Happy things thread!

[sasasha]

Did my first big shopping in a week, at the Middle Eastern bakery and grocery near me. Two miles each way, so it's a bit of a hike, but it was a lovely day and I managed not to destroy my arms coming back. Normally, I try to practice restraint when I'm there, but between COVID-related stress and not knowing when I could make a return trip, I was like, "Fuck it". Chocolate-covered cashews or chocolate-covered pistachios? How about both, plus chocolate-covered pomegranate seeds? They were out of a few things, but they were things I anticipated they'd be out of so I had a substitution strategy prepared.

That sounds dreamy. I would love to have anything remotely similar within two miles, but I live in deepest darkest England.

I like all the gardening wisdom chris_notts. I don't have a garden per se, but do have a little strip of land between our back door and the path, which sounds semantically like it should be a garden but isn't (the back doors are supposed to open onto a two-inch deep Juliet balcony, which we removed when we moved in so the cat could get in and out, and is just sitting out there in a corner. The ground is about 70cm below the lip of our back door. The strip is about a metre wide, houses a big bush maintained by the council, and has no grass or other plantlife on the ground, just slug pellets from before we moved in. So other possible referents include "slug pellet parking lot" and "little desert").

But wouldn't it be nice to help something, anything grow there! Any advice for a barren north-facing bush-drained slug-pelleted metre-wide strip of potential planty paradise?

Travis - I'm a total noob just starting learning C++ for something to do; is zeptoforth a language, or a compiler, or something else?

[chris_notts]

I like all the gardening wisdom chris_notts. I don't have a garden per se, but do have a little strip of land between our back door and the path, which sounds semantically like it should be a garden but isn't (the back doors are supposed to open onto a two-inch deep Juliet balcony, which we removed when we moved in so the cat could get in and out, and is just sitting out there in a corner. The ground is about 70cm below the lip of our back door. The strip is about a metre wide, houses a big bush maintained by the council, and has no grass or other plantlife on the ground, just slug pellets from before we moved in. So other possible referents include "slug pellet parking lot" and "little desert").

But wouldn't it be nice to help something, anything grow there! Any advice for a barren north-facing bush-drained slug-pelleted metre-wide strip of potential planty paradise?

Do you know what the bush is? Do you get weeds growing there? If you don't get any volunteers at all then it might be quite challenging.

I guess it's dry because it's in the rain shadow of the house, and shady because it's north of a wall. Does it get indirect light from above? Dry shade is always a bit difficult, but the crucial question is how dry and how dark. Plants which will survive indirect light may not survive the deep shade under an evergreen tree.

Do you know if you want shrubs or something less woody? Do you want food or ornamental plants? One plant that's tough, low growing, spreading and will tolerate dry shade is geranium macrorrhizum. It has scented leaves, pink or white flowers, and is almost evergreen.

People look down on it sometimes because its toughness means it gets used a lot in low maintenance carpark / office planting type areas. But it's used so much because it is fairly attractive and very easy to grow in quite difficult conditions.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geranium_macrorrhizum



And here:

https://www.crocus.co.uk/plants/_/geran ... 000004813/#

[Travis B.]

Travis - I'm a total noob just starting learning C++ for something to do; is zeptoforth a language, or a compiler, or something else?

zeptoforth is an implementation of Forth for ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers (currently just M4, but it could be easily ported to M3) written by myself, which both a compiler and runtime language environment and runs with no underlying operating system or kernel. Forth itself is a dynamic language that is simultaneously very low level and reasonably high level, which is very capable of runtime reflection and extensibility; think of what one would get if assembly language and Lisp had a baby.

[chris_notts]

think of what one would get if assembly language and Lisp had a baby.

I've often thought that what assembly language needs is more parentheses...

[alice]

think of what one would get if assembly language and Lisp had a baby.

I've often thought that what assembly language needs is more parentheses...

More indirection? ((0x400c) HL LD)?

[chris_notts]

think of what one would get if assembly language and Lisp had a baby.

I've often thought that what assembly language needs is more parentheses...

More indirection? ((0x400c) HL LD)?

Looks good! But seriously, I always found Lisp basically unreadable because of bracket overload. I get why being able to treat your code like the language's main data structure is very powerful, but the look of it... makes my eyes bleed.

[chris_notts]

But wouldn't it be nice to help something, anything grow there! Any advice for a barren north-facing bush-drained slug-pelleted metre-wide strip of potential planty paradise?

In addition to the geranium macrorrhizum I suggest above, you could try some of the following, especially if you're willing to water occasionally. If the soil is very compacted, digging it over a bit and adding some compost before planting might help the plants get established.

Currants - many members of the ribes family are surprisingly shade tolerant. Red currants will produce some fruit in surprisingly shaded conditions. Ribes alpinum is supposed to be good for shade.

Sarcococca confusa - Small evergreen shrub with scented flowers in winter. A lot of people like them, although they smell a bit like cat wee to me.

Pachysandra terminalis - Short, spreading, evergreen ground cover with white flowers in summer.

Periwinkles - Vincas are evergreen sprawling vines with purple flowers.

[alice]

But seriously, I always found Lisp basically unreadable because of bracket overload. I get why being able to treat your code like the language's main data structure is very powerful, but the look of it... makes my eyes bleed.

There have been unforeseen side-effects, too: reports of LISP programmers dreaming about being stuck inside lists of right parenthesises.

[Travis B.]

But seriously, I always found Lisp basically unreadable because of bracket overload. I get why being able to treat your code like the language's main data structure is very powerful, but the look of it... makes my eyes bleed.

