Friday, January 24, 2025
B93 Anno Nu
This afternoon, I went to see the exhibition B93 Anno Nu - Het is duur en niet ongevaarlijk, which translated to English is: B93 Now - It's expensive and not without danger. I did not go to the opening (in English) on January 8, but today there was another opportunity to see the exhibition. I did like the exhibition. I found the following works (in random order) noteworthy:- Video projection with electronic music by Patrick Jonkman
- making new memories, an installation and performance by Marlies van Grootel. The installation consists of a table with a scroll of paper that is fed into a shredder while on the otherside being decorated with the strips of shredded paper.
- Several works made with threads made from paper by Afra Willems
- Three painting by Johannes ZomerVijver.
- Shots on rotating smarth phone by Santiago Colombo Migliorero.
- Veiligheid, installation of manual fire alarms on the wall by Susan Pinkster.
Tuesday, January 21, 2025
Link
Monday, January 20, 2025
IJsdagen
We have had three days where the maximum temperature stayed below zero degrees Celsius. In Dutch these days are called 'ijsdagen'. Last winter we did not have any such days, so, with these 'ice days' the longest sequence on record of days that the maximum temperature stay above zero has ended. The Dutch word for ice is 'ijs' en the Dutch word for days is 'dagen'. The word 'ijs' starts with the digraph ij, which is usually captilazed as IJ, which rather exceptional. There are also Unicode character for this digraph: ij and IJ.Sunday, January 19, 2025
Mutual exclusion with atomic memory operations
I have thought that for low-level mutual exclusion you need a test-and-set operation. In the past day, I realized that it can be achieved with atomic memory operations. An atomic memory operation is where you can retrieve and store the contents in one undividable operaton. This is usually the case when reading or writing a value to/from a memory cell into the register of a CPU. For values larger than the size of a register have to be loaded with multiple instructions and usually do not have the atomicity property. The idea is to use two memory locations, 'A' and 'B', where is one process (the lock server) that copies the contents of 'B' to 'A' if 'A' has the value zero and that there are multiple proceses each with a unique identifier that when needed mutual exclusion (a lock) write their identifier to memory location 'B' if 'A' and wait until 'A' becomes equal to their identifier. If 'A' becomes zero again, they will write their identifier to 'B' again. To release a lock (when they leave the mutual exclusive section) they set 'A' to zero again. This morning, I believe that the following PROMELA code proof this:
byte n = 0
byte A = 0
byte B = 0
proctype Client(byte id)
{
do
:: (A == 0) -> B = id
:: (A == id) ->
n = n + 1;
assert (n == 1);
n = n - 1;
A = 0
od
}
proctype LockServer()
{
do
:: (A == 0) -> A = B
od
}
init {
atomic {
run LockServer();
run Client(1);
run Client(2);
run Client(3);
}
}
It fails when two processes have the same identifier, for example, when
Client(2) is replaced by Client(1) in the above code.
