Ballmerpeak devblog

Software development, related stuff and others

Pro vim development environment 2: mid-level tricks and tips

July 26, 2020 — Richárd Thier

Pro "haxxors" and coders can live without a full-blown IDE and usually prefer a good editor, a good terminal, a good operating system, scripts and habits.

The second part of the vim devenv story. Read on, more heavy, but still mid level stuff is presented here. I am presenting this not from a purely "vim" viewpoint, but from a "what comes up handy when programmng" viewpoint!

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Tags: vim, devenv, development, environment, tips, tricks, pro, hacker, hackz, tutorial, linux, bash, sex

Pro vim development environment 1: basics and motivation

April 24, 2020 — Richárd Thier

Pro "haxxors" and coders can live without a full-blown IDE and usually prefer a good editor, a good terminal, a good operating system, scripts and habits.

One such good editor is vim and I thought why not blog down some tips&tricks?

Aside of writing down some neat tricks I wrote and wrote and wrote and my text became a spaghetti whose half is for vim-novices and other half is for mid level and "at least casual" vim users so I thought I seperate these two into their own blog posts or maybe later who knows add more and more parts to this little "vim dev env series".

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Tags: vim, devenv, development, environment, tips, tricks, pro, hacker, hackz, tutorial, linux, bash, series

Blog not mobile friendly? Neither apache mod_dir is!

February 28, 2020 — Richárd Thier

As most of you already know, my blog is just static HTML but generated by one small bash script called bashblog or bb.sh. For this it is blazing fast and simple to load and pretty much always looked good on my phone too. When lookin at google search console I spot however that they said it is not really mobile friendly and you better take that seriously for SEO penalties and such.

Read on for some tips and tricks in responsive blog design.

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Tags: responsive, web, blog, development, trickz, tutorial, apache, mod_dir, text-is-too-small-to-read, googlebot, internal, css

Holiday DIY hobby electronics Christmas tree

December 24, 2019 — Richárd Thier

When I was a kid my dad made me a little blinking "Christmas tree" out of a "cone" from a pine and some little electronics and leds. When last year I saw the nice blinky presents I got together for free when odering from local hobby electric shop I though the next Christmas will be the perfect time for making from that circuit what my dad once did for me as a present for my girlfriend.

Then I thought why not write a tutorial about it so others can build - maybe even foreign people who did not see the Hungarian tutorial for it of course?

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Tags: DIY, Christmas, electronics, hobby, present, tutorial, tree, blinking, circuit, beginner, hestore, hestoreplexing, charlieplexing

How we speak with computers

July 06, 2019 — Richárd Thier

Once my high-school friend asked "how a bunch of bytes can mean something?" and he wanted to have a clue on how a computer "magically works".

Back then I already knew it, because I have started up my programing with the assembly programming language, which is practically machine language and also I knew about very basic electronics at least. But what if you are not knowing these things? What if you know computers quite well, but you are neither a programmer, neither anyone who uses a soldering iron ever?

I will try my best to explain how a very simple computer really works. Read on.

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Tags: tutorial, computers, programming, assembly, how, it, works, beginner, introduction

Debugging HyperZ and fixing a radeon drm linux kernel module

June 19, 2019 — Richárd Thier

It was only a few days ago I have finished debugging a really heavy bug making as big of a mesa performance hit in the userland radeon driver that it became a news article on Phoronix. Back then while still on the heavy journey for getting my performance back I saw HyperZ was also not enabled for me, but if I enable it I gain 10-15% more performance - and an unplayable 3D screen.

On the original blog post I have also written about how to troubleshoot a performance issue generally, but what to do if you know about a performance increasing functionality - just you see it destroys the 3D picture?

Read on if you are interested in linux graphics internals once again ;-)

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Tags: drm, hyperz, r300, radeon, linux, kernel, mesa, arch, 32bit, linux, debug, glitches, fix, contribute, open-source, graphics, stack, analysis, 3D, optimization, tutorial, system, internals, hackerman, opengl, zbuffer, hiz, zmask, documentation

Debugging mesa and the linux 3D graphics stack

June 11, 2019 — Richárd Thier

Have you ever wanted to troubleshoot or even contribute to the linux graphics stack? Were you ever interested in doing a deep dive? Read on if you dare, but do not fear - I was rookie on the topic myself before I went for my hunt on a 50-1000% slowdown after some updates and a distro change.

I wanted to document the process of delving deep into open source drivers. I just wanted to put things together as it might be valuable for others wanting to do similar things - I was and still is a rookie for these things after all.

The power of open source: We can fix a more than decade old hardware getting a slowdown as easily as a new one! Fuck you planned obsolesence haha!

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Tags: mesa, arch, 32bit, linux, debug, slowdown, contribute, open-source, graphics, stack, analysis, 3D, optimization, tutorial, system, internals

Building your own mesa

June 04, 2019 — Richárd Thier

These days I was doing a debugging session on a slowdown somewhere in the linux graphics pipeline of mine after I have changed to arch linux. It have turned out to be a bug in mesa, but in order to corner the problem I had to compile mesa myself both in latest and earlier versions.

I have found that it is really easy to do so - nearly as "simple" as compiling and using your own kernel and it is well documented, but I had to use different information from different sites so I thought it is good to collect the relevant links in one place.

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Tags: mesa, build, compile, tutorial, linux

Website and blog speedup tricks

April 01, 2019 — Richárd Thier

Performant websites and blogs lead to a much better user experience and not only that, but even google will rank your creations better when optimized.

This blog was always lightweight - until lately when a lot of clutter have finally piled up in form of various scripts, third party components along with badly optimized pictures. Through this blog post I am documenting the "cleanup process", so read on.

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Tags: website, speedup, web-development, optimization, trickz, tutorial, blog

Setting up my own ascii-casting on my blog

January 18, 2019 — Richárd Thier

Uploading live-code like recordings is handy for a blog in many ways. My machine is not the fastest to handle easy MP4 content creation software and I like lightweight solutions anyways.

Asciinema is a nice app for recording the terminal. It closely resembles termrec and earlier alternatives but is much more stable when it comes to handling editors and other things. In this post I show how have I set up a javascript player for asciinema recordings to work with my minimalist blog using bb.sh (bashblog)

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Tags: meta, asciinema, bashblog, asciicast, termrec, blog, terminal, lightweight, fun, tutorial, software-development, linux