Can my SPARC server host a website?
TL;DR: I’m hosting a website on a 25-year-old Sun Netra X1 SPARC server running OpenBSD 7.8. The setup includes: Noctua fan mods for quiet operation, httpd serving static HTML/CSS, OpenBSD’s pf firewall with default-deny rules, and Cloudflare tunnels to expose it safely without port forwarding. The server pulls ~55MB of RAM and serves pages from […]
Constraint Propagation for Fun
Constraint propagation for fun I’ve been playing the very good Squeakross this weekend. It is adorable and the aesthetics are absolutely immaculate, but I’ve found the actual picross puzzles to be a point of frustrating friction in the game when compared to the picross-style puzzles in my bicross game. Picross puzzles, aka nonograms, can relatively […]
Shades of Halftone
There has recently been a newfound excitement for pattern-based post-processing effects all over my timeline, as softwares such as Paper, Efecto, or Unicorn Studio are democratizing the use of shaders for both designers and developers. While some of these patterns originated as workarounds due to technical limitations we have since overcome, they now serve as […]
Clean-room implementation of Half-Life 2 on the Quake 1 engine
Loading… Why am I seeing this? You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites. This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone. Anubis is a compromise. Anubis uses […]
Code Storage by the Pierre Computer Company
~*~ © Code Storage by the Pierre Computer Company, Inc. ~*~ Use Code Storage to programatically create Git repositories and manage them with a simple API. No more rate limits, complicated auth-flows, or other limitations. Just create repos whenever you need them, and start pushing. Perfect for AI-driven coding platforms, agentic frameworks, and more. Code […]
Gradient.horse
Honestly I just wanted to play around with gradients. But gradients without anything on the horizon lack something, so I added horses. Since I can’t draw horses, now you can draw them. And watch them parade across the screen alongside horses drawn by people you probably wouldn’t like. Or maybe you would, how should I […]
Show HN: I spent 3 years reverse-engineering a 40 yo stock market sim from 1986
Prologue: The Dragon That Couldn’t Be Slain A Denver company that developed legal software tried. They failed. A game studio that made software for Disney tried. They spent over a year and hundreds of thousands of dollars. They had a team of programmers in Armenia, overseen by an American PhD in mathematics. They failed. Commodore […]
Faster Than Dijkstra?
Last year a couple of people forwarded to me the same article on a new method of finding shortest paths in networks. The underlying research claims to improve on the classic approach pioneered by Dijkstra that is taught in most networking textbooks (including ours). I was initially a bit skeptical, much as I would be […]
Using an engineering notebook
One of my core software engineering practices is writing, by hand, in a physical notebook. It’s one of the most important things I do to remain productive and effective. Maybe the single most important. And it’s a practice that I see very few others using! When I polled my Mastodon followers, 25% of them said […]
How the Little Guy Moved
Plus: news. Detail of the cover for The Making of Prince of Persia (2020) Welcome! Thanks for checking in. It’s another Sunday issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and this is the slate: 1. Animating in the early days of the personal computer. 2. Newsbits. With that, let’s go! 1. Computer animation There was a […]