ESP32-S3: reset I²C
Yesterday evening, I discovered that the reset of the finite state machine of the I²C of the ESP32-S3 is not implemented. In the soc_caps.h file it says:// FSM_RST only resets the FSM, not using it. So SOC_I2C_SUPPORT_HW_FSM_RST not defined. //ESP32-S3 support hardware clear bus #define SOC_I2C_SUPPORT_HW_CLR_BUS (1)This basically means that you have to shut-down the I²C peripheral, perform an optional bus reset, and start-up the peripheral again. I think you can use the following low-level code, which works on memory mapped hardware registers, to shut-down the I2C0 periperal:
// Save the current settings
i2c_scl_low_period_reg_t scl_low_period = I2C0.scl_low_period;
i2c_scl_high_period_reg_t scl_high_period = I2C0.scl_high_period;
i2c_scl_start_hold_reg_t scl_start_hold = I2C0.scl_start_hold;
i2c_scl_rstart_setup_reg_t scl_rstart_setup = I2C0.scl_rstart_setup;
i2c_scl_stop_hold_reg_t scl_stop_hold = I2C0.scl_stop_hold;
i2c_scl_stop_setup_reg_t scl_stop_setup = I2C0.scl_stop_setup;
i2c_filter_cfg_reg_t filter_cfg = I2C0.filter_cfg;
i2c_clk_conf_reg_t clk_conf = I2C0.clk_conf;
bool fifo_mode_en = I2C0.fifo_conf.nonfifo_en;
// Disable the peripheral
SYSTEM.perip_clk_en0.i2c_ext0_clk_en = false;
To start-up the I2C0 peripheral again (with the saved settings), I think you
can use:
// Enable the peripheral
SYSTEM.perip_clk_en0.i2c_ext0_clk_en = true;
// Reset the peripheral
SYSTEM.perip_rst_en0.i2c_ext0_rst = 1;
SYSTEM.perip_rst_en0.i2c_ext0_rst = 0;
// Set the default configuration (for master)
i2c_ctrl_reg_t ctrl_reg;
ctrl_reg.val = 0;
ctrl_reg.ms_mode = 1;
ctrl_reg.clk_en = 1;
ctrl_reg.sda_force_out = 1;
ctrl_reg.scl_force_out = 1;
I2C0.ctr.val = ctrl_reg.val;
I2C0.ctr.tx_lsb_first = I2C_DATA_MODE_MSB_FIRST;
I2C0.ctr.rx_lsb_first = I2C_DATA_MODE_MSB_FIRST;
// Reset FIFO buffers
I2C0.fifo_conf.nonfifo_en = fifo_mode_en;
I2C0.fifo_conf.tx_fifo_rst = 1;
I2C0.fifo_conf.tx_fifo_rst = 0;
I2C0.fifo_conf.rx_fifo_rst = 1;
I2C0.fifo_conf.rx_fifo_rst = 0;
// Disable and clear interupts
I2C0.int_ena.val &= (~I2C_LL_INTR_MASK);
I2C0.int_clr.val = I2C_LL_INTR_MASK;
// Restore saved settings
I2C0.scl_low_period = scl_low_period;
I2C0.scl_high_period = scl_high_period;
I2C0.scl_start_hold = scl_start_hold;
I2C0.scl_rstart_setup = scl_rstart_setup;
I2C0.scl_stop_hold = scl_stop_hold;
I2C0.scl_stop_setup = scl_stop_setup;
I2C0.filter_cfg = filter_cfg;
I2C0.clk_conf = clk_conf;
Note that in the function s_i2c_hw_fsm_reset the peripheral is not
disabled and enabled again, like it is in the function
i2c_hw_fsm_reset. To clear the I²C bus, a specific sequence of
signals on the clock and data lines is used. It seems that can be done by
calling the function s_i2c_master_clear_bus. (In
i2c_hw_fsm_reset this is called when the peripheral is disabled,
suggesting the idea that it can be executed without it being enabled and being
some function outside the normal circuitry.) Because
SOC_I2C_SUPPORT_HW_CLR_BUS has the value (1) for ESP32-S3 the
following code can be used to start the bus reset procedure that exists of nine
pulses as defined by the value of I2C_CLR_BUS_SCL_NUM.
I2C0.scl_sp_conf.scl_rst_slv_num = I2C_CLR_BUS_SCL_NUM;
I2C0.scl_sp_conf.scl_rst_slv_en = 1;
I2C0.ctr.conf_upgate = 1;
However, the function i2c_ll_master_is_bus_clear_done always returns
false, which results in the time-out to be triggered and that the function
s_i2c_master_clear_bus returns the ESP_ERR_INVALID_STATE
error. The time-out period is 50ms as defined by
I2C_CLR_BUS_TIMEOUT_MS. From the fallback code in the function, I
understand that the whole bus reset sequence is 100µs. A time-out period
of 1ms should be enough for the bus reset sequence to be finished. After the
time-out, the i2c_ll_update function is called, which equals to the
following for device I2C0 for the ESP32-S3:
I2C0.ctr.conf_upgate = 1;
The code of i2c_master_clear_bus does not have the time-out check,
without which it would run indefinitely, it seems that the function
i2c_hw_fsm_reset is not called for the ESP32-S3.
