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I write, therefore I am

With this variation on a famous statement by the philosopher Descartes, I would like to express that the act of writing about what happens in my life is important to me.

Wednesday, July 9, 2025

Links

Tuesday, July 8, 2025

Graduation thesis

At 15:33, I received the graduation thesis The Parametric Nature of Life Systems written by Falera van Balen in English, ISBN:9789403799704, which I had bought on Monday, July 7, 2025 at 23:46 for € 12.67. I saw this at the KABK Graduations show on last Friday.

Monday, July 7, 2025

Link

Saturday, July 5, 2025

Are we on the brink of World War III?

The article China tells EU it does not want to see Russia lose its war in Ukraine starts with: 'Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told the European Union's top diplomat on Wednesday that Beijing did not want to see a Russian loss in Ukraine because it feared the United States would then shift its whole focus to Beijing, according to several people familiar with the exchange.' Although China claims that it is not involved in the Russian war, parts from Chinese companies have been found in the drones that rain down on Kyiv by the hundreds every day on civilian building. Because they target civilian buildings to terrorize the population, they are considered as war crimes. China seems to side with the Russian agressor and not speak out against the state terrorism. From the recent steps, such as withholding promised weapons deliveries, that the USA took, one could already conclude that the USA is shifting it focus to China. The European government leaders are speaking a lot, but rather slow in taking actions. There are signs that Russia is preparing for a war in the Baltic's. So, even if there is a ceasefire in Ukraine, Russia could attack Europe again and this time also involving NATO. It would be rather strategic if that attack would come at the same time as an attack of the People Republic of China on the Republic of China, also known as Taiwan. Although Trump has made the European NATO members to increase their defence spending and is vague about whether the USA would support them when Russia would attack a NATO country, the highest NATO general in Europe is still an American who might act on orders given by the executive branch of the USA. Although the European NATO members have large armies, I wonder if they would be able to fight a trench war in the Baltic's due to a lack of tanks, howitzer, ammunition, and such. European countries now already have expressed hesitance with respect to placing peace keeping troops in Ukraine in case of a ceasefire.

Friday, July 4, 2025

Graduation Show at KABK

Today, I went to the Graduation Show 2025 at KABK. I found the works of the following students noteworthy, which is very subjective and often based on the first impression, in the order I encountered them:

Radical accessibility

In the train, I read the book radical accessibiity: crib pedagogies, crp theory, crp practice, which I bought yesterday at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. It seems that the book was published for the Studium Generale program with the same title that was held on 19-21 March of this year. The books seems to be a collection of (short) quotes and definitions. It was an interesting read, but it also made me feel like you have to be rather privelegded to be able to think about the subject. I do realized that I am that privelegded too, but I do know people around me who are not.

Thursday, July 3, 2025

Graduation Show at Rietveld Academie

I traveled to Amsterdam to attend the Graduation Show 2025 at Gerrit Rietveld Academie. But first I went to see the exhibition Digital Deluge at the headquarters of ABN AMRO Bank. I found the following works noteworth:

At the Graduation show 2025, I found the works of the following students noteworthy, which is very subjective and often based on the first impression, in the order I encountered them:

At 16:57, I bought the book radical accessibiity: crib pedagogies, crp theory, crp practice edited by jorinde seijdel, written in English, and published by Studium Generale 2024-25, Gerrit Rietveld Academie on Sunday, January 19, 2025, ISBN:9789083813883, for € 5.00.

At 17:38, I bought a ceramic cup made by Miranda Axelsson from the shop for € 20.00. Although it is usuable as a cup, I also consider it as an work of art.

Wednesday, July 2, 2025

36.9° Celsius

The temperature at Twenthe Airport has gone up to 36.9° Celsius, which breaks the record of 36.1° for this day ten years ago and also makes it the third day this year that the temperature of 35° is reached. Today, a national heatwave was announced, the first since September 2023, because the temperatures at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute the temperatures reached 30° and with this the conditions were met, which are that the temperature should reach 30° in a period of at least five days where the temperature reaches 25° every day. We did not meet those criteria here. At half past four in the afternoon, the temperature dropped 10 degree in about half an hour. There was some intense lightning and thunder in the areas a bit South of us and also some around us, but nothing close. We did get some rain, the first in some weeks. I read that in a city in the area South of us, 127 case of damage through rain and wind gusts were reported.

