limited to land, and more importantly, they only cause structural damage when they are in very close range of the player.

In the nether though, there exists ghasts. Ghasts are ranged mobs that fire projectiles that explode on impact. Any building material that doesn't have enough blast resistance will just disappear in that circumstance. Thankfully, my primary building material for structural elements has been smooth stone, whose blast resistance of 6 can withstand the damage from the ghasts' fireballs. But the rails that sit on them... those aren't as resistant, and can prove to be a problem. So one of the projects that I will need to do later on is to build a protective covering around the rails for the parts that are heavily exposed.

Anyway, that's all I have for now. I'm going to work a little bit on synchronising mechanisms in the main-loop of LED2-20 before calling it a night.

Till the next update.

Main Loop Start and Mob Farm+

Ah. After a bunch of effort creating the QuickBASIC/QBasic syntax highlighting script for Vim, I finally sat down to write the skeleton for the main loop of LED2-20. The first thing that I started on was the keyboard event trapper. According to my design document, I had to define 21 keys:

• 4 built-in for arrows;
• 4 for ``extended'' keyboard arrows;
• 4 weapon-related;
• 8 relating to utility functions; and
• 1 for quitting the main loop.

The key idea here is to use the event-trapping to set a bit-wise flag that the key had been detected to press. Then, when I reach the ``user interaction'' processing part of the main loop, I can consult the bit-wise flags ``all at once'' and deal with them. This allows the processing of the so-called chorded keys, i.e. having more than one key pressed at once. Using the old method of reading directly from INKEY$ led to all kinds of synchronisation problems, among which was the sheer impossibility of tracking chorded keys.

The proper tracking of chorded keys is important for movement. One of the old-school bugs/features of the day is the unintentional speed boost from chording two or more directions at once. Usually the keys provide only 4-directional movements, with each key adding one unit of movement in their associated direction. This means that if I chord [say] the right and down keys, I end up moving at a distance of about 1.4 in the down-right direction, as opposed to moving 1 in the the down-right direction. If the movement units are singular (like just 1 unit), then it doesn't matter too much. Since I am intending to allow the player to change the maximum thrust power of the LED, this boost is definitely unintentional. With the method I stated, the direction keys now provide the correct interpretation of setting the direction, and more importantly I don't need to spend much of my interpreter time polling the keyboard via INKEY$ and do weird math to figure out the chording.

In QuickBASIC/QBasic land, there is a need to differentiate between interpreter and behind-the-scenes run-time. Interpreter run-time is necessarily slower, since each line of code translates to multiple lines of machine code, whereas behind-the-scenes run-time tend to be more efficient since there is little to no translation time required to get it to run on the metal. That's why during the later parts of QuickBASIC/QBasic's run, near the end of the Windows 98 era, assembly-based libraries like DirectQB and FutureLibrary were a thing. At that point, much of the main-loop and rendering engine is handled using behind-the-scenes run-time, while the game logic is still handled at the interpreter level.

I could use those libraries for LED2-20, but that's not the purpose of this retro-programming project.

Anyway, I wrote up the basic MAINLOOP.BAS, and used it to test the qb.vim file, doing more fixes along the way to both and publishing the updated qb.vim file as and when I reached some kind of milestone. One thing I learnt along the way was the idea of a ``dotted filetype'' in Vim, where one can define a chain of syntax highlight scripts to load in left-to-right order. I learnt about it solely to fix the problems that NERD Commenter was having when I used qb.vim only. The problem was that NERD Commenter was expecting something called ``basic'' in the filetype system variable, and not seeing it, defaulted to using C-style comments.

And that's about it for the retro-programming bit for now.

------

In Minecraft, I've finally started building up the item auto-sorter and the two automated sugar cane farms under my mob farm. They were surprisingly easy to build, and I had finished it within a couple of hours of starting. So now, when I AFK at the mob farm, I can get bones (good for bonemeal for an empowered manual tree farm), arrows (good in general), gunpowder (great for rockets needed to fly in Elytra), and sugar cane (can be crafted into paper to make rockets).

