For a while I have been trying to work out some bugs in David Johnson-Davies’ uLisp interpreter for Arduinos. I ported some macro and quasiquote extensions for an older version of uLisp to the current version, and apparently I did not do something right – it crashes whenever I try to …

I did a total redesign of my Langton’s Ant simulator last week – and most of the formatting I was able to do with pure CSS - no Javascript needed for layout control.

Previously I had a rather crude layout consisting of a fixed-size canvas and a textbox below it. The …

I have finally written code that actually compiled and ran on the little ESP32 board I bought, and I hate the blasted thing already.

For starters, the process is slow, annoying, and tedious:

1. I click UPLOAD, and the Arduino IDE begins compiling by … dumping preferences.
2. It then has to shuffle …

Aaah, that’s been a nice break from coding. Four weeks with no commits pushed to Phoo. It’s a shame I left it in a broken state. I haven’t the slightest idea why it’s broken — but then again, all the other times Phoo broke, I never knew …

Over the weekend I joined the conwaylife.com forums because I am interested in cellular automata. I find watching the mechanisms mesmerizing, and building them exciting.

I also have an interest in music, and so a year or two ago I tried to generate music from cellular automata. I used …

Last time I had just announced that Phoo was finished. Well, it’s still finished — except for the fact that the online console no longer works. I tried porting the shell code to Phoo, but that ended up breaking the shell!

It was pretty much a line-for-line translation, so I …

…Gosh, I just realized that I haven’t posted anything in weeks. I really don’t want to fall prey to the obsession of posting everything online. I hope I’m not.

Anyway, I just finished up the first draft of the documentation of Phoo. The generator script is Python …

I am currently working on an online console for Quackery that is using the Pyodide in-browser Python interpreter. The only bad thing is, Python’s input() function blocks until input is provided, which can’t be done in the browser because everything is asynchronous. The only way for it to …

Several years ago I discovered the wonderful world of cellular automata.

After some Googling I discovered a cellular automata called Wireworld that is designed to simulate electronic circuits. Each of its square cells can be in one of four states, “empty” (which always stays empty, and is shown here in …

Today I managed to submit my first ever Github pull request. In developing Phoo I made some changes to the meta-words from its predecessor Quackery, and they seemed backportable to Quackery. So I forked Quackery and submitted a pull request with those changes.

In the name of trying to bootstrap …