Link
Saturday, January 18, 2025
Into the city
At Fotogalerie Objektief, I saw the exhibiion 'Gewaande Landschappen' (which in English can be translated as: 'Imagined Landscapes') with photographs by Hans Bouma. At 14:45, I bought the book De Godenmakers written by Frank Herbert in Dutch, translated by Lucien Duzee from the English The Godmakers, published by Het Spectrum in 1994, ISBN:9789027440457, from Het Goed for € 2.60.Thursday, January 16, 2025
Fancy Tetris Wooden Puzzle
Some time ago, I found this 'Fancy Tetris Wooden Puzzle' measuring 15×22cm, which is using the same types of pieces as the Chinese Wooden Puzzle. It does not have five pieces of each type, but only three, except for the yellow and the purple type, which have four pieces each. Please note that in this puzzle, the colours on the white and purple types are swapped. The pieces fit in a grid of 8 by 12. Last weekend, I started a modified version to calculate the number of solutions. The program is still running and it still might run for some time. Below it shows one solution where the pieces of the same type are all connected with each other but minimally touching each other.
Link
Tuesday, January 14, 2025
Prospects & Concepts
Today, I received two Prospects & Concepts catalogues about the young artist that were supported by the Mondriaan Fonds and exhibited their works at the Art Rotterdam exhibition. I bought both wooks last Sunday. The books are:- Prospects & Concepts edited by Mirjam Beerman, written in Dutch, and published by Het Mondriaan Fonds in February 2020 from Reread Boeken for € 7.50.
- Prospects & Concepts edited by Mirjam Beerman, written in Dutch, published by Het Mondriaan Fonds in February 2019 from abcBoekBookBuch for € 7.00.
Monday, January 13, 2025
Link
Sunday, January 12, 2025
ESP32: Disabling peripheral interrupt source
On October 27, I wrote something about I²C on the ESP32 without interrupts. I suggested that idea of disabling interrupt by setting the INTERRUPT_COREx_SOURCE_y_MAP register to the value 16 (the default). Today, I read in Section 9.3.3.3 of ESP32-S3 Technical Reference Manual that setting the value to 6, 7, 11, 15, 16, or 29 will disable the interrupt source. To disable this, if it was enabled (for example when calling i2c_new_master_bus), I understand that you have to execute the following statements:esp_rom_route_intr_matrix(0, ETS_I2C_EXT0_INTR_SOURCE, 16); esp_rom_route_intr_matrix(1, ETS_I2C_EXT0_INTR_SOURCE, 16);The ETS_I2C_EXT0_INTR_SOURCE is found in the SoC specific interrupts.h file in the soc module.
