Mike’s Place

Learning Wayland: Part 1

This is the first part in a series, the length of which is unknown. Since I have decided to resume working on AllTray again, it’s also become clear that in order to modernize it, I need to learn Wayland. It has also become clear, just in my cursory research and what I already know, that the methods that AllTray uses under X11 simply won’t work with Wayland.

The primary point of these posts is to provide personal reference material, as well as help to solidify what I’m learning. Hopefully it’s also useful to you.

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C++ in Micro Environments

This is a follow-up to my Minimal C++ article. It might be helpful to read that article first, in order to understand the context better.

Here, I present a relatively refined—and featherweight—method for using C++ in “micro” environments: think 16- or 32-bit microcontrollers with memory on the order of 64–256 KiB of storage, usually split between the program and runtime memory (RAM).

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Web Service Backend Protocols

There are several popular choices when it comes to which protocol to use for Web service backend software. In this post, I take a look at the available options and—spoiler alert—come to the conclusion that HTTP is the winner. Yes, HTTP. The one and same protocol used to actually communicate with the Web browser, should also be the one used to communicate between the Web server and the application itself.

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What the Hell is an Event Loop Anyway?

One of the more formative moments in my career as a programmer and as a coder, was the insight that I gained when I truly understood what an event loop is. In fact, until I did, I thought the same thing as some others out there do: that glib, Qt, APR, etc. all provide “event loops”. But, they do not. What they do do, is provide a useful abstraction of the underlying event loop so that programmers can focus on their logic without mucking about the system.

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Trust in Programs

Computer programs are only as “smart” as they are made to be. This is something that you already know if you’ve written even a single computer program. This is a fact that is often exploited by people, used against programs which are connected to the public network. The Spectrum As with anything, with programmers, you have a spectrum. Most people fall somewhere in the middle of it, but at the edges you have two types of people:

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