TL;DR:
added comments support to the blog, did some music and hypnosis projects, fixed a few bugs in plakar and began a new toy project.

Learnt myself some Swift

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Got myself a book on the Swift programming language, spent a couple hours reading it and I really enjoyed it.

I was mostly curious, I don’t have anything I want to do with it at the moment, but it seemed really nice as it kind of looks like a mix between C, Golang and Python, taking bits I like from the three of them.

We’ll see if something comes out of it for me in the future :-)

Added table of content and comments support to the blog

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For the last few years, this blog has used a static generator so that I could write the posts in Markdown and publish by committing to a repository. This is nice because the website is standalone and I can easily move it around from machine to machine, but it has prevented me from providing comments and I ended up relying on Github discussions and adding a link to the proper discussion below each article I write.

I do get feedback from people, but at the exception of some articles that were referenced on popular websites, these feedbacks tend to happen through other means like private messages on Twitter or discord. Maybe these people wouldn’t leave a comment on the blog if it was possible, but maybe it’s just because having to follow a link and comment elsewhere is not practical and does not keep the article available with a scroll.

So I found a nice javascript library that allows interfacing with the Github discussions API, and now each article has… its own comment section. It is now possible to comment directly at the bottom of each article, the comments reflect what was discussed directly on Github and are published there.

While at it, I figured it was possible to add a table of content to my articles so you can jump to specific sections. I have not added it to previous articles, though I might for some, but from now on I’ll make sure to always include one as I had lengthy articles in the past and it’ll ease reading.

Feel free to comment this article and test :-)

Music-related work

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I enrolled in a course on music production that will start in March 2023 at a local studio in Nantes, so I spent some time playing with Logic Pro X to be more familiar with it and not begin the course as a complete newbie with regard to tools.

These are four LoFi remixes I worked on by importing midi tracks, altering instruments, scores and tempo, and adding some effects. Definitely not fantastic but I do like the result for some so I’m sharing:

Let me know if you like them, I have created a specific playlist on my youtube channel for these experiments, you can subscribe, comment and give thumbs up :-)

Hypnosis-related work

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I haven’t spent much time at the hypnosis office since I came back from holidays, only performing a few sessions here and there, mostly due to dedicating time to my son as he entered kindergarten and I need to adjust to his schedule.

So I decided to spend some time working on a podcast in French to explain how hypnosis works at low-level. I have recorded the first three episodes of 8 and I intend to release roughly 1 per month, with next episode due in late November or early December as I’ll present a conference in November and won’t have time to record.

As a side-note, I found it enjoyable to record so I might create a podcast related to computer stuff in the future, when I’m done with this one.

A bit of plakar work

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First, I fixed a crash that happened when trying to list content of a path that consisted in a single directory and not starting with /. Basically, there is no such thing as a “relative” path in plakar as they are always relative to the snapshot and therefore to the root of a snapshot, so def:etc is really def:/etc as far as plakar is concerned. Because of how paths are handled, by splitting pathnames into atoms and recreating a filesystem view, this confused plakar about what was the root directory and caused it to crash. I fixed the function that splits a snapshot path (ie: <snapshot>:<pathname>) into prepending a slash to the pathname portion whenever there isn’t, which should not only fix the crash I observed but also all commands that accept snapshot paths.

Then, I spotted a more annoying bug where restoring a snapshot results in a partial restore with missing files. I was concerned at first because the last thing I want in a backup tool is for a snapshot to miss files, however after a bit of testing I could verify that they weren’t really missing as they could all be restored individually, this pinpointed to a bug in the pull primitive which seems to miss some restorable files. I spent several hours trying to understand the issue but couldn’t figure out why it happens, except that it happens mostly with snapshots containing a lot of files and when pull is parallelized. It doesn’t happen, or at least I could not reproduce, when working with a small snapshot or when pull is sequential. I removed concurrency for the time being but this is not practical, sequential restore of a large snapshot is dead slow, I’ll continue tracking the issue.

I also removed the gzip support that I added in plakar cat around May, and moved it to a dedicated plakar gzcat command. Back then it seemed like a good idea to me that plakar cat transparently inflated compressed output at it allowed to plakar cat a compressed log, but after some thinking I’d rather provide that through a dedicated command as it allows using plakar cat to redirect a compressed stream to a file, something that was no longer doable.

Finally, I changed the way plakar checksum works and implemented a -fast option. The command allows printing the sha256 checksum of a file contained in a snapshot, and since I already had the checksum in the snapshot INDEX, the command didn’t recompute it but used the recorded checksum instead. I changed it so that it recomputes the checksum by default, reading the file chunk by chunk, and only resorting to the recorded checksum when the -fast option is used. In practice, this should always produce the same result unless the plakar store has corrupted chunks.

And that’s all for plakar !

A new project: streamchain

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So this is a TOY project, nothing serious, I’m just experimenting with an idea.

Basically, I wrote a tool which lets me create a “twitter-like” stream where I can post short messages, however instead of being centralized on a server they are stored in a standalone structured file.

The file is structured in a way that allows verifying both authenticity and integrity, but also allows for fast random access to any message without having to read the entire file. A streamchain reader can validate that the streamchain file originates from its owner, it can validate that it has not been tampered with, and can seek to any message in constant time regardless of the streamchain size.

As a result, it can be hosted anywhere from an s3 object storage to a static web server, and if the storage supports range queries, like pretty much all HTTP servers… then all the better. A streamchain client reader that can talk HTTP can either mirror a streamchain locally and perform range queries to synchronize updates, or it can consume the streamchain remotely without downloading it entirely.

I have a working PoC but I’m not ready to publish the code yet, so I’ll likely write an article about it when I open the repository publically.

What’s next ?

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A conference on hypnosis for psychology students in November, so probably not much happening in the next two weeks as I prepare for it.

Then, I’ll try to get streamchain in shape to open the repository.

Take care, stay tuned, I’ll post as soon as I resume my work !