Recently I had the misfortune of a data loss, so I had to re-instally my OS again. But even worse: I also had to re-install Unity on GNU/Linux, which has been an exercise in frustration and trial & error. In this post I will outline what I had to do, in the hope that it will be of use to other people.
When I develop Grid Framework I need Unity3D to generate project files for Omnisharp to pick up in order to provide me with tooling like auto-completion, linting and refactoring support. Normally doing so requires me to have VSCode installed, but there is a simple way to trick Unity into generating those files anyway.
I have been watching a tutorial on GraphQL recently (YouTube link) where the lecturer uses MongoDB for persistent storage. He instructs viewers to sign up for a service that hosts a database, but I wanted to run a local instance on my machine instead. MongoDB is not available in the Void repos, but fortunately it is available in the Guix repos. However, running the Mongo deamon requires a little tweak first.
I have recently been getting into Elixir, and one nice feature it has is the pipe operator. It allows us to express a pipeline of function through which an object will be dragged. This got me thinking: with how flexible Lua is, would it be possible to add something similar to Lua as well?
Javascript has a spreading operator which lets us splice the contents of an object or array into another object or array. This makes it very easy to create an object based on another object and override or add entries. Since Lua and Javascript are quite similar, wouldn't it be nice to have this operator in Lua as well? Lua is a minimal language, so adding a new operator seems unlikely, but Lua is also very flexible, and we can add a spreading function instead.
LuaRocks is a community-driven package manager for the Lua programming language. LuaRocks packages can be installed globally or in the user's home directory, but sadly LuaRocks does not follow the XDG Base Directory specification. However, with a few lines of Lua code we can fix this shortcoming partially at least.
The war on dotfiles continues, this time with SBCL. Let's see how we can make it comply with the XDG Base Directory specification.
GNU Bash does not comply with the XDG Base Directory specification, it uses
the classical dotfiles approach where it just dumps all its files into the home
directory. It does not even have the courtesy of putting all its files in one
common ~/.bash directory. Fortunately we can coerce Bash into compliance with
a bit of effort.
I use GNU Guix as a secondary package manager on my system. Previously I have been running Kubuntu, which uses systemd as its init system, but I have since switched to Void, which uses runit. Guix comes with services for systemd and Upstart included, but not for runit. Let's find out how to create a runit service from scratch.
There are two types of people: those who make backups and those who will experience a system breakdown. Fortunately I was in the former category, but it was still a very tedious and stressful experience. Every problem is also an opportunity to grow and throw off dead weight, so I used the opportunity to upgrade the hardware and switch my operating system.