Maybe the next Minecraft project will be to build me some nether-rails. That one will involve some adventuring and careful math. Another project might be to use my Elytra to find some other biomes containing other useful materials that I still haven't seen, like bamboo.

Anyway, that's all I have for now. Till the next update then.

Fixing Stewpid O'Clock Mistakes

Okay, stewpid o'clock's claim of too subtle was itself too subtle, or ``I really shouldn't be refactoring code at stupid o'clock in the morning when I am not thinking so straight''.

Here's how it should really look like:

I had the relevant search patterns defined more or less correctly, but the problem was that I had put them in the wrong place. You see, in Vim syntax highlighting, the order in which the patterns appear matters a whole lot. Usually we will structure the most general matching to create an initial assignment, and then bring up specific patterns to refine it to special case input.

So in this case, the (simplified version of) general matching is that of a Comment, which is

syn region qbComment start="'" end="$" contains=qbTodo

And the pattern for the '$INCLUDE: 'FILEPAK.BI' metacommand is

syn region qbMetacommand start="'\s*\$include" end="$"

This means that the pattern for $INCLUDE is more specific than the one for regular comments.

In my bid to refactor, I had shifted all the QuickBASIC-only patterns up to the front of the file. So it had first assigned the matching for $INCLUDE correctly, but then when it encountered the rule for comments, it re-assigned the matching to that of the comments since it was more general.

I fixed that this morning, and filled in quite a few more quality-of-life type updates, specifically detecting and highlighting some lexical-level errors where possible, as well as tweaking some edge case-related stuff that I ``know''.

Anyway, I'm basically done with this side-track for now. You can download it from here if you are interested for some reason. Note that this isn't exemplary of how a Vim syntax file should look like---I did hack it up in a moment of annoyance in less than a day.

Till the next update.

Stewpid O'Clock with Basic in Vim

I wasn't expecting to do this. I never wanted to do this.

But I had to. I felt compelled to.

And so, it is done. Here we have it running in QuickBASIC syntax mode:

Font of Vim (see previous post for details) and retro light-gray text on dark blue background aside, what I had done over the past few hours was to painstakingly define the various highlight groups needed for highlighting the various keywords that QuickBASIC has (there are many). I derived this list from the handy index page of the built-in QuickBASIC help file.

On a whim, I decided to pull up the QBasic help file and check out what keywords it didn't support and incorporate a check in the syntax highlighting definition list to display them as an error. And here is how it looks like with that applied:

Notice how the COMMAND$ is now highlighted in error-red. That's because QBasic does not support that keyword which returns the arguments that were passed from the command line.

Notice also the more subtle effect of '$INCLUDE: 'FILEPAK.BI'. In QuickBASIC mode, it shares the same metacommand syntax highlight as '$DYNAMIC, but in QBasic mode, it is treated as nothing more than a regular comment. The colour change is very subtle, and it is there---in fact, I had to edit this post after publishing just to state this, because I didn't even notice it myself while writing this.

It works well as compared to whatever was being distributed in regular Vim or even in Vim-polyglot. I think there might be some other edge cases that I have overlooked, but c'mon, it's stupid o'clock now. I gotta go crash out before I start to massively hallucinate.

Peace.

Quickie

I... got annoyed at the terrible syntax highlighting for the QuickBASIC dialect of BASIC in Vim. And so, I've been spending time working on it today, after I had read the chapter on Romans from the ESV Study Bible.

I also updated my main house in Minecraft, expanding the outside porch with smooth stone, and adding a new brick wall (more like fences from a game mechanics perspective) perimeter. I experimented a little with using firework rockets for my crossbow: I didn't like the high variance in damage, and mob densities really don't justify the need for such a large AOE attack in the first place. I also did a little exploration with my Elytra to find the treasure with a treasure map that I found, and it was cool.

My next projects in my Minecraft world would be to build an auto-sorter at my mob farm, and a couple of sugar cane farms under my mob farm so that I can easily harvest and build rockets, TNT, and other fun things like make use of the bone meal which I can get from crushing the large amounts of bones that my mob farm drops.

