A post was made today in the IPFS discussion forums about a project aiming to be a decentralized replacement for GitHub called Multiverse. It is currently alpha software, so only try to use it if you are intending to submit bug reports, becoming a developer, or being a bleeding edge adopter. It is far from ready for mainstream developer use. But is is already promising, to the point that if it stays maintained, I will be switching my repositories over to it.

Recently, I was reading this article about compiling Ada to WebAssembly and running in the browser. I haven’t used Ada and I don’t plan to, but because I was curious about how they were doing OpenGL from WebAssembly, I took a peak at the JavaScript shim they were using and found code like this:

  __adawebpack__html__Button__disabled_getter: function(identifier) {
    return +(__adawebpack_o2i.too(identifier).disabled);
  },

  __adawebpack__html__Button__disabled_setter: function(identifier,to) {
    __adawebpack_o2i.too (identifier).disabled = (to !== 0);
  },

  __adawebpack__html__Canvas__height_getter: function(identifier) {
    return __adawebpack_o2i.too(identifier).height;
  },

I’m sure that it works, but I found it looked a bit clunky. So I began thinking about how I would get the same behavior while not having to produce so much boilerplate code. The idea of using handles to reference JavaScript objects is good, so I kept it, but tried to reduce the remainder to as few API calls as I thought was reasonable. JavaScript helps here in that ever object except window can be accessed thru window with indexing (i.e. []) Here is what I came up with:

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. WASM).

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. Anything that isn’t worth even a few seconds of my time is going to the dustbin (rm -f $COMMENT).

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. One of the ways to ensure you have a supply of food is to grow it right at your home. While it is vanishingly unlikely you will be able to grow enough calories to keep you alive, growing some of those calories will make any food storage you have last longer.

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. This is a man of the highest integrity that I have every seen, including people of rank in large religious institutions, being on the level of respect I give to my own father. He has consistently done what he has said he will do in the face of overwhelming corruption in DC, a Constitutional libertarian. Some of the people that have been kicked off mainstream platforms there might have been some hint of validity, but not here.

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. Instead you are limited to a lookup of SHA-256 Hash to CID, download the entire file, then verify the hash is correct.

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-0.9.0 to the latest stable version that is not affected by the referenced bugs.