Thursday, January 9, 2025
Some snow
When I was walking to the office, it started to snow. During the day, there was some snow, from which some did stay on parts of the ground. Some of it stayed during the evening.Wednesday, January 8, 2025
Links
- Operating System in 1,000 Lines (on Hacker News)
- F4map, demo
- CubeTrek
- Photorealistic 3D Tiles from Google Maps Platform in Cesium for Unreal
- Fidget
Tuesday, January 7, 2025
TkkrLab member again
In the past half year, I have been visiting the TkkrLab hackerspace once every while. I have decided to become a member again and did so this evening.Monday, January 6. 2025
Links
Sunday, January 5, 2025
2cm snow and 11.2°C
At the end of the morning, there was about 2cm of snow on the table outside. This means that at least 2cm of snow fell during the evening and the morning. On ground most of the snow was already gone. The snow already had changed into rain. Until noon, the temperature at Twenthe Airport remaind between -0.4 and 0.4° Celcius. It dis not look like the prediction of 9.4° as the maximum temperature for today was goint to be reached, but around 3 in the afternoon, the temperature started to rise and between 6 till the end of the day remained around 11°C with a maximum of 11.2°C around 11 in the evening. For tomorrow a maximum temperature of 12.9°C.ESP32: SMP
I continued my investigation with respect to running 'bare metal' on core 1 of the ESP32. I notice that I was mistaken about SMP in description about watchdog timers two days ago. The FreeRTOS SMP scheduling policy means that there is one 'instance' of the scheduler controlling task on several cores, where with the AMP scheduling policy each core runs its own 'instance' of FreeRTOS. The ESP-IDF define CONFIG_FREERTOS_SMP ia about selecting an experimental SMP version of the FreeRTOS Kernel. The normal kernel verions is SMP capable.Friday, January 3, 2025
Wet snow
When I walked to the office, it started to snow. Some of the snow stayed on the ground. In some areas the snow stayed on the street, while at other is did not. The temperature of the ground must have been around the freezing point such that the properties of the street, such as the blackness, played a decisive role in whether or not the snow stayed. During the day some more snow fell from the sky. When I walked home I there was only some snow left in some small spots.Watchdog timers
Watchdog timers are used in embedded systems to perform a system reset when for some reason the embedded system is not responding anymore. These are timers that after a specified time perform some kind of reset operation. To prevent the reset operation to occur, the timer need to be reset frequently. The ESP32 has several watchdog timers. According to the ESP32-S3 Technical Reference Manual (version 1.6), the watchdog timer in timer group 0 (belonging to core 0) is automatically enabled during the flash booting process. In the code of ESP-IDF it is disable again in the function bootloader_config_wdt when it is no longer needed. The watchdog timer in timer group 0 is enabled again in call_start_cpu0. No watchdog timer is enable in the function call_start_cpu1. This means that by default the watchdog timer for core 1 is not enabled. It is only possible to enabled it by software. If CONFIG_ESP_INT_WDT is enabled (defined) the watchdog timer in timer group 1 will be used for Interrupt Watchdog Timer (IWDT). Furthermore, the ESP-IDF also has a Task Watchdog Timer (TWDT), which is enable with CONFIG_ESP_TASK_WDT_INIT, that watches the idle task and makes use of the watchdog timer in timer group 0. The idle task has the lowest priority and only becomes active when other tasks are not active. If the idle tasks is not active, it probably means that some other task is running all the time. An idle task is started (by default) on both cores, but it is possible (through setting the field idle_core_mask to disable the idle tasks to be tracked by task watchdog timer. The idle tasks are created in the function prvCreateIdleTasks, which is called from the function vTaskStartScheduler. Note that there are two definitions of these function depending on whether FreeRTOS-Kernel-SMP or FreeRTOS-Kernel is used, which depends on the CONFIG_FREERTOS_SMP define. SMP stands for Symmetric Multiprocessing, which allows tasks to be scheduled across multiple identical processor cores. This should not be used when you want to dedicate one of the cores (core 1 usually) for a dedicated task.Links
Thursday, January 2, 2025
Photograph
This evening, I bought a photograph from Paul Hendriksen that I had seen at the opening of the exhibition A day in a lifetime on December 11, last year. It is one of twenty photographs that are enlargements of a single photograph when placed in four rows of five photographs display the original photograph. I found this particular photograph the most interesting and Paul allowed me to buy this single photograph. (It is relatively easy to make the series complete again by printing the one photograph again.) While at his place, he showed me the monograph One Tree by Machiel Botman, one of his tutors. Botman takes a long time, years, to compose his monographs. I fear it is impossible to appreciate these kind books at one vieweing and that it takes careful watching and rewatching to understand them. Probably having some formal training in taking and printing photographs also helps appreciating and understanding these kind of monographs. Paul also gave me some clips such that I could put the photograph on the wall in the same manner as at the exhibition.Tuesday, December 31, 2024
403: Access Denied
I chatted with the Dutch helpdesk of Albert Heijn, the largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands, because the link https://ah.nl/producten when opening with Firefox under Linux was returning a 403 error: Access Denied with the contents (similar to):Access DeniedIf you follow the link to https://errors.edgesuite.net/ it says that if you are the site owner you can find more information on the control center under: "Hamburger menu > SUPPORT > Edge Diagnostics". Edgesuite.net is a content delivery network. I already had cleared the cookies for the ah.nl website. The people at the helpdesk (I chatted with three different people) suggested I use a different browser. And indeed, the link returned the expected contents with Chrome and Chromium. (According to Client Reputation Overview my IP Address did not receive a bad risk score.) I told them that I was a little surprised that Firefox was no longer supported as is only in the past week that the 403 errors are returned. The last person asked me to provide a lot of details such that the IT deparment could investigate the problem. I told that I already had provided all the necessary information by copying the above reply and the User-Agent string, which gives information about the version of Firefox and the operating system.You don't have permission to access "http://ah.nl/producten" on this server.