Tuesday, July 1, 2025

35.0° Celsius

The temperature at Twenthe Airport has gone up to 35.0° Celsius, which breaks the record of 33.7° for this day that was reached in 1957. This is the second tropical day where the temperature reaches 35.0° of this year. Last Saturday, the temperature reached 26.5°, last Sunday 26.7°, and yesterday 28.6°. For tomorrow the predicted maximum temperature is 36.0°. It depends a bit on when the cold air, with probably a lot of rain, will arrive here. For an official heatwave the temperature has to reach 30° in a period of at least five days where the temperature reaches 25°.

Monday, June 30, 2025

Garden

Our garden in the back is getting full with plants and trees. Where there used to be grass on the left side (viewed from the house), there are now growing two trees, which are already about two meters high. We did not plant those trees. They just arrived as a seed. This is the case with some more plants in our garden. But there are also some tall daisies that we did plant some years ago. It looks like some of the plants we planted last year in the early spring, are now surfacing. I now realise that some plants only sprout if they have experienced the cold of the winter. It looks like there are some Jerusalem artichokes growing in the garden in front of our house. The little plant, we assume is growing from a seed of our magnolia, is still rather small, not more than 4cm high, and only has five leaves now. But I read on the internet that they focus on growing roots. I also noticed some flowers in our magnolia. This evening, there was also a pleasant smell of flowering trees outside and in the house.

Sunday, June 29, 2025

AKI Finals (second time)

Today, I went to see the AKI Finals exhibition for a second time, as I am just to day. My experience is that it worth to visit an exhibition more than once, because a second (or third) time, you often notice things you had not seen the first time. It was rather quiet with respect to both visitors and students being present. I walked around the whole exhibition. With the exhibition of the following students, I spend some more time or talked with the student a bit:

Saturday, June 28, 2025

Self hosting compiler

I have achieved another milestone in developing a C compiler and that the compiler is now able to compile the source of itself such that the resulting executable when called with the source will return the same output. I already achieved this some days ago in the commit 9fb0e126, but the compiler failed to compile the program stack_c.c, which can translate the output from the compiler to assembly language. After some debugging, I found that cause and implemented some fixes. The next step will be to see if the compiler can compile the source of the Tiny C Compiler. I already know, I will have to extend the standard library, a partial implementation of the C standard library for this.

Friday, June 27, 2025

AKI Finals

I went to see the AKI Finals exhibition. Below a list of the students whose work I found noteworthy, which is very subjective and often based on the first impression, in the order, I encountered them.

At 18:41, I bought the Finals catalogue for € 10.00, which was packed in a plastic back. At home I discovered that it had almost empty pages with just a new of a student on each page. In the middle it had a stack of stickers, one of each student. The stickers fit on a 'frame' printed on the empty pages.

Thursday, June 26, 2025

Void functions

The C programming language has functions that usually return a single value, except when they are defined of the type void (with the keyword void). In the past three days, I have been debugging the C compiler, I am debugging. I have been learning how to debug the code it produced with GNU Debugger using commands to step through the instructions and inspect the values of registers. I also used the trick to insert if (1); statements in the code of the compiler, that would then generate a label in the machine code that I could use in the break command to make the debugger stop at those locations. Yesterday evening, I discovered the cause of the bug. It was related to the void functions and some parts of the code being generated assuming that all functions return a value. This morning, I realised that to fix this bug, I could just change the behaviour of void function such that they do return a value, instead to making the compiler smart in tracking when a void function is called and special action should be taken to deal with the function being void.

Tuesday, June 24, 2025

Link

Sunday, June 22, 2025

Biking along MUPIs

This morning, from 7:19 till 10:35, I biked around the city to visit all the MUPIs that had a poster on it made by one of this year graduates of the AKI. This year, the MUPI in the town Glanerbrug was including again, making the route a bit over 35Km long. I left early, because the temperature were predicted to get over 30° Celsius this afternoon. I calculated the route with the latest version of the ParseMUPIkml2.cpp program and a bucket size of 1000 solutions for each pass. I made some modification to the program. I added a command line option (-h) to add my home to the locations to be visited. The program also writes the names of the locations to a text file, which I printed out and took with me. I had to add an additional MUPI to the MUPIs.kmz file. I also had to flex the conditions for mapping the pins in the Aki Finals 2025 map to the locations of the MUPIs, because they were not all within 15 meter. The pin marked 'Point 46' had a photograph of a work by Luna Smiesing on it. I found the photographs of the following graduates on the MUPIs noteworthy:

Friday, June 20, 2025

The Way Things Unfold

I went to the opening of the Creatieve Broedplaats Enschede (Dutch for 'creative breeding ground') at their new location, which is at the same location as the first company I worked from 1990 to 1994. There I also saw the exhibition The Way Things Unfold. I found the following works noteworthy:

Wednesday, June 18, 2025

A milestone in developing compiler

I achieved another milestone in developing a C compiler. The compiler can now compile the stack_c.c program, such that when the resulting executable is run on the output produced by the compiler with stack_c.c as input, it produces the same M1 file. The last bug fixes can be found in the commit 5808d49c. The next step will be to try to compile the source of the compiler itself.

