updating decadv

Author: nilaykumar

content-org/garden/december-adventure.org

@@ -16,7 +16,7 @@ I've taken the liberty of retroactively logging the days I missed.
 | 日 | 月 | 火 | 水 | 木 | 金 | 土 |
 |----+----+----+----+----+----+----|
 |    | [[december 1][01]] | [[december 2 - 3][02]] | [[december 2 - 3][03]] | [[december 4][04]] | [[december 5][05]] | [[december 6][06]] |
-| [[december 7][07]] | [[december 8][08]] | [[december 9][09]] | [[december 10][10]] | [[December 11][11]] | 12 | 13 |
+| [[december 7][07]] | [[december 8][08]] | [[december 9][09]] | [[december 10][10]] | [[December 11][11]] | [[december 12][12]] | [[december 13][13]] |
 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 |
 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 |
 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 |    |    |    |
@@ -277,7 +277,6 @@ though it definitely won't feel as smooth. Then finally onto the interesting
 part: understanding the patterns behind the gaps in ink and the radical shapes!
 
 * december 10
-
 Today I let the intrusive thoughts win and started seriously considering writing
 my own static site generator. It feels like the illogical next step to starting
 a digital garden. I don't know if I have the technical chops for it, but I'd
@@ -290,7 +289,7 @@ learning =emacs= and =org-mode= (and to be clear, I don't have any plans to stop
 using =emacs=), I've always felt hopelessly out of my depth, and I never end up
 setting aside the time to get comfortable enough with site generation toolchain
 that I use. This leads to frustration with little things like not being able to
-quite control the final HTML markup that's generated. Sure -- maybe there's a
+quite control the final html markup that's generated. Sure -- maybe there's a
 way of fixing the little issues that bug me, but I'm easily intimidated by =ox-hugo=
 and =hugo=. It'd also be nice to remove =emacs= in the toolchain -- I sometimes have
 trouble getting the publishing to work on my laptop (and, indeed, I couldn't get
@@ -346,8 +345,7 @@ congestion pricing. It looks like they analyzed a combination of epa and city
 sensors. I'd like to get around to understanding this more carefully, so
 maybe I'll leave this for another day (it seems the code is on [[https://github.com/timothyfraser/nyc_congestion_rep][GitHub]]).
 
-* December 11
-
+* december 11
 Working late today, but while I'm taking a bit of a break, here's some thoughts
 on basic functionality of a static site generator/site design that I'd like:
 - *input:* I like the idea of writing in markdown, because I think you can throw
@@ -370,40 +368,170 @@ on basic functionality of a static site generator/site design that I'd like:
 Then there's some more fun things after the basic functionality is done:
 - *output:* supporting multiple outputs, say gophermap for gopher or gemtext for
   gemini
-- *fun little modules:* a little program that detects and reports linkrot, or a
-  little date-to-co2ppm transformer, or whatever other silly thing I think up of
+- *fun little modules:* syntax highlighting, a little program that detects and
+  reports linkrot, or a little date-to-co2ppm transformer, or whatever other
+  silly thing I think up of
 
 Before bed I got =gforth= and =uxn= installed, and was playing around learning the
 basics of forth-style programming. It's not as scary as it looked, and I hope to
 get some time to play with them tomorrow.
 
