A paper on the approach to implementation of high-quality resizable bitmap fonts using signed distance fields.

It turns out that there is a whole phenomenon in the world of computer games — fantasy game consoles. These are programs that simulate imaginary machines with the capabilities of retro consoles, and they usually have built-in game development tools: simple editors for code, sprites, game maps and sound effects. The most popular fantasy console, in my opinion, is PICO-8. It seems to be the most thoughtful and complete. There are many other similar programs, including open source ones.

Here is a link to a list of such consoles.

https://github.com/paladin-t/fantasy

A short series of articles on how to write a simple X11 reparenting window manager.

https://jichu4n.com/posts/how-x-window-managers-work-and-how-to-write-one-part-i/

Winnie is a tiny window system for Linux framebuffer written in C++.

https://github.com/hikiko/winnie

Serenity is an on-going project of Andreas Kling who implements own Unix-like operating system with aestetic of late-1990s. It already supports multithreading, POSIX-signals, mmap, local sockets, TCP/IP networking, GUI, etc. There are many user space applications working well in the operating system, they include a text editor, an IRC client, even two games!

https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity

#osdev #system #programming #lowlevel

An image viewer for X11 that sucks less.

https://github.com/muennich/sxiv

Today I found an article that I saw a long time ago. This article is about various approaches to implement spin and read-write locks, it includes good examples of code written in C and inline assembly language.

https://locklessinc.com/articles/locks/

Even today there are companies and independent teams of hackers creating new applications and games for retro platforms. One of such teams is Morphcat Games. In the following video they describe how one can fit a modern platformer into the standard NES cartridge without any special mapper or hardware extension.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWQ0591PAxM

Узнал, что в Москве есть ежегодная летняя школа биоинформатики. Занятия проводятся интенсивным шестидневным курсом. Участие в событии платное и студенты отбираются на конкурсной основе. Партнеры организаторов готовы предоставить гранты авторам самых лучших заявок на участие, гранты покрывают стоимость обучения, проживания на территории летней школы и питания. Насколько понял, занятия планируют проводить в МФТИ. К сожалению, прием заявок на участие был закрыт еще в начале мая, но ничего не мешает попробовать себя в новой области в будущем году.

Страничка летней школы: https://bioinf.me/education/summer

Do you know where the name of the grep utility originates from? In the following video Brian Kernighan unveils the mystery.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTfOnGZUZDk

Sndio is a lightweight audio server originally developed for OpenBSD. Now it is a cross-platform solution available for Linux and other popular versions of *nix systems.

http://www.sndio.org/

Almost every old Linux user once played with the device file /dev/dsp which was associated with the sound card. You could cat some file containing data to be played and redirect the output to /dev/dsp, so this data were played by the sound card through the speakers. Such easy access to the sound card spawned a number of jokes like, for example, playing of the Linux kernel binary.

The following blog post is about little programs written in C which generate output playable via the sound card. And it sounds like music!

http://countercomplex.blogspot.com/2011/10/algorithmic-symphonies-from-one-line-of.html

One more post about algorithmic symphonies with deeper analysis of the programs.

http://countercomplex.blogspot.com/2011/10/some-deep-analysis-of-one-line-music.html

I already wrote about Alexander Zolotov and his programs. Today I want to recommend you another one, PhonoPaper — an application to play sound represented in printed analog form.

http://www.warmplace.ru/soft/phonopaper/index.php

Low-level software hackers often use disassemblers, object format dumpers and other tools for reverse engineering. Almost all involved people know Radare 2 — a portable framework for reverse engineers which includes plenty of tools and runs on almost all popular operating systems. This is a swiss army knife that fits almost all needs of any assembly geek. Radare's web interface is too simple and doesn't cover all provided features, other ones are available only in command line mode. To simplify the task of software analysis the community developed a free GUI application on top of Radare 2 — Cutter. It looks impressively, just like somebody made an open source analogue of IDA Pro.

https://github.com/radareorg/cutter

The following page is about a way to profile your programs using only the standard GNU debugger and couple of shell noscripts.

https://poormansprofiler.org/

The dissertation of Michael Franz attached below introduces an efficient compressed intermediate representation for compilers called SDE. The author shows how this compact representation can be used for fast on-the-fly code generation in the program loader.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/69c5/480c60831236c80a10f69cc5df9c2ae07941.pdf

Третьего июля в московском планетарии доцент Кембриджского Университета Блейк Д. Шервин выступит с популярной лекцией. Из лекции вы узнаете о методах наблюдения реликтового излучения и о том, что оно говорит нам о строении и истории Вселенной. Требуется регистрация на мероприятие.

https://kurilka-gutenberga-events.timepad.ru/event/1004798/

A short, little bit outdated overview of Intel's hardware-assisted virtualization technology (VT-x). Very helpful for quick dive into the topic. Of course it cannot replace the original specification.

http://zabaljauregui.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Vtx.pdf

Today I want to remember everybody about excellent documents on software optimization written by Agner Fog. His detailed rigorous research of microarchitecture solutions incorporated into modern processors is incredibly valuable and highly acclaimed by many developers. The amount of work done by Agner seems impossible for just one person!

https://www.agner.org/optimize/