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Hello! I’m Oleksandr Kaleniuk. I do Words and Buttons Online. Just not too often lately. Last night reminded me that I probably owe my subscribers a “still alive” message. Literally still alive. So here it is. I’m still alive. As for the site, I haven’t written a new piece for about a year and, for the time being, am not planning to do so. The reason is that I’m working two jobs mid-war, and I really have no vigor left for interactive writing. The good news is that I restarted my academic career, and something good may eventually come out of it. I work at the Institute of Nuclear and Thermal Energy (https://dte.kpi.ua/pedahohichnyi-sklad/kaleniuk-oleksandr-serhiiovych/), where I teach numeric methods and explore periodic surfaces and their applications for thermal management. For instance, this is my latest work, code, examples, and whitepaper included: https://codeberg.org/okaleniuk/faitps I also built a tool for online teaching that includes all the visuals from the Words and Buttons, plus many more: https://okaleniuk.codeberg.page/blackboard/. It’s like a slide deck with interactive visuals where you get to form your deck according to your own lecture plan. I do have a lot of material to share. Some classics of numerical methods and mathematical programming, and some really hot insights, straight from the frontier of computational geometry research. So, if I manage to dodge a few more missiles and live to see the impending victory, I will definitely breathe out and come back to writing for Words and Buttons Online. But for now, I have to keep my priorities straight. Stay tuned.
An interactive demo of the Gauss-Seidel method for solving linear equation systems. When and why does it work? And why, when you flip the equations, it suddenly stop working? You can now play and see.
An interactive demo of bisection search and golden ratio search algorithms. There is also a motivation to learn them both. Spoiler alert! One converges better, and the other has a better computational cost.
An image interpolation that gives us a continuous and smooth image, where every interpolated value only depends on the four neighboring pixel values. The image becomes smooth, but sharp features remain sharp.
Rational interpolation is a step forward from polynomial interpolation towards rational splines. With rational interpolation, you can build functions that run through a set of points and also have vertical asymptotes whenever you want. With this capability, you can now model functions like logarithms better.
More in programming
Yesterday, I received this email as a response to You Can't Vibe Code Love. It's such a remarkable and powerful statement that I asked permission to share it here, in its entirety, with personal information redacted: Hey Jeff, Hope you and your family are doing well.
A frustrated Reddit post about being a condom between an AI and production made the rounds in our team. Here is why I think the opposite is true and what it means for how we review code, plan work and think.
And here we are three years after I wrote about the Google Pixel Fold being announced, followed now with the announcement of the iPhone Duo...(I have questions about the naming by the way). Four years ago I was talking about web primitives in the platform for the Surface Duo. My how time flies. There are CSS media features, a Viewport Segments API, a Device Posture API but Chromium based browsers are the only ones currently supporting these things. I haven't been able to find any signal yet on whether Safari will support these things in the web platform as the developer docs focus on application development. If you're interested in trying out the platform features, you can emulate the Surface Duo and Galaxy Z Fold in the developer tools. And if you're thinking, do I really have to have my website adapt to two screens? The answer is no. Adding a design to an application or dual screen makes sense if you have an experience that has two simulataneous contexts that are useful e.g. a list of email messages/inbox on one screen, an open message, email thread or email composer on the other. Here's one of my talks from 2022 if you're interested in learning more about what's available in the browser for dual screen/foldable devices. Happy building :)
After a write-up in the New York Times, Mommy Bloggers had two options. Either lean in, or step back. Given how popular it became after that, it's not hard to guess which option they chose. The post Mommy bloggers react appeared first on The History of the Web.
I'm quite a bit late on this one, but Haunt version 0.4.0 was released released back in July. I haven't had much time for blogging, but I'm catching up now! This release contains a small set of improvements and bug fixes since the 0.3.0 release in 2024. About Haunt Haunt is a static site generator that uses the Guile Scheme as its configuration language. It aims to be simple, functional, and extensible. Features include: Easy blog and Atom/RSS feed generation Markdown post support Simple development server for viewing edits before publishing Purely functional build process User extensibility Notable changes Added support for HTML in Markdown documents. This was a long time coming because guile-markdown did not support it and the library was abandoned by the original maintainer. As part of my work at Spritely, we forked it, implemented the relevant portions of the CommonMark specification, and released it. Spritely's guile-commonmark fork is now considered to be the official upstream by Guix and others. A further consequence of this is that guile-lib is now a required dependency for building Haunt as we need the (htmlprag) module to parse Markdown documents with embedded HTML. html->shtml from guile-lib's (htmlprag) module is now used instead of xml->sxml in the HTML reader. It was silly of me to use xml->sxml for this purpose years ago, but at the time I wanted guile-lib to be an optional dependency. Added haunt new subcommand for creating a new site. Added default directory, template, and prefix arguments to flat-pages procedure. Added support for index metadata flag to flat pages for pretty URLs. Flat pages now receive all page metadata, not just the page title. This is a breaking change from 0.3.0. Added .scm as an additional extension for sxml-reader. make-file-extension-matcher now supports multiple extensions. Fixed emission of <script> and <style> elements. Fixed handling of no available reader in flat pages builder. Fixed unreachable error handling clause when a reader is not found for a post. Fixed default blog theme template missing an <html> tag. Fixed overloaded -h option in haunt serve. Deprecated post in Skribe reader in favor of document. Download Haunt 0.4.0 is already available in Guix: guix pull guix install haunt See the Haunt project page for information on how to build from source. Thank you to Camilo Rodrigues, Noé Lopez, jgart, Jakob L. Kreuze, and Daniel Meißner for their contributions to this release! Happy haunting!
