betabug... Sascha Welter (Einträge über programming)

Nicht denken, nur segeln

S. Welter — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 11:32:41 GMT

Im Moment ist Nachdenken überhaupt nicht angesagt. Zuviel passiert "da draussen" in der weiten Welt. Da haben wir das Fediverse (aka "Mastodon") und das IndyWeb (aka "Blogs") und dreiviertel davon scheint immer noch gefüllt zu sein, mit allem was gerade furchtbar ist. Da zu lesen ist wie ein Gang durchs Minenfeld. Da kann ich auch gleich die Zeitung lesen.

Statt dessen funktioniert für mich gerade nur, was ich machen kann ohne darüber hinaus nachzudenken: Zeichnen, Velofahren, Kochen, Bücher lesen, Programmieren. Ich beschäftige mich wieder mit Ada, einer Programmiersprache, zu der ich seit ewigen Zeiten immer wieder mal zurück kehre. Warum gerade die? Keine Ahnung... vielleicht eine Mischung aus der altmodischen Verbosität, der Suche nach dem Strickten, gleichzeitig anachronistisch, nützlich und nicht wirklich hilfreich. Wobei es am besten funktioniert, wenn ich nicht über den Sinn nachdenke.

Picking up Activity

S. Welter — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 11:09:06 GMT

Many years ago two of my friends had started a little project for tracking of sports workouts. They had a nice little "proof of concept", which actually worked. Then, for many years, nothing happened and the project was forgotten. Except it still bounced around in my head, while me and my friends were busy with other projects.

The problem with projects like this is that there is some kind of "bit rot", or should we say "dependency rot". The project doesn't only consist of its own code, it depends on a bunch of other code bases, libraries, tools, etc. which invariably change over time. If you are not on the ball with your own project, suddenly it will stop installing or working, because a couple of the underlying libraries have changed. But I digress...

Then, I remembered that project again and started to pester my friend Wu to let us start with it again. The problem was that the code base I had was outdated, while Wu had some newer changes that he needed to apply. Also we needed a place to host the project to work on it. So at the start it was Wu who got busy, installing Forgejo on one of his servers, getting the git project set up, applying and testing his patches.

When that was done I started to dive in. At first with some code reading, some trying out, formulating some lists of tasks. It took me a while to get comfortable, but then it felt so good to be working with my friends again, especially on something that is our own thing and is enjoyable in itself. We called out to a close circle of friends who might join in, and Max jumped right in. With a lot of energy and knowledge.

Now I'm working almost every day a little bit on this. It's a hobby project after all. Programmers recognize the graphic at the top of this post right away: It's the "activity graph" of a project. Each square represents a day (the graph goes back one year, from left to right). Grey squares are where no work was done, Yellowish-reddish squares represent days with work done, the darker the more. So you can clearly see how the work has picked up after a long hiatus. And I'm sure it won't stop there ... "more to come" as they say.

The forgejo site is currently locked and password protected. On the one hand, we want to move the project a little bit more ahead before "presenting it". On the other hand, we're a bit cautious after reading all the stories of AI bots thrashing web sites and especially code repository sites. We don't want to feed the ghouls and we certainly don't want to deal with the bandwidth and server hassles. We will have to find a solution for this.

Found a typo in my blog, and then ...

S. Welter — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 15:15:49 GMT

Today I remembered this little weblog again, and as I was looking through the pages, I noticed a typo. Easy fix, I know where the posts are on my laptop, so I can fix the mistake in maybe 10 seconds locally.

But then I have to convince nikola (the static site generator) to re-build the site, so I can upload the fix. Since I haven't touched anything in a while, this might be broken... and it was.

First I had to update / upgrade the virtualenv (in Python 3 this is called a "venv" now). The magic incantation is something like this:

python3 -m venv --upgrade <path_to_dir>

(Where python3 is the python interpreter that should run the whole circus afterwards.)

Next I had to pip install --upgrade nikola, the same for pip itself, then it wanted to have jinja2 installed in the virtualenv (no idea why it wasn't)... and then it worked. Not too bad, all in all. It leaves me enough time to go for a walk before the sun goes down now.

Playfair first Ada package

S. Welter — Thu, 16 Jun 2022 14:21:57 GMT

So by now I have a simple Ada package that encrypts / decrypts in Playfair and builds an encryption table given a "secret" keyword.

This is still very much beginner code, the suckage is high.

But I had LOADS of fun and learned a lot. The strong typing system is at times infuriating, and at times bordering on beautiful.

Retro Ada coding

S. Welter — Mon, 13 Jun 2022 08:25:45 GMT

Reading lately so much about retrocomputing made me want to get back to some simple coding, like back in the times where figuring out a 30 line BASIC program was an achievement. So a week ago I downloaded a free Ada introduction book and started to "work" through it.

Yesterday morning I finished with it and set me a little challenge: Started to implement Playfair with only the wikipedia article as a base. Despite having guests for lunch AND dinner, at night at 1AM I had a basic POC together that encrypted the example message correctly.

Resurected Matryoshka Code

S. Welter — Thu, 17 Feb 2022 16:15:58 GMT

Noticed today that there was some appreciation for one of the posts from my old blog. So I went and resurrected the text of that post at the right URL. In the process I found out how to put stuff into random places in Nikola, so I could actually selectively bring some of the old blog content back. Here is Matryoshka Code.