Link

Tuesday, June 17, 2025

Book

At 12:10, I received the book Natural relations : eine Skizze written by herman de vries in German and published by Verlag für Moderne Kunst in 1989, ISBN:3122531725, which I had bought on Wednesday, June 11, 2025 at 12:34 from Antiquariat & Verlag Winfried Jenior for € 50.00. I decided to buy this book after I saw it on June 7 at the exhibition herman de vries. 70 jaar de natuur als kunstwerk. I do not think I am ever going to read this book. It is just one of those peculiar books I like to add to my collection of books.

Links

Saturday, June 14, 2025

32.2° Celsius

The temperature at Twenthe Airport has gone up to 32.2° Celsius, which breaks the record of 29.5° for this day that was reachted in 1980. There was a prediction for rain with thunder and lightning, but we did not get any.

Friday, June 13, 2025

First tropic day

Today, the temperature at Twenthe Airport has gone up to 30.4° Celsius, which does not beat the record of 32.8° of 1964, but it does make the first tropic day according to the definition of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute. The predition is that tomorrow it will even become hotter and probably break the record for that day.

Monday, June 9, 2025

Long low slow baden

I went biking again today and followed some part of route of the KunstenLandschap 2025. The highlight of the day was being a subject of the Long low slow baden installation by Gemma Luz Bosch. It was rather deeply relaxing and special experience. I saw the installation last year on June 28 when it was shown on the Graduation show KABK exhibition.

This afternoon. I first went to Concordia. I first had a look at the shower tray of the Paviljoen #4 exhibition that I saw on May 24. The bucket with blue coloured water had emptied completely and was removed. Next, I saw Doublet #8, a colaboration between Peggy Franck, who painted the windows and Christine Moldrickx, who I guess contributed the two dia projectors. I found the exhibition somewhat minimalistic. On the first floor, I saw the exhibition Kunstblikken: De Spiegel Binnenin with works by high school students that they made in collaboration with some artists. I found one lino print rather interesting. Next, I (re)visited the following locations:

At Rijksmuseum Twenthe, I walked around and found the following works noteworthy:

Saturday, June 7, 2025

KunstenLandschap 2025

I biked around the route of KunstenLandschap 2025. At 15:11, I bought the entrence and got a wristband, a small book with details about the art work and artists, and a map with the route. There was some rain while biking around. I stayed inside some shipping container along the route during some of the worst rain. I found the following artist noteworthy (including the number of the location where they were shown):

At Rijksmuseum Twenthe, I watched two new exhibitions. From herman de vries. 70 jaar de natuur als kunstwerk ('herman de vries: 70 year the nature as artwork'), I found the following works noteworthy:

From the exhibition Ergens tussen hoop en vrees ('Somewhere between hope and fear'), I found the following works noteworthy:

Thursday, June 5, 2025

Book

At 16:47, I bought the book Standbeeld: Kunst en woningbouw edited by Edwin Boering and Jaap Huisman, written in Dutch, and published by Gemeente Amsterdam on Thursday, June 6, 1991 from Het Goed for € 0.99.

Tuesday, June 3, 2025

AI agents for software engineering

Today, I came across the article My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts that argues that there are no reasons not to use AI agents as a software engineer. In the past half year, I have tried to use agents in my work, but they never have helped me much. When, this morning, I asked ChatGTP to generate the code for a M4F MCU that implements the VirtIO code for accessing the GPIO through RPMSG using FreeRTOS, it produced two answers that were both incomplete and incorrect. (I have added links to the acronyms to show that these are not very obsure things, suggesting that what I ask is not something extremely obscure.) Someone replied, acknowledging that it was outside his domain, that I could break down my prompt into separate prompts. I followed this approach and again got some answer that was neither complete nor correct. When I made the suggestion to ChatGTP to take Section 5.18 of Virtual I/O Device (VIRTIO) Version 1.3 into account, it produced almost the same code preceded with some babbling from the document, but did not use anything from the specification, not even the code fragments mentioned in the section. I understand that a large group of software developers are using AI agents, probably even more than half, but I get the impression that these are software developers in domains where there is a lot of repetition. For areas that are less common, such as embedded software development for specific devices, AI agents probably do not have enough training materials, also because a lot of embedded software is proprietary. Examples that are provided by companies selling embedded devices are often rather simple. For certain application domains, such as aviation and medical, there are often strict coding standards that have to be followed.