Reference #18.55071002.1735742594.142133ce
https://errors.edgesuite.net/18.55071002.1735742594.142133ce
Sunday, December 29, 2024
FDA Clearance for spinal cages
Today, I read the press release: Nvision Biomedical Technologies™ Secures FDA Clearance for First 3D-Printed Porous PEEK Interbody System made with Invibio PEEK-OPTIMA™ from September 24 earlier this year, which mentions the usages of the proprietary Bond3D additive manufacturing technology. Surpisingly the blog on the Bond3D website does not mention this achievement although it has been one of the two primary goals from April 2023 until the end of 2023 when the application for the FDA Clearance was submitted. During that period it was also my top priority to support the process team responsible for the application with respect to developing features for the Bond3D Slicer. For this, I also joined the weekly meeting of the process team to know about all the relevant developments and to see how we of the software team could support them. During that period, I did not take any holidays except for the last weeks of December, when I did joined Advent of Code, but even during that time I was on standby ready to return to the office if needed, checking my emails daily. So, I do feel part of the achievement of getting the FDA Clearance. The blog of Bond3D does mentioned that Bond3D joined the Demcon group on October 12. On October 1, 2019, I joined Bond3D as a senior software developer working primarily on the Bond3D Slicer, which is an application that taken a geometry specified with one or more 3D models (in the STL format) can produce instructions (in G-code) for a 3D-printer according to the various settings that the user has selected in the slicer. When I joined the company, the slicer was already developed and I helped to develop many of the features. Without knowing it at the time, it was my first experience with continous intergration and continuos delivery. I estimate that on the DORA Quick Check we scored an 8.3 at that time. In the years that followed, management forced a more project oriented according to the V-model on the development of the slicer, which probably resulted in a much lower score and a less effective software development process. At my preformance review at the start of 2024, I got a less than good score on the areas of cooperation and predictability due to my 'attitude' with one of the projects, a project that did not have top priorities and for which I nevertheless did achieve all the goals that were set. This caused me to lose my confidence in management, which resulted, after a lot of struggling and feeling burn-out, in quiting on March 29. Earlier that month, in the blog 'Being too senior', I implied that I did not feel recognized for my abilities as a senior software engineers.Link
Friday, December 27, 2024
WinterGo
I went to Wintergo, a friendly go tournament (just one round per day) with various workshops and ample time to play board games, for just one day. primarily to talk to some people that I had not seen for a long time. This year the event was held at Brick Works De Panoven, a little over a one hour drive from were we live. I played my first game of go in more than five years during the first round, which as usual started later than according to the schedule. I lost the game with five and half points (if we counted correctly) against a 9 kyu player. I was quite happy about this because I had enlisted myself as a 11 kyu player, although according to the European Go Database my rating was just a little less than 10 kyu, because I had expected that my strength would have gone down after not having played any game for more than five years. I was a little surprised by how strong I played. I did make some tactical mistakes that costed me about twenty points, but probably also because I had played some bold moves that I could not have defended anyway. I guess I would have felt guilty had I been paired up with a 11 kyu player, as it seems that my strength is still around 10 kyu. I also watched several other go games being played, all outside the tournament and watched some strong players teach others about go. I was happy to see that the strongest player, took ample time to analyze the game he played against another player, almost replaying the whole game, and sharing his ideas about what his opponent could have done better. Strong go players have no problems with replaying a game without having taking notes, because they can usually remember the whole game. There is always an eagerness with strong players to tutor less strong players. There was a code yellow alart because of possible fog. When driving home there was some fog, just as on the way going there, but not so bad that I had to significantly my driving speed. With respect to the end position shown on the right, black captured 10 stones and I captured one.Thursday, December 26, 2024
Language for TinyCoPoOS
In the past weeks, I have been thinking about a programming language that is an extension to (a subset) of C that can be compiled to code that for cooperative, polling operating system that I came up with last month, because it is hard to write correct code for it. An example of a some code in this language, using a I2C peripheral to read a 16 bit value from some temperature sensor every 4 ticks.
