Recent Blog Posts

This is the very first devlog entry for my pet project, guile-2d. As the title suggests, guile-2d is a 2D game development framework for GNU Guile, a Scheme implementation that has the honor of being the official extension language of the GNU project. Guile is a language with a growing number of features, but it still lacks a large assortment of libraries. I like to do 2D game programming, and I saw a niche that needed to be filled. Python has Pygame, Lua has Love, but there’s no fun and accessible game programming library for Guile. Guile-2d is working to correct that.

Everyone that’s ever talked to me about software development knows that I am in love with Emacs. Emacs has a wonderful keyboard driven interface and is almost infinitely customizable via Emacs Lisp. I’ve done a lot of programming in Emacs from my not-so-great laptop lately. My laptop has a rather poor 1280x800 resolution and low performing integrated graphics chip. Until today, I was running the GNOME 3 desktop environment on it. Unlike most people (or perhaps just a loud minority), I like GNOME 3. However, I wanted something that was both less graphics intensive and more keyboard driven than GNOME Shell and Mutter.

Every summer, my friends and I go to Maine for a week. We stay in the Rockland area in an old house on a blueberry field. This year we hiked a mountain in Camden, hiked Mt. Katahdin, and went to the Rockland Blues Festival.

With all of the recent news about the NSA’s widespread spying, I have decided to ween myself off of proprietary, centralized web services. Facebook, Google, and other such corporations hold onto massive amounts of our data that we’ve willingly given to them via status messages, “like” buttons, searches, and emails. Using and contributing to free (as in freedom), decentralized (like email) web services is a really great way to re-establish control of our data. These services rely on many small, interconnected nodes to operate, rather than a monolithic website that is under the control of one entity. If the distinction between centralized and decentralized isn’t clear, consider how email functions. There are many email providers to choose from. Users can communicate with others that choose to use a different email provider. This is how web services should work, but unfortunately very few work this way now.

I spend a lot of my free time writing code. I usually work on my own personal projects that never really go anywhere. So, I decided to take a detour from my normal hacking routine and contribute to an existing free software project. My contribution was accepted awhile ago now, but I wasn’t blogging then so I’m rambling about it now.

Hey! I have a shiny new website. I just purchased a cheap VPS from Digital Ocean and registered the dthompson.us domain for this site. Instead of the going the Wordpress route (or using similar blogging software), I’ve decided to use a static site generator called Pelican after seeing that the Linux kernel website was using it. I’m going to use this site to host this blog, my resume, and information about my software projects.