Monday, June 2, 2025

Proclamate Light

I figured out how to use your own fonts on a webpage. I downloaded the Proclamate Light font designed by Paul Lloyd. Below an example of the usage with the text of what I wrote yesterday. Just before the paragraph, I added the following in the HTML: 
<style>
@font-face { font-family: 'proclamate_lightlight';
    src: url('proclamate_light-webfont.woff') format('woff');
    font-weight: normal;
    font-style: normal; }
.blackletter { font-family: 'proclamate_lightlight'; }
</style>
and I used '<p class"blackletter"><font size="+1">' for the paragraph. I am not sure if this works for all browsers, so if it shows as normal text, it might by my fault.

I started reading the book Designing Type by Karen Cheng. On page 14 it has a section on 'Type Classification' that talks about the French typographic historian Maximilian Vox. I noticed that his classification, now known as Vox-ATypI classification did not include Blackletter, also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule or Gothic type, which was a script used in Germany and also the Netherlands for official publications, where it was known as Textualis. Blackletter and also Gaelic type were later added to the classification. I cannot remember having seen Gaelic type before, which uses the insular G letter form for the letter g. (Another example of how reality is almost always more complex than it appears on first sight.)

Remark on June 3: If it does not show, try www.iwriteiam.nl.

Compiled first program

I managed to compile a program with the C compiler that I am developing. The commit 6ac84a5d contains the version of tcc_cc.c with which the hello.c program can be compiled to the stack_c language, and compiled to an ELF with the stack_c compiler and the life-bootstrap programs blood-elf, M1 and hex2. Below the hello.c program. 
#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    fputc('H', stdout);
    fputc('\n', stdout);
    return 0;
}
The include directive is ignored by the compiler and the stdlib.c file is included. The relevant parts of this file are: 
const FILE *stdout = 1;

int sys_int80(int a, int b, int c, int d);

int fputc(int c, FILE *stream)
{
    int buffer[1];
    buffer[0] = c;
    return sys_int80(4, stream, buffer, 1);
}
The function sys_int80 represent the software interrupt that are used in Linux for system calls. I am still struggling a bit how array variables are dealt with. In the above fputc function, in the call to sys_int80 the arguments stream and buffer are slightly handled differently. For the variable stream the contents is retrieved, while for the variable buffer, which is an array, the address is used. The compiler compiles this to the following stack_c program: 
int stdout
void fputc
{
    int stream stream =:
    int c c =:
    int buffer
    buffer 0 4 * + c ? = ; 
    4 stream ? buffer 1 sys_int80 () return
}
void __init_globals__ ;
void main
{
    int argv argv =:
    int argc argc =:
    __init_globals__ ()
    72 stdout ? fputc () ; 
    10 stdout ? fputc () ; 
    0 return
}
void __init_globals__
{
    stdout 1 = ;
    return
}

Sunday, June 1, 2025

Blackletter

I started reading the book Designing Type by Karen Cheng. On page 14 it has a section on 'Type Classification' that talks about the French typographic historian Mximilian Vox. I noticed that his classification, now known as Vox-ATypI classification did not include Blackletter, also known as Gothis script, Gothic minuscule or Gothic type, which was a script used in Germany and also the Netherlands for official publications, where it was known as Textualis. Blackletter and also Gaelic type were later added to the classification. I cannot remember having seen Gaelic type before, which uses the insular G letter form for the letter g. (Another example of how reality is almost always more complex than you at first thought.)

Friday, May 30, 2025

Book

At 12:13, I received the book Designing Type written by Karen Cheng in English and published by Yale University Press on Monday, May 1, 2006, ISBN:9780300111507, which I had bought on Monday, May 26, 2025 at 11:57:31 from Boekhandel Westerkwartier for € 12.50.

