One milestone I will be looking forward to in the WebAssembly space is when a compiler that can output WebAssembly has been compiled to WebAssembly and is capable of compiling itself. The first compiler to do this will be the first native WebAssembly compiler. Right now, all compilers that output WebAssembly do so as a cross compiler, where the compiler is one instruction set (x86_64, aarm64, etc.) and outputs binaries in a different instruction set (WebAssembly aka.

When I first came across WebAssembly, I was already aware of the IPFS project, and immediately thought that the two would work well together. Specifically, I thought that WebAssembly modules stored in IPFS could be loaded automatically by an edge web server to allow for dynamic content without a centralized server and without requiring IPFS on the device utilizing the service. The latter is important for supporting legacy devices and services that cannot be updated.

Looks like the bots have found my web site. I guess I should be grateful that the site is reachable from the other parts of the web and not just floating around in IPFS outer space. I’ve started to get a number of comments that add absolutely nothing to this blog, and thus will never see the light of day. Before anyone yells “Censorship!”, I did say that the comments will be added manually, meaning that I have to take time out of my day to move the comments over to the site.

It is that time of year, when the big-box stores start carrying their meager selection of garden seeds and crappy single-use flimsy plastic starter “pots”. It is also the time of year that you need to start plants indoors for early spring planting, and getting seed orders submitted for late spring planting. This year looks to me like growing an increased portion of your own food is a winning strategy. Between travel restrictions and social unrest, the security of your food supply is probably in the front of your mind.

You may notice at the bottom of this page is a comment submission form. As of this post, comments are live, using a prototype store and forward relay server. Right now, the only functionality is to accept posts and store them. The forwarding part hasn’t been written. Also, any comments that I receive will have to be manually added by me (and moderated at the same time). Let me know if it’s working.

And you though 2021 would be any better.... I woke this morning to the news that Ron Paul has been banned from Facebook. While I hate Facebook’s guts and everyone involved in creating that cesspool of conformity and control, and I think them having one fewer person captive in their walled garden is a good thing, there are some extremely disturbing trends coalescing. The ban was done on the grounds of “Violation of Facebook’s Terms of Service”, implying that Ron Paul did something wrong, which is a massive, steaming pile of bull.

I’ve been following this thread that mostly boils down to this: if I have the SHA-256 hash of a file, can I use that to get a file from IPFS? The short answer is not really?, because Merkle-DAG. The slightly-longer answer is that because Merkle-DAG is required to allow chunking files and verifying those chunks as they come in, and SHA-256 does not have a facility to combine hashes of two components into a single hash for the combined block, you can’t find files on IPFS my the hash of the entire file in a way where you can verify that each block belongs to that hash without having to download the entire file.

I have been using the project described here for some time now to get Archlinux package updates, even going so far as to join the pinning cluster, but I’m not sure how much longer that is going to last. As of five days ago, the cluster has stopped getting updates, and according to the status page, the cluster is offline for the foreseeable future. The quick(ish) fix is to roll the IPFS software back from the development version of ipfs-0.

Another weekend, another wabt-hole. I got crystal to compile to WebAsembly and then run in Brave, and it only took two days to get setup and get it to print out “Hello, World!” in the console. I have tried to use WebAssembly a couple of years ago, but dropped it once I failed to get a simple hello world program to function. This is the same reason I don’t have Haskell under my programming utility belt, no hello world.

While doing a websearch for “steam ipfs”, I happened upon the website en.wikipedia-on-ipfs.org. I have known that there was a copy of Wikipedia made in 2017 for English, Kurdish and Turkish, but only today did I find out that somebody has registered a domain name for it. I looks like a recent development.