There have been unforeseen side-effects, too: reports of LISP programmers dreaming about being stuck inside lists of right parenthesises.

Don't worry - Forth code rather has the structure of being endless sequences of words (what are called procedures or functions in the rest of the world), without a parethesis (except for comments, as one kind of comment is marked with parentheses), one after another, such that it makes C look parenthesis-infested.

[alice]

But seriously, I always found Lisp basically unreadable because of bracket overload. I get why being able to treat your code like the language's main data structure is very powerful, but the look of it... makes my eyes bleed.

There have been unforeseen side-effects, too: reports of LISP programmers dreaming about being stuck inside lists of right parenthesises.

Don't worry - Forth code rather has the structure of being endless sequences of words, one after another, such that it makes C look parenthesis-infested.

Actually, I know how Forth works I've created a derivative of it (computer conlanging!) which has object-oriented support. My 1980's-era microcomputer, when it's built, will probably run it.

[chris_notts]

But seriously, I always found Lisp basically unreadable because of bracket overload. I get why being able to treat your code like the language's main data structure is very powerful, but the look of it... makes my eyes bleed.

There have been unforeseen side-effects, too: reports of LISP programmers dreaming about being stuck inside lists of right parenthesises.

Whereas presumably Forth programmers have nightmares about being pushed to the back of the queue or popping their clogs early.

Ok, that was weak. Anyone have any better Forth programmer jokes?

[Travis B.]

There have been unforeseen side-effects, too: reports of LISP programmers dreaming about being stuck inside lists of right parenthesises.

Don't worry - Forth code rather has the structure of being endless sequences of words, one after another, such that it makes C look parenthesis-infested.

Actually, I know how Forth works I've created a derivative of it (computer conlanging!) which has object-oriented support. My 1980's-era microcomputer, when it's built, will probably run it.

I added object-orientation to one of my Forths for some misguided reason (I also implemented a dynamic memory allocator for this Forth). In zeptoforth I have exercised better judgement and decided to not include it (especially since the boards I am targetting have somewhere in the area of 96K of RAM).

[mèþru]

I finished my first semester of community college!

[Travis B.]

Got the disassembler for zeptoforth working! (Well, it might still have bugs, and it is not a complete disassembler by any means, but I can specify a start and end address and out pops assembly code.)

Now the next thing to implement is checking for the ends of words, so that I can implement the word SEE so I can specifically disassemble individual words...

[sasasha]

But wouldn't it be nice to help something, anything grow there! Any advice for a barren north-facing bush-drained slug-pelleted metre-wide strip of potential planty paradise?

In addition to the geranium macrorrhizum I suggest above, you could try some of the following, especially if you're willing to water occasionally. If the soil is very compacted, digging it over a bit and adding some compost before planting might help the plants get established.

Currants - many members of the ribes family are surprisingly shade tolerant. Red currants will produce some fruit in surprisingly shaded conditions. Ribes alpinum is supposed to be good for shade.

Sarcococca confusa - Small evergreen shrub with scented flowers in winter. A lot of people like them, although they smell a bit like cat wee to me.

Pachysandra terminalis - Short, spreading, evergreen ground cover with white flowers in summer.

Periwinkles - Vincas are evergreen sprawling vines with purple flowers.

Thanks for all the suggestions. There have been absolutely no volunteers in the one and a bit years we've lived here, so it must be an extraordinarily unwelcoming spot. (There are balconies above to contend with too.) In the end we decided to buy chipped bark, which has a lovely earthy forest smell, and levelled and covered the soil over, with a wooden stake border like a teeny tiny ten-inch-high palisade. Will probably investigate the geranium you suggested in a pot. It is much nicer now, and harbours two camping chairs fairly comfortably, so we can sit and enjoy the outdoor space... blissful, compared to feeling that you're trapped in a flat.

An old broken bench became a cat ladder, which the cat now suspiciously uses, so that's a small victory!

[Man in Space]

A piece by my favorite composer, Philip Glass, has recently been rediscovered and is being released next Friday! It was recorded in isolation, but they still pulled it off!

[sasasha]

A piece by my favorite composer, Philip Glass, has recently been rediscovered and is being released next Friday! It was recorded in isolation, but they still pulled it off!

Oh, exciting, what is the piece? I tried searching for it but didn't find anything (probably because I use Ecosia: ecofriendly but not particularly great at finding things!!).

I like Philip Glass too, particularly Hydrogen Jukebox.

[doctor shark]

Small happy: I'm picking up my residence permit card on Wednesday, so that means pretty much paperwork hell is done! (For now.)

[Man in Space]

A piece by my favorite composer, Philip Glass, has recently been rediscovered and is being released next Friday! It was recorded in isolation, but they still pulled it off!

Oh, exciting, what is the piece? I tried searching for it but didn't find anything (probably because I use Ecosia: ecofriendly but not particularly great at finding things!!).

“Music in Eight Parts”.

[Travis B.]

I heard of a better documentation conversion tool than what I had been using, py.sphinx combined with recommonmark (so I can convert Markdown, rather than having to convert my documentation to RST format), and it produces wonderful documentation combined with intergrated search functionality (written in JS, so it can be used offline), with the only disadvantage of that I cannot take advantage of py.sphinx's built-in indexing functionality because that would require my documentation to be written in RST. Additionally, I added built-in code labeling to my disassembler, so that my generated assembly has labels on lines corresponding to the starts of individual words.