uint32_t temp = 0;
err_t temp_err = ERR_OK;
task int get_temp(void)
{
queue for I2CExec {
I2COpen(TEMP_DEVICE_ADDR);
I2CStartWrite();
I2CWrite(TEMP_DEVICE_GET_TEMP_CMD);
I2CReadValues(2);
temp_err = I2CExec();
if (temp_err == ERR_OK) {
uint8_t x = I2CRead();
uint8_t y = I2CRead();
temp = (x << 8) | y
}
}
}
I have marked the extensions bold in the above example. The task
keyword (type modifier) indicates that the function should be executed as
a task. The queue for keywords indicates that following code needs to
be queued for the call of I2CExec task. The other function starting
with I2C are low level functions that compose the I2C-request that
is going to be executed. The implementation of I2CExec will make use
of a timer for the case when the I2C peripheral continues producing errors due
to a bad behaving slave device. The implementation for this could look like:
task err_t I2CExec(void)
{
I2CStop();
err_r err;
timer bus_err_timer;
poll {
if (I2CDone()) {
err = I2CError();
break;
}
} at most (2) {
err = ERR_TIMEOUT;
}
if (err == ERR_OK) {
TimerReset(bus_err_timer);
}
else {
I2CResetFSM();
TimerStart(bus_err_timer, 100);
if (TimerDone(bus_err_timer)) {
I2CBusreset();
poll {
if (!I2CBusBusy())
break;
}
}
return err;
}
The keyword timer is used to allocate a timer. The keyword
poll stands for an infinite loop that yields at each iteration of the
loop. The yielding means that the execution is interrupted to allow other tasts
to execute. The at most keywords after a poll indicates a time-out
timer will be started at the start of the poll and that the following statement
will be executed if the time-out has occred. The TimerStart function
will not restart the timer when it is already running. To execute the
get_temp task every 10 ticks, the following code can be used, that
uses the every (10) start construct. If the task is not finished yet,
it will restart as soon as it is finished.