Anyway, that's all for today's entry. I'm going to work more on that syntax highlighting script. Till the next update.

gVim Font Fixes and Other Tangents

Okay, I fixed something that has been irking me for a very long time: why gVim in Windows cannot use my favourite pan-Unicode font, Unifont in it despite being distinctively monospaced in nature as compared to the regular proportional fonts.

As it turns out, the TTF marks it as ``Even Width'' instead of ``Monospaced'', which explains why despite having the font installed, I simply could not select/set it in gVim via the .vimrc file.

The solution then is to grab Fontforge (I already have it installed some time back), and go through the annoying process of setting the correct marked information. I'm replicating the steps here in case the information goes away:

1. Fire up Fontforge and load the relevant TTF file.
2. Once loaded, go ``Element''→``Font Info''→``OS/2''→``Panrose'' and set ``Proportion'' to ``Monospaced''.
3. Head to ``PS Names'' and update the various fields to not clash with the existings ones for Unifont (I just shoved a capital `H' in front for ``Hacked'', so my hacked font is now ``HUnifont'').
4. After dismissing all the dialogue boxes, head to ``File''→``Generate Fonts'' and just follow through to generate some new TTF, ignoring warnings/errors.
5. Install the generated TTF and we are done.

And from that, we've got a ``monospaced'' version of Unifont that can be activated in gVim. The multi-cellular span of some double-width characters (like CJK ideograms) are rendered correctly, as is the navigation through them, so all in all, I call this a success.

On a semi-related note, after getting back into QuickBASIC on my retro-programming tour, I've fallen back in love with the stupidity that is the 9×16 VGA character font. You see, when I was writing FilePak for LED2-20, I used the iconic QuickBASIC IDE with its glorious 80×25 text mode display with blue background and light gray characters in full-screen, and that really made my eyeballs feel so at home, despite these days trying my best to avoid dealing with blue light [at night] in general.

So nostalgic.

Anyway, someone has gone through the trouble and created modern equivalents of the old school text-mode fonts, with the added proportion adjustments to ensure that what is rendered is closer to the true physical proportions from back in the day.

And this brings up a different aspect of the old days. Programmers these days are spoiled for a few reasons:

1. Physical screen aspect ratios have been synchronised with logical screen aspect ratios, leading to square pixels; and
2. Screen resolutions are high enough that a pixel is much closer to the ideal of a dimensionless point than before.

For the first point, things have largely been determined through the HDMI standard that unifies computer screens and television screens, defining important features for video formats that get back-ported into regular computer displays. In yonder days of computing, the computer display being solely analogue meant that the actual output signal from the DAC to the display had little to do with how the screen was logically handled, which led to interesting problems like having a 4:3 (aspect ratio 1.3+) monitor trying to display a 320×200 (aspect ratio 1.6) screen. This meant that each logical pixel had a physical form that was some squished version. This led to interesting ``adjustments'' to draw things like circles, as seen in this official documentation in QuickBASIC's help file:

I can only imagine how complex the various early versions of CAD programs were just to accomodate the myriads of odd-shaped displays while still using the logical CGA/EGA/VGA/VESA standards.

By a fluke of history, what was originally complicated aspect ratio wrangling in the past for 320×200 resolutions is completely nullified with the modern screens having exactly the 1.6 aspect ratio. It makes old programs that tried to compensate for that look wrong now, but it makes lazy programmer me who didn't see the need to mess with all these physical stuff that I cannot control very happy to see that circles that I kept logically correct is now physically correct as well. And this is likely to keep being the same since 4:3 monitors are not making a come back any more. Rumour has it that the reason for the 4:3 aspect ratio came from how it introduced less variance in the curvature of the CRT (cathode ray tube you faux ``woke'' bugger) between the centre and the edges since it was closest to being ``circular''---I don't know if it is true, nor do I really care as much.

As for the second point, it means that more details can be added to the graphics in a brute-force sort of way, as opposed to many of the tricks that had to be employed to work with the big-ass rectangle pixels that we used to see. There's no real problem with this, just that it really makes graphics related design that much easier since it relies more on fundamentals than on advanced trickery that is tailored to the hardware of the time.

I think that's about it. Maybe I should create a new tag in addition to technical for these retro-programming stuff.

Maybe.

Till the next update then.