Vinc

Reviewing January 2024

2024-02-01T01:00:00+01:00

Reviewing January 2024

Most of my free time in January was spent on MOROS, my hobby operating system.

First I explored the idea of printing its source code on archival paper which gave me a second reason to refactor the code to fit the lines under 80 chars. The first reason has always been that the VGA Text Mode is limited to 80x25 in size, but I prefer to go up to 100 or even 120 chars on the host system.

It took quite a bit of work because I didn't like the result of simply running cargo fmt. When I was done I wrote a small script to download all the source code inside the OS to /src in case one want to read or edit it.

After that I started a serie of small features to improve the system. The first one was adding ANSI OSC color palette support to the userspace like Linux does to avoid calling a kernel function for that. And then I added a simple but very usefull implementation of hashbang support to run scripts in /bin as if they were binaries.

The rest of the time was spent buying some devices to create a Zigbee network to monitor the home. I want to see how much electricity the house is using in real time and control the electric heaters to heat the house in a smarter way.

I already have 1-wire temperature sensors everywhere but I added some devices with a screen to measure and display the temperature and humidity in various rooms.

I bought a couple of old but inexpensive Lenovo ThinkCentre M83 SFF computers instead of using yet another Raspberry Pi to install Home Assistant in a virtual machine. I will also test Proxmox as an hypervisor. And if all goes well I will install it on the big Dell PowerEdge R710 servers in my homelab rack instead of Ubuntu.

Reviewing December 2023

2024-01-01T01:00:00+01:00

Reviewing December 2023

I started December by participating in the Advent of Code for the first week until I didn't have enough time before breakfast to continue. I did the challenges in Ruby first with a bit of code golfing to produce short solutions and then I rewrote some of them in MOROS Lisp to improve the language like I did last year.

It was fun. I customized my boot script to start directly into the Lisp interpreter and removed the need to load the core library manually. This allowed me to go straight to coding after turning on the computer.

The language improved significantly with the addition of a dict type to complement list, a host function to resolve hostnames, escape sequences like \e to print ANSI colors easily, and more!

Additionally, I implemented a hash command to compute the SHA256 digest of a file to make sure I can download and copy files without errors.

At the beginning of the month I also started a new project called Nyx to have a bedrock platform to build MOROS. It's currently based on Alpine Linux and provides a minimalist text-based Linux host with the same look and feel as MOROS.

After that I updated this website and changed its theme from solarized to gruvbox that I've been using everywhere since 2019. I really like the result.

The rest of the first 3 weeks was spent on polishing a release of MOROS 0.10.2 in time for the winter solstice.

In the last week I took a coding break to try to see what data I could salvage from 22 hard drives of past computers from the last 30 years. The oldest drives no longer work, but most from around the year 2000 are still surprisingly in good condition, whereas many produced after that are either dead or full of errors.

Releasing MOROS 0.10.2

2023-12-22T01:00:00+01:00

Releasing MOROS 0.10.2

MOROS is a text-based hobby operating system targeting computers with a x86-64 architecture and a BIOS. It is inspired by Unix and ITS but is closer to a modern DOS at the moment in term of features.

What's new in MOROS 0.10.2?

Added a process page table
Added a userspace memory allocator
Improved the lisp interpretor
Improved the documentation

Read the full list of changes on the CHANGELOG

How to run MOROS?

The binary can be booted from USB on a computer with a BIOS or from a virtual machine with Bochs, QEMU, or VirtualBox. Here's a quick way to do it with QEMU:

qemu-system-x86_64 -m 32 -cpu max -nic model=rtl8139 -soundhw pcspk -hda moros-v0.10.2.bin

Read more detailed instructions in the README

Reviewing November 2023

2023-12-01T01:00:00+01:00

Reviewing November 2023

In November I mostly used my spare time to work on my hobby operating system MOROS.

I was finally able to merge a feature adding a dedicated page table to each process that I started a year ago. And from there I merged another even older feature adding a userspace allocator with two new ALLOC and FREE syscalls. Next step was a little improvement to spawn a new process from userspace which is the first step for a userspace shell. I also started working on adding an assembler to the system.

In parallel to that system work I improved the documentation, I added hexadecimal and binary numbers support to the Lisp interpreter, and I added a hash command to compute file digests with SHA256.

I also added a Gruvbox light theme to moros.cc, the website hosting the documentation.

Reviewing October 2023

2023-11-01T01:00:00+01:00

Reviewing October 2023

This month I finished the prototype for Geonde, an environmental platform for green computing that I started last month.

I also created a landing page for CloudWaste, an idea for a related green computing project to help people stop wasting cloud resources.

And finally I worked on a fix for dates before 1900-01-01 on my lunisolar calendar. I also fixed the Geodate website that couldn't be built from source anymore.

Reviewing September 2023

2023-10-01T02:00:00+02:00

Reviewing September 2023

This month I started working on Geonde, an environmental platform for green computing.

I've been exploring recently what I could do to help make cloud computing more sustainable and one interesting area is carbon aware software using data from the electricity grid and weather forecasts.

The prototype is pretty basic for now but it is reusing things that I coded almost a decade ago for an abandoned project.

During the launch of Geonde I had to update and rebuild some of my other apps hosted on the same server in a hurry to avoid too much downtime. I took this as an opportunity to add a dark mode to News Search after I updated its version of Bootstrap. I use dark mode a lot at night and I was really missing it on this app.

And finally I released a new version of MOROS on the day of the autumnal equinox which was the object of my previous post.