void run(void)
{
every (10) start get_temp;
}
Link
Wednesday, December 28, 2024
Advent of Code: Rank 1719
My alarm went of at 5:40, such that I could go down and be ready at 6:00 to solve the last puzzle of this years Advent of Code challenge. Yesterdays puzzle was really difficult and it was way after midnight before I solved the second half of that puzzle with a bit of hacking. I might look at a better program to solve that puzzle. For today, I did get the correct algorithm to solve the problem, but I made a small mistake that required me to do some debugging with the example input that was provided with the puzzle (as there is some examples with every puzzle).When I found the bug, it found the correct answer for the example input and my puzzle input. At 6:18:26, I submitted my answer for the puzzle (being the 2060th person doing so). The second part of the puzzle is simply clicking a link that is only available if you have already solved all other puzzles, and because I had, at 6:18:51, I as the 1719th person doing so. The fact that this rank is a bit lower than the first, means that about 341 persons who solved this puzzle, had not yet solved all other puzzles.Tuesday, December 24, 2024
Link
Monday, December 23, 2024
Link
Sunday, December 22, 2024
Ein Endloses Geflochtenes Band
At 15:03:27, I bought the book Gödel, Escher, Bach: Ein Endloses Geflochtenes Band written by Douglas R. Hofstadter, translated from the English Gödel, Escher, Bach: an eternal golden braid to German by Philipp Wolff-Windegg and Hermann Feuersee, and published by Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH in September 1991, ISBN:9783423114363, from bookshop Broekhuis for € 10.00. I already saw this book yesterday, when I visited the shop, and this afternoon, I went back to buy it. I already have the original and the Dutch translation of this book. I have only read parts of those books. I do not know exactly why I bought this German translation.Links
- LLMs vs Advent of Code, AI is winning
- Unofficial Leaderboard of Advent of Code
Saturday, December 21, 2024
Rozendaal Ateliers
I went into the city where I saw the exhibition Rozendaal Ateliers at Concordia. It is about the artist working at Rozendaal Ateliers. I found the works of the following artist noteworhty:Sunday, December 15, 2024
Link
Saturday, December 14, 2024
A picture of a Christmas tree
The second part of todays puzzle from Advent of Code was rather cryptic mentioning finding 'a picture of a Christmas tree' in a long sequence of generated images. I first thought that the Christmas tree would be centered in the middle at the bottom and I designed some code to detected this. When this resulted in nothing promising, I went back to the puzzle description and realizing that it said 'some' and not 'all', implying that there could be dots (robots in the description) outside of the Christmas tree. I wrote some code to see if at some point there would be a horizontal concentration of dots. That was indeed the case, but there were multiple occurences of this. When I added code that also looked at a vertical concentration of dots, I did find the correct answer to the puzzle. When I later watched the video Advent of Code 2024 Day 14 - 12th gold star! by Neil Thistlethwaite solving the puzzle, I got the idea to check for the iamge that did not have any dots on top of each other. For him that did result in the correct answer. I later noticed several others also mentioning this idea. I verified it for my puzzle input and found that there was but one image with no overlapping dots. I still wonder if this always the case or that it was engineered like this.Sapphire Blue
In the past months, I did not find a Moleskine dairy for 2025 in the shops I visited. Last Friday, I went to their Dutch webshop and discovered that they did not have the black version that I normaly buy in stock. So, I ordered a 'Moleskine 2025 12M Daily Hardcover Pocket Sapphire Blue', article code DHB2012DC2Y25, for € 23.90. The postage costs were € 3.95. Today, it arrived at 14:06 (according to the tracking page) in the mail.Thursday, December 12, 2024
Enschede Lights Up
In the evening, I went into the city to see the Enschede Lights Up event. I saw the following projections or installations:- Keys of Light by Mr. Beam, which bring to life a public piano.
- The Timelight Project which was an interactive installation created by Saxion students to the accompaniment of music composed by ArtEZ students.
- Infinity, an installation by Total Image.
- Light magic in the night by MK Lighting Technology.
- Christmas Carousel 2.0 by Vision Impossible.
- Futuristic Hologram Pillars by Jasper Schütz, Bouwding, Jay Minimal and Michiel Brink.
- Come to blossom by Vision Impossible. I liked this one the best.
- Sticker Mania by University of Twente in collaboration with 100%FAT and Enschede Promotie.
- ANNA by ZoomWorks.