+* december 12
+I wrote my first =uxntal= program today! I was following compudanza's wonderful
+[[https://compudanzas.net/introduction_to_uxn_programming_book.html][book/online tutorial]] of which I worked through "day 1" and "day 2". So far it's
+been the basics of stack-based computation and drawing pixels and sprites to the
+screen. I love that drawing to the screen is presented immediately after the
+basics -- how fun!
+
+#+ATTR_HTML: :alt a red keffiyeh pattern of pixel drawn on a white window
+[[file:images/december-adventure-2025/uxn-keffiyeh-d.jpg]]
+
+I wrote some code to draw the patterns on the keffiyeh I tend to have draped
+around my chair. I don't know how to write loops yet, so the code's a bit silly,
+but it was fun regardless! Once I learn how to loop and set variables I'll clean
+up the code and put it up here.
+
+* december 13
+Watered the plants (always takes longer than I expect) and leisurely did some
+laundry.
+
+#+ATTR_HTML: :alt picture of succulents, aloe, coleus, etc.
+[[file:images/december-adventure-2025/uxn-keffiyeh-d.jpg]]
+
+(I think I took this photo in June, everything's way bigger now, but the
+camera's in the other room and I can't be bothered)
+
+** static site generation
+Anyway, I got some time to start thinking about my static site generator more
+concretely. Working name (because I needed a directory name in my projects
+folder) is /kishin/ (記伸), coming from "memory" (記憶) and "extend" (伸びる),
+inspired by the word memex.
+
+Earlier I was considering writing my input files in Markdown, but more and more
+I'm starting to think that it's not much more work to just write plain html (my
+current emacs setup seems to have a good amount of snippets already set up in
+=html-mode=). The job of the static site generator will be to:
+- do basic templating (separating out the header, footer, etc. from content)
+- handle media (organization of images, automatically generating thumbnails,
+  etc.)
+- handle timestamps, tags, backlinks, or more generally metadata linking and
+  display 
+- run any processing modules that I end up writing (math rendering, syntax
+  highlighting) 
+
+In terms of parsing html, I'm not sure how much heavy lifting I'll actually have
+to do. For now I'm thinking I'll try out the tree-sitter html parser. I'd love
+to be dependency-free and write a bespoke parser, but I should probably ease
+myself into the intricacies of string parsing and data structures in =c=. In any
+case, I've wanted to play with tree-sitter ever since I watched Max Brunsfeld's
+[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jes3bD6P0To][strange loop]] talk on it.
+
+Actually, now that I think about it for a moment, tree-sitter might be the way
+to go if I want to do any syntax highlighting for my code blocks...
+
+** tree-sitter
+As a complete newbie to the =c= programming world, I couldn't make heads or tails
+of the [[https://tree-sitter.github.io/tree-sitter/using-parsers/1-getting-started.html][getting started]] page in the tree-sitter documentation. After being
+confused for a solid half-hour, here's what I ended up doing, which worked:
+1. cloned both the [[https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter][tree-sitter]] and [[https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-html][tree-sitter-html]] sources, built them with
+   =make=, and copied the resulting =libtree-sitter.a= and =libtree-sitter-html.a=
+   files into my =lib/= folder.
+2. copied tree-sitter's =tree-sitter/lib/src/*= as well as
+   =tree-sitter/lib/include/tree_sitter/api.h= into my =include/tree-sitter/=
+3. made sure my =Makefile= knew about these static libraries and the inner include
+   path 
+   
+I don't know if this is what I was supposed to do, but I'm able to use
+tree-sitter from my =main.c=, so it'll do for now. I copied the example code from
+the tree-sitter documentation and started playing around with traversing the
+tree with =TSTreeCursor=.
+#+begin_src c
+#include <string.h>
+#include <stdio.h>
+
+#include "tree-sitter/api.h"
+
+const TSLanguage *tree_sitter_html(void);
+
+int main() {
+  // Create a parser.
+  TSParser *parser = ts_parser_new();
+
+  // Set the parser's language (HTML in this case).
+  ts_parser_set_language(parser, tree_sitter_html());
+
+  // Build a syntax tree based on source code stored in a string.
+  const char *source_code = "Hi你好!<p>para</p>";
+  TSTree *tree = ts_parser_parse_string(
+    parser,
+    NULL,
+    source_code,
+    strlen(source_code)
+  );
+
+  // Get the root node of the syntax tree.
+  TSNode root_node = ts_tree_root_node(tree);
+  // Print the syntax tree as an S-expression.
+  char *string = ts_node_string(root_node);
+  // For the example above, "Hi你好!<p>para</p>", it looks like:
+  // > (document (text) (element (start_tag (tag_name)) (text) (end_tag (tag_name))))
+  printf("Syntax tree: %s\n", string);
+
+  // Start traversing the tree with a cursor
+  TSTreeCursor cursor = ts_tree_cursor_new(root_node);
+  bool result = ts_tree_cursor_goto_first_child(&cursor);
+  // If no child was found, abort
+  if(!result)
+      return 1;
+
+  // Print out the node type, and start and end bytes
+  TSNode nextNode = ts_tree_cursor_current_node(&cursor);
+  // For the example above, it looks like:
+  // > text
+  // > 0
+  // > 9
+  // You can check that the Chinese characters here are 3 bytes each
+  // in utf-8 (I suppose somewhere along the lines tree-sitter is figuring
+  // out that we're using utf-8) and so, adding the 3 extra bytes from "Hi!",
+  // we do indeed expect 9 bytes
+  printf("%s\n", ts_node_type(nextNode));
+  printf("%d\n", ts_node_start_byte(nextNode));
+  printf("%d\n", ts_node_end_byte(nextNode));
+
+  // Free all of the heap-allocated memory.
+  free(string);
+  ts_tree_cursor_delete(&cursor);
+  ts_tree_delete(tree);
+  ts_parser_delete(parser);
+  return 0;
+}
+#+end_src
+
+In additional to traversal there's a query API, but I'll scope that out later.
+I'll leave this here for now. Tomorrow I'll see if I have the time to put
+together an example static site and get started on the actual site generation.
+
 -----
 
 Down here I'm collecting the little project ideas that tend to pop into
 my head:
 - write up some notes on the basics of how C programs are compiled and linked,
-  as well as the platform-dependent aspects.
+  what static/dynamic objects and linking are, command line tools to investigate
+  symbols, platform-dependent aspects, etc.
 
-  /inspired by:/ me realizing I have no
-  idea what I'm doing when I'm putting together a Makefile or working on a
-  C project on my mac when traveling
-- learn and write a toy program in assembly! and/or forth! and/or uxntal! if I
-  can get the kakuji editor working, it might be a good second program to port
-  over.
-
-  /inspired by:/ [[https://100r.co][100r]], learning more about how memory and caches works
+  /inspired by:/ me realizing I have no idea what I'm doing when I'm putting
+  together a Makefile or working on a C project on my mac when traveling
 - speaking of uxn... the =screen.tal= example that ships with =uxn= generates
   patterns that remind me of the keffiyeh. time for a little spritework?
 
   /inspired by:/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLRE_TSpnYc
-- exploring moving away from org/ox-hugo for static site generation.
-
-  /inspired by:/ as much as I love being able to use org-babel to write and run code from
-  directly inside my posts, losing control over the final export is annoying.
-  maybe I could just post-process the generated html? or rather, use tools that
-  hugo exposes to do so?
 - take a look at [[https://github.com/timothyfraser/nyc_congestion_rep][recent work]] on the impact of ny congestion pricing on air
   quality.
 
   /inspired by:/ the air leaking through my windows freezing my toes
   feeling less pm2.5y than usual
+- learn a little bit of lean and formalize something fun! Or at least write a
+  new math blog post
+
+  /inspired by:/ me remembering (idk why) Kuo-Tsai Chen's work on integrated
+  integrals, and the connections to Hochschild homology.