Sorry I was alching

Written Jun 15, 2021 - Blog

Since I was a medium-sized child, I’ve enjoyed playing the MMO RuneScape. It is by far the game I’ve spent the most time playing, and, well, despite that, I’m not very far in the game at all. I started sometime in 2006 and, being that the internet hadn’t even been invented yet, I was constantly lost. Even though the game had only been around for ~5 years, it was still absolutely massive.

Continue reading ↦

Connect 4 - The Power (or, here, lack thereof) Two Choices

Written May 27, 2021 - Projects

A year or so ago, in my lab’s reading group we read the famous power of two choices in randomized load balancing paper, and it gave me an awful idea - what if we applied a similar idea to games? As a very quick explanation, for the task of load balancing requests - basically, you have a bunch of servers handling things for you like fetching emails, and you want to spread out the work evenly - a common approach is to just pick a random server and send the next request there.

Continue reading ↦

My new-er favorite thing - RP2040 with CircuitPython

Written Apr 20, 2021 - Blog

Back when I did my Model M thingy with CircuitPython, I encountered a lot of difficulties doing I/O. For one, the I/O speed was much too slow for bit-banging anything in Python. Now, you could write some C and call it from Python, but that defeats the benefit of working with Python to begin with. Additionally, hardware peripherals seemed to be destined to be behind in Python. I doubt this will ever change, but a certain recent product seems to offer a bizarre best-of-all-worlds.

Continue reading ↦