Hack 23 – February 2022

Another case of “nice weather during the hackday” left us a bit thin on the virtual ground, but thanks to the dedication of two of our regulars, there was all kinds of hacking afoot!

It turned into a self-declared “cocktails hack”, for which the emperor was pleased. Shout out to friend of the show Tubby Tom and his Buffalo hot sauce.

Things people Did

• Adam is trying to generate a corpus of error messages in a semi-deterministic way, meaning containers (obvi), and so the first step was just removing random lines from applications and having containers crash, then scoop up those tasty logs…but he fell victim to the design constraints of containers, which is that they don’t die if you run a bash script to start a child process that dies (double obvi). So all in all, he learned slash remembered a bunch of stuff about process management in Docker.

• Ruth made some amazing shapes and patterns using the canvas that covered the entire browser screen, and then decided she would try to get the centre of gravity for those images (for the purposes of anchoring effects like dithering) somewhere halfway between half the width of the page and the edge, and got it literally half working. Then she put that down for a bit and did some sewing…and then…

• Ruth and Adam made cocktails and discussed all things cocktails, git, friend of the show Tubby Tom’s Hot Sauce, and otherwise, in what was surely a well poured episode of the podcast. We hadn’t recorded one of these since JUNE 2021, so there was lots to get to (running time just north of 22 minutes).