jon.dowland.name log

I haven't written much yet about what I've been up to at work. Right now, I'm making changes to the sources of a set of Docker images. The changes I'm making should not result in any changes to the actual images: it's just a re-organisation of the way in which they are built.

I've been using the btrfs storage driver for Docker which makes comparing image filesystems very easy from the host machine, as all the image filesystems are subvolumes. I use a bash script like the following to make sure I haven't broken anything:

computer game boxes

My brother and I found these whilst tidying up the stuff that we've left at our parent's house. What on earth should we do with them?

boxes of CDs & the same data on MicroSD

It's been at least a year since I last did any work on Debian, but this week I finally uploaded a new version of squishyball, an audio sample comparison tool, incorporating a patch from Thibaut Girka which fixes the X/X/Y test method. Shamefully Thibaut's patch is nearly a year old too. Better late than never...

For a while I've been wanting to tidy up some of my existing ikiwiki hacks, as well as test some changes I'd like to make to this site, but I hadn't had much success with setting up environments to play with it. That was until earlier in the year, when as a bit of an experiment I tried to put ikiwiki in docker.

This week I released version 2.0 of Wad Compiler, a lazy functional programming language and IDE for the construction of Doom maps.

Version 2.0 is the first version in about four years and adds a fair number of features, most notably the ability to compose textures in your code and a basic command-line interface.

My previous blog posts about deterministic Doom proved very popular.

I've still got it!

Recovered floppy disks

What happens if you remove randomness from Doom?

For some reason, recently I have been thinking about Doom. This evening I was wanting to explore some behaviour in an old version of Doom and to do so, I hex-edited the binary and replaced the random number lookup table with static values.

Rather than consume system randomness, Doom has a fixed 256-value random number table from which numbers are pulled by aspects of the game logic. By replacing the whole table with a constant value, you essentially make the game entirely deterministic.

Now I'm back to Linux on the Desktop for my dayjob, I was slightly nervous about checking out the state of the art for Linux music players; an area I've never felt the Linux desktop was very strong on.