Thursday, May 29, 2025

Link

Wednesday, May 28, 2025

PostNL track & trace website

According to the website of PostNL they send about 1.2 million packages and 6.3 million letters per day. You can follow the packages on their Track & Trace website. Last Monday, I ordered something, which first was said to be delivered on Tuesday. It did not arrive yesterday and also not today. Because tomorrow is a national holiday, Friday will be the next day it could be delivered. At 22:54 this evening, I received an email stating (in Dutch) 'It's almost here!' and that it will be delivered on Tuesday May 27 between 8:00 and 18:00. On the website, the last update is from this evening 22:51 stating: 'Time of delivery: today between 08:00 and 18:00.' I do understand that sometimes thing will not go as planned when you deliver that many packages and letters, but I do not understand that you still have the kind of bugs in your platform that generate this kind of messages, about that you are going to do something in the past and that are not consistent with each other. I presume that both messages were caused by the same trigger and that the original planned delivery time has not changed. The process generating the email presumingly does no check on whether the delivery date is in the past and I guess that the process putting the update on the website (probably stored in some database table), modified the date, noticing that it was in the past, and changed it today, not taking into consideration that the delivery time is before the time it was generated. It is possible that something went wrong because tomorrow is not a normal working day, but even than, the software should be able to deal with those edge cases.

Monday, May 26, 2025

The switch statement

The switch statement of C is a kind of computed goto statement. In the past weeks, I worked on code generation for the C-compiler for parsing the Tiny C Compiler. In the past week, I worked on the switch statement. At first I hoped that the switch statements in the source of the Tiny C Compiler would be 'easy' in the sense that they would be easy to transform in conditional statements, but that was not the case. The code did make use of fallthrough, where a case is not ended with break statement. Also there cases statements that the default case did not occur at the end. I had to use some hacks to implement the switch statement. I still have not verified if it is correct in all cases.

Link

Saturday, May 24, 2025

Going into the city

I went into the city. At Fotogalerie Objektief, I saw the exhibition On Scene with photographs by Imca Schoots. Next, I went to Concordia to have a look at Paviljoen #4, the fourth exhibition in a series of exhibitions with works by two students of the AKI. Although the opening speech should have started half an hour earlier according to the website, it was still going on when I left a quarter of an hour later. For that reason, I did not really see the part of the exhibition with works by Maximiliaan Tiemessen. Sacha Otte had multiple object on display including a shower tray with a bucket above it from which blue coloured water dripped. There were some splashes on the floor around the shower tray.

Thursday, May 22, 2025

Here my hand and there your cheek

In the train, I finished reading the book Hier mijn hand en dáár je wang: wat intieme correspondentie (Dutch for 'Here my hand and there your cheek: some intimate correspondence') with letters that Heere Heeresma and Laurie Langenbach wrote to each other. I started reading the book on March 11 after I bought the book two days earlier. He, Heere, is about fifteen years older than she. He already was a recognized author with many readers. She just published her first, rather autobiographic, book, which was not very well received by critics, nevertheless, she is as much an author as he. She wrote a lot for magazines. He thought that she could become the Dutch Virgina Woolf.

Utrecht

Because I had some time left, I decided to take a break at Utrecht were I had to switch trains while traveling to Amsterdam. In Utrecht, I visited the bookshops ALEPH Books and Steven Sterk. In the latter, I saw a book that I found interesting and I made som inquiries whether they could send it through mail because it felt kind of heavy to carry around the remainder of the day. They pointed me at the website ramsj.nl from which I could order it.

Amsterdam Art Week

I went to Amsterdam to visit the various exhibitions at various galleries that participate in the Amsterdam Art Week. Below the list of locations I visited (leaving out some that were closed or I did not find noteworth enought): I walked at least 12 kilometer in Utrecht and Amsterdam. At Brandt Gallery, I took a printed copy of the Programme, which includes a map showing all the 72 locations that were involved.

Saturday, May 17, 2025

Introduction

Diaries
July 2025
June 2025
May 2025
April 2025
March 2025
February 2025
2025
2024
2023
-- contact --

Family

Frans
Conny
Annabel
Andy
Li-Xia†
Others
Pictures

Collecting

Books
Maps
Bookshelves
Art works
Computers
Cameras
Trips
Flights
Weddings
Funerals
Reading
Movies
Useless lists

Hacking

My life as a hacker
Signature programs
Software enginering
The Art of Programming
HTML to LaTeX
JavaScript
eXtreme Programming
Programs

Puzzles

Hamilton cycles
cutting sticks
Califlower fractal
more...

SARS-CoV-2

Tracking
Trends
Prediction
nextstrain.org/ncov


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