Alex Shroyer

FloatVer gets a breaking change.

Extending FloatVer to include rational numbers.

…when attaching a guitar neck to a guitar body, that is

Rewiring a Gibson Blueshawk for simplicity and lower noise.

Guitar traditionalists hide your eyes.

It's a focused sort of EQ.

It's a funny sort of EQ.

A triple effect pedal built for a friend.

Describing the 1.0 version of FloatVer

My DIY guitar project

Sometimes you can turn a traditionally "batch" oriented algorithm into a streaming one which trades off memory for time.

Updates on some prototype guitar effects.

Did you know you can set the time zone for cron?

Putting my ego aside to build a decent overdrive pedal.

A collection of in-progress guitar distortion circuits.

Getting back into guitar effects after a long break.

A hardware-accelerated alternative to SemVer.

Versioning software with floating point numbers.

Cramming static types into an already dense dynamic language.

Some strategies for developing a programming languageinterpreter(prototype).

What features does your new programming language need to succeed in today's fast-paced world?

Customizing the behavior of a Google Form using Google Apps Script.

Russel and Norvig's approach to search problems.

Trying to summarize some array languages based on their features and how they work and feel.

Experiencing something N=1 times qualifies me to give advice, right? Maybe not, but here are some IU-specific tips anyway.

An incomplete list of resources and things I did that helped me finish my Ph.D. studies.

Productivity tip: pretend your scrollbar is broken.

G.K. Chesterton once wrote about the hazard of removing a metaphorical fence simply because you see no need for it today. He cautioned that before you remove the fence, you should understand why it was there in the first place. This story has become part of programming lore, perhaps leading to an overabundance of caution when it comes to removing features.

The shavehorse embodies the video game "skill tree", but for wood furniture making.

A compact method of decoding bytecode.

Making a batch of iron acetate wood stain from household materials.

What special features does a language interpreter need that are different from an ahead-of-time compiled language?

A deep dive into the Nand2Tetris VM language, and what it means to write an interpreter for a compiled language.

Some notes about usingpyhidrafor reverse engineering. Some of this post is background on what reverse engineering is, but the focus is on pyhidra, an interface between Python and Ghidra.

A woodworking project.

A description of the hand and power tools I use most frequently, and some recommendations.

Building a low impedance guitar pickup prototype.

Some thoughts about split keyboards.

A brief review of a pair of "truly wireless" earbuds.

A conversation with ChatGPT about how to teach in this brave new world that contains ChatGPT. OpenAI has a public beta application called ChatGPT which is a chat-like front end to one of their large language models. It interprets what you type and generates plausible responses.

Writing a syntax highlighter for emacs starting from zero knowledge.

Big ideas in programming languages, some of which are not yet mainstream.

Here's an idea - a default email address is actually a "honeypot". That is, a target intended to attract scammers or spammers to direct attention away from the real address.

Writing an academic article is one thing, getting it published is another. Now that I have helped write 4 published papers, and assisted my peers with revising their own papers, I feel like I have some insider knowledge to share. This is the kind of information I wish I had before starting my academic publishing journey.

An idea which is "obviously better" to some people and yet obviously worse to others.

Setting up Emacs and org-mode to use IEEE's two-column template.

Trying to write the smallest assembler possible.

A method of computing a breadth-first search using a sparse adjacency matrix.

Higher order fantastic sports.

How much atmospheric carbon dioxide do I generate in a year?

A collection of short idiomatic code snippets which I've used in my Machine Learning tasks, written in J. Hopefully I'll come back here to update this list once in a while.

Looking down at Lisp

What is "endianness", and what are some examples?

Some ways to call a dynamically linked library from J.

Snow Crash is the most relevant book of 2019, 2020, and 2021.

Installing Emacs on MacOS 12.0.1.

The k-means clustering algorithm with Python and J implementations.

Documenting features I like to see in a programming language.

The non-obvious way to call one Google Cloud Function from inside another one.

Separate syntax for declaration and assignment is a Good ThingTM.

Daylight Savings Time does not make sense, causes harm, and should be abolished.

How I broke my Emacs and taught myself a lesson.

The set of possible strings is infinite, so the design of a programming language's syntax is mostly about whatnotto allow. I find this topic interesting and fun, because constraints encourage creativity.

A tour of some of my favorite programming language features.