Wednesday, December 11, 2024
Carte Blanche
I went to the opening of two exhibitions at the artist collective B93: A day in a lifetime with photographs by Paul Hendriksen and Farewell to 't Winkel with photographs by Martin Klein Schaarsberg, which is about his parents leaving the 't Winkel where he grew up. Paul Hendriks had one of his photographs of a view from the beach towards the sea split into twenty prints showing a part of the original photograph. I thought about which of the individual photographs I liked most and selected the fourth photograph from the left in the second row from the top.Sunday, December 8, 2024
Advent of Code: 14 seconds
In the past days of solving the Advent of Code coding challenges, I have been rather successfull in finding the answers when I try to find the answers in one try (including compiling the program correctly). To achieve this, I spend some time reviewing my code before compiling and running it. Several times when doing this I found syntax errors and bugs in my code.Today, the first correct solution to the first part of the puzzle was submitted after 14 seconds by Jeroen de Bruin. On his GitHub page he writes: 'Improving my Python skills using AI.' It looks like he used an AI agent to help solving the puzzle, and in the short time it took him to submit the answer, he probably used the program that the AI generated. It might be the case that some of the other top five submitters also have been us an AI for finding their solution. In the About page of Advent of Code it says:
Can I use AI to get on the global leaderboard? Please don't use AI / LLMs (like GPT) to automatically solve a day's puzzles until that day's global leaderboards are full. By "automatically", I mean using AI to do most or all of the puzzle solving, like handing the puzzle text directly to an LLM. The leaderboards are for human competitors; if you want to compare the speed of your AI solver with others, please do so elsewhere. (If you want to use AI to help you solve puzzles, I can't really stop you, but I feel like it's harder to get better at programming if you ask an AI to do the programming for you.)The fifth submitter for the first part of the puzzle is Foromo Daniel Soromou, who just took 35 second for the first part of the puzzle and than 61 seconds to find the solution for the second part of the puzzle. The second part is a rather simple adjustment of the first part. Although I have to admit it also took me a second try to find the solution due to not reading the puzzle description in detail, which removes an exclusion condition explicitly stated in the first part of the puzzle. He has not yet published his programs, so, we cannot see how he got from the first to the second part of the puzzle. It looks like he does not have extremely short submit times, so, probably he is just very good at these kind of challenges. Some of the top people in the global leaderboard up until today (that I have not mentioned before) are:
- 2nd: Kaden Bilyeu, who, if I remember correctly, is participating for the first time and against using LLM's as he states in his statement.
- 3rd: Nordine Lotfi.
- 4th: エニラ (Japanese female name).
- 5th: George Hotz.
- 6th: Małgorzata Kozłowska.
- 10th: Hugo Romero, who seems to be using Claude according to his repository to generate Python code.
- 17th: Peter Cullen Burbery, who is trying to solve the puzzles with many different programming languages: advent-of-code-002 repository.
Saturday, December 7, 2024
Do Not Believe in Us
In the afternoon, I went into the city. I first went to TETEM art space where I saw the exhibition Pearl of the Past with works by Lea van Vlodrop. I saw her work the first time on Saturday, July 6 at the AKI Finals exhibition. Next, I went to Fotogalerie Objektief, where I saw the exhibition Morgen ligt de vis erin (Dutch for Tomorrow the fish will be in) with photographs by Emiel Muijderman from his nieuws and report photography. I finally, went to the opening of the exhibition Do Not Believe in Us: Celebrating 25 years of low res hardcore images with works by The C-Men, the duo existing of Julian van Aalderen (Website in Dutch) and Sjors Trimbach (Website in Dutch). The C-Men are a VJ-duo making use of Amiga computers. The works on display are:- Digital print on foil on the window.
- Traffic light. MDF, lights, stickers.
- Do Not Believe in US: 6 digital prints 84×118 cm.
- Let us belive in you: 3 animation loops surrounded by many smaller prints.
- Small animations: many displayed on a single screen.
- Wise Buddha. Digital print on Forex® with LED lightning, 156×150 cm. With the text: 'Try a little gendermess. Your inner buddha has a skill issue. Sometimes your worst just hypnotize me.'
- 5B. Digital print on Forex®, 147×210 cm.
- We R the C-Men. Animation on music.
- Peepbox. MDF, animation.
