2022-06-08.01

LÖVE, Lines; Sat; Hearing

LÖVE, Lines

Photo by Sebastian Kanczok on Unsplash

Despite being in the TIOBE top 20, the Lua programming language doesn't get much 💙 or press in day-to-day internet blatherings. It does get some 💛 from LÖVE, which is a framework for making 2D games in Lua. I may cover it in more depth in a future edition but you should take a moment and check it out as it's a pretty cool concept, framework, and community.

I learned about LÖVE from Plain text. With lines. (PtWl) — note, this is an http vs https link as it appears the site runner is part of the cleartext web contingent) — which is written using said framework. PtWl is a small text editor that allows you to draw/doodle within the same document (i.e. no cognitive disruption by having to open a different app). It's clever in that the drawing is stored with the document as a series of drawing statements. It's much easier to grok once you see an example (stolen from the site):

Hi there.
```lines
{"p2":{"x":141,"y":85},"mode":"line","p1":{"x":34,"y":44}}
```
I am some text.

It's an interesting concept, and the author's post goes into the rationale behind it with a fair amount of detail.

Now, if only I could actually draw… (but, I can make an R package/R Markdown renderer to read and display these docs).

Sat

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Sat (GH) is a tiny WebAssembly edge compute (think "satellite") server from a pretty cool company called Suborbital.

I keep dropping Wasm topics because I'm fairly convinced this is the future of modern application/service deployment, and Sat only reinforces my posit.

Sat has a sibling dubbed atmo, which is a fully-fledged server framework and platform with support for running entire applications[1], whereas Sat is designed to run a single, small Wasm function incredibly efficiently (think "Wasm lambda functions").

These Sat programs can be super-tiny thanks to the Sat framework; small enough to risk using the horrible Substack code block:

use suborbital::runnable::*;
use suborbital::util;
use suborbital::log;

struct HelloEcho{}

impl Runnable for HelloEcho {
    fn run(&self, input: Vec<u8>) -> Result<Vec<u8>, RunErr> {
        let message = util::to_string(input);
        let output = format!("hello {}", message);

        log::info(output.as_str());

        Ok(output.as_bytes().to_vec())
    }
}


// initialize the runner, do not edit below //
static RUNNABLE: &HelloEcho = &HelloEcho{};

#[no_mangle]
pub extern fn _start() {
    use_runnable(RUNNABLE);
}

The above just says hello back to you, but it shows the idiom Sat wants you to follow.

Sat was designed to run in a mesh farm, which Suborbital refers to as a "constellation", that can be orchestrated with the company’s constd.

Keep a telescopic eye on Suborbital and their tools/frameworks, as I think they've got a great concept that's, so far, been executed super-well.

Hearing

I do my best to keep the pending demise of American democracy out of these newsletters, but — as of this edition — we've only got ~943 days left of it (you can keep track of when we fall into anocracy with my countdown timer), and today is a big week in terms of perhaps staving off said demise.

The U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6, (2021) attack on the Capitol is holding its first public hearing on this Thursday evening (June 9th, 2022). They've been at work for about a year investigating the circumstances behind Capitol riot and taking a close look those who influenced the more than 800 people criminally charged in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying the 2020 election results.

This is the first of _eight_ planned for this June.

You can and should watch it live at 8:00pm EDT on C-SPAN, the Select Committee's YouTube, ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN and Fox Business (Fox "News" isn’t airing it as they’re on the side of sedition). If you're a parent with middle-school+-aged kids, have them watch it with you. It's important.

I know most folks want to "move on" and care more about inflation, sportsball, and Kardashians than this topic, but that's just how "it" can — and will — happen here.

FIN

FWIW I won't be spamming future newsletters with any reminders of tomorrow's or other June Committee hearings, just this one. ☮

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1. Work-related interjection: it'd be neat to deploy honeypots as Wasm apps. ↩︎