Stores and restraints are opening up again and the streets are crowded again.

Job Search

The Foxconn company is interested in me interviewing for another software engineer position, so things are looking up compared to yesterday. I’ve already done a lot of research into Foxconn’s stack (lost of Java) so I’ll devote more time to learning for the other one.

Site

The journal section looks a bit better now. Since these journals are designed to be bite-sized and easily skimmed or moved through, it helps to have a clear listing vs the otherwise redundant title with date, date, and summary on multiple lines and pagination.

Also working on some of the China Retrospective series which you’ll see on the front page soon. These are meant to summarize my experiences in China, and will eventually include pictures. These will probably be the most long-form posts you’ll see here for a while, and are something I intend to share with my family and friends when the time comes.

Coding

As an exercise in understanding a large project’s code, I git clone’d vim and compiled it, and am looking through the code to see how everything works together. Starting from the main function, moving through the calls… It’s all a lot more complicated than the code I’m used to and pretty old-school in terms of formatting, but it’s worth a shot. I think it would be better for me to do this for something in a language I’m more familiar with than C, like Go.

I’ve also started reading Drew Niel – Practical Vim (ISBN 9781934356982) to get a better understanding of the usage. If I plan to make a career in software I’ll need to edit text, and to edit text I’ll need an editor like vim. If I plan on using vim for the rest of my career, any time-savers or tricks I learn now would benefit me for the rest of my life. I’ve been using the editor for about 4 years now for code, blogging, fiction, config files, etc. but there’s always something new to learn.

Runescape

I found a new interest in Old School Runescape, particularly botting. I can’t stand spending 7000 hours grinding by clicking on trees and stuff, so I’d rather have a separate screen where I could watch my avatar do stuff with minimal interaction. Ideally all I’d have to do is tell him to “farm woodcutting here” and it could manage the inventory and all that. I’ve looked into some scripts already and bots like powerbot look simple enough to do this with and abstract a lot of the finicky stuff. The frameworks I’ve seen have to be compiled in, so you can’t really adjust much on the fly, but maybe if the bot interacted with an endpoint it could get some remote procedure calls.

This is an easy way to get banned from the official servers, so I’m looking into creating a custom server I can do this in. Apollo seems to fit the bill, but it’s some old java software that will probably be a pain to set up properly.

Things I’m Liking

• devdocs.io: A one-stop shop for all your documentation needs. Specific documentation can be enabled, disabled, and viewed offline (in chrome).
• goaccess: This tool simply takes in access logs in a couple different formats and displays some visualizations for each, such as who has visited your site the most, what pages are requested the most, etc.
• Maangchi: A cute Korean woman teaching you how to cook Korean food. It might be because I’ve been eating 90% Chinese food for the past year, but Korean food is more appetizing to me. They have a lot more fermented ingredients, which is a flavor profile I really love.
• Low Tech Magazine: How to Build a Low-tech Website: The people behind Low Tech Magazine made a website that’s served from a single-board computer and solely powered by solar energy! They bring the page size down by some neat tricks including image dithering, so the page containing a few images, a full longform post and comments is just over half a megabyte. The idea that “this website might go down sometimes and that’s OK” is really cool, and something about the article in its purpose and visual aesthetic feels ahead of its time. There’s more technical information here.

Misc

I haven’t seen any effects of Valentines Day in China. Maybe I’m not in the right places, but there doesn’t seem to be many couples around or Valentine’s merchandise.

The heater/AC unit in my room sometimes stops working, giving an “H4” error which apparently indicates “System Abnormality” which probably indicates the filter is blocked, the pressure isn’t normal, or some electrical issues. It works most of the time when I power cycle though.

Another late “night” and it’s already 6:00am.