I like org-mode, and I want to generate content for a static site (blog, cv, etc). I'll use emacs to edit and export org-mode files to html, then tweak the results for aesthetics.

Artifical Neural Networks (ANNs) are a key part of machine learning. We can see how they work by building a toy example.This post shows two variations of ANNs, in two languages. First inPython(with the NumPy library) and then inJ. These implementations are based on the code inthis post.Both of these languages are high-level, highly dynamic languages. Python's strengths include its extensive set of libraries, and the ease of extending the language both in terms of syntax and by binding to compiled C code. J's major strengths include its fundamental array-oriented paradigm, and the ease of composing its large set of primitive operations.

Jx is a J interpreter with built-in support for task-level parallelism. For more information about Jx, check outthis page.

My work often requires me to access remote machines. Luckily, I'm fortunate enough to live in a part of the world with decent broadband, and my work has very fast and reliable networks.Still, networks arenot as reliable as we want them to be, and higher latency hurts ergonomics. Then I triedmosh, which claims to improve latency and also help smooth some of the rough edges of non-ideal network conditions.

I started usingorg-revealfor presentations. It's not perfect, but it succeeds at combining the editing ease of org-mode with good-looking and portable html/js presentations.

What makes some code readable and other code unreadable? I'll argue that readability, at least when it comes to source code, is not so much about how the code is arranged (in folders, on the page) or how it looks (whitespace, indentation, naming conventions). Instead, readability hinges on how easy it is to discover and modify the behavior of the running software.

In a previous life, I designed guitar effects. Here are some fragments which survived digital bitrot.

Despite being about on par with a current midrange smartphone (in terms of processing power) my 2012-era Chromebook has been a capable development machine. I've written about itbefore, and generally been pleased with its capabilities. However, after 5 years of heavy daily use, its battery will now only last about 2 hours on a charge. So I've replaced it with yet another Chromebook.

Some user interfaces are just so horrendously bad they deserve to be named and shamed. Here is a sampling.

One of the more intimidating constructs available as a J primitive is the dyad;:, also known asSequential Machine. This is kind of an oddball compared to the rest of J's primitives.

Originally this site was built using Jekyll, specifically a preconfigured kit designed by Barry Clark calledJekyll Now.

This site is now served up over https, courtesy of some helpful blog posts I found. Hosting is still provided by GitHub. The entire process was quite painless and I wish I had done it sooner.

Because software is so "soft", making changes to its source code representation (while preserving functionality) much more common than making similar changes in hardware. This process even has its own jargon -refactoring- which, like a mathematical factorization, implies a cosmetic change with the purpose of making it easier for human readers to understand. Martin Folwer called it re-factoring probably because it's such a common activity when writing software.

Ever since I got over the initial learning curve of Vim, I've been one of those loonies who volunteers opinions about text editors. Mostly friends, sometimes family. Generally strangers via the internet. If you've read internet message boards or blogs that relate to programming or software-creation-related disciplines, or sites likestackoverflow, you've likely encountered someone like me.

In which a long-time Vim user tries Emacs for the third time.

Instrumentation for psychological experiments can be simple or complex. It can be as simple as a pencil-and-paper survey, or as complex as an fMRI outfitted with custom electronics. The researchers I work with generally want something on the complex side. The most common challenge I've seen is the problem of time-aligning heterogeneous data.

This is a new term I've coined to describe what I do to professionals in related fields. To someone on the outside it probably sounds like meaningless jargon, but to me it is completely descriptive and succinct. So, let's break it down into smaller, easier to digest components.

I was a smart kid. At least, I always thought so, until middle school. I found myself in the "advanced" math class, totally dumbfounded by the concept of negative numbers. This was the first time understanding something in school wasn't easy, and it made an impression. I remember the initial terror and uneasiness, followed by intense brain exercise, the sense of accomplishment and finally the realization that the world is bigger than it was before.

Today's post is about my computer. I use a Chromebook, quite possibly in ways the manufacturer did not intend. From a distance the marketing for these things seems to imply "browser with attached keyboard". However, there is enough going on under the hood to make this a rather viable development machine for a person like me.

This is a blog, so it's time for a rant. Now, I'm not incensed enough about this to re-enable my CAPS LOCK key, but it's still pretty bad. What I want to rant about today is the stereotypical pessimistic engineer.

Much of my non-compulsory reading during my formative years was comic books. So I am a fan of the origin story.