2024-11-07
Joey
So I've been doing more work on the Joey front, with little visible progress. This is my big learning project so I'm allocating lots of time to just trying new things. Fun stops I've made along the way lately:
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Built a bunch of infrastructure around text parsing engines for handling short-form user input from a CLI (or Veilidchat etc) using Python plugins to add several different "Realms". Right now there's a call-and-response plugin (fuzzy text parsing for an input token returns a given result) and a state machine plugin based on python-statemachine. This allows for phone tree style interactions, but I'm naturally using it to make a MUD. I'm sitting on this instead of pushing it for now, just because I...
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Got frustrated with the difference between the Python JSON interface to Veilid and the vastly fuller-featured Flutter/Dart plugin, so I spent some time deep diving what it would take to use FFI to access Veilid at a lower level, and then totally replicate the Veilid/Chat helpers in Python. It's a big lift, but doable if I can get the Veilid lib builds to output a .h file to simplify the boilerplate.
This is basically how the Rock Band backend, Rock Central, worked back in the day. C++ server with Python bindings for the business logic. That was SWIG, though, and we all hated maintaining it. So I'm edging carefully away from this idea for now.
Instead I'm peering down the path of doing this in Rust / Rocket next. I got into Veilid because I had hoped it would get me back into Rust, but started diving into Python because I thought it would help the project more. I'm not super sure that's the case given the current state of the Python implementation and pretty slow movement on the core, so we'll see how this goes over the next few weeks.
Meshtastic
My Nomad stopped working and I have been too embarassed to reach out to Specfive to get some help, I assumed it was something I messed up in the meshtasticd configuration. Turns out it's related to updating the pi and not my fault at all for once! Specfive were helpful and pointed me to a post in their forums here [https://specfive.com/community/xenforum/topic/146067/danger-danger-will-robinon]. Good times!
I have bits and bobs on order to stand up the "big" antenna and add a phone clip so we can communicate with each other when we're out in the woods. I have a 1/4 mile-ish trail to clear so that I can start getting the bush hog through there to keep it maintained, but that's going to be several days of chainsaw work so it'll be nice to be able to keep in touch with the house.
Open edX
We cut our bi-yearly release, named Sumac, a bit ago. It's in testing now, but I spent a lot of this release on vacation / sick / doing project management while the rest of the team carried our end of things. It was really nice to be able to breathe for a bit after 2 years of cranking pretty hard.