The First Week of January 2023

One of the projects I poured a bunch of time into was Torus Wrapper, which was an effort to wrap transparent PNGs into tiles that can be tiled to make tiling wallpapers, tiling game assets, et cetera. A high-level overview of how this is done is that the program takes in a transparent png, finds the biggest rectangle inside it and then wraps the parts not fitting in the rectangle atop it. Here's an example of a tile created with it:

I worked on a lot of websites during this break; my personal site, BITS SOS' site and the Journal Club's new website. I used static site generators to build BITS SOS and JC's sites, as they provide a simple way to theme huge websites; however, these are not free of hiccups. Themes often come configured wrong and can cause CSS and images to not load if the paths are not set right. Luckily, there were no other major problems setting up either of them with HUGO. For my personal site, I wrote the main site in ClojureScript (with Reagent) and the blog site in Frog. The blog (this site) is based on Racket lang's blog.

I abstracted away a lot of the recursion in my R6RS infix expression calculator by defining a new macro to handle functions that iterate over a carry-forwarded list and adding the Clojure thread-first macro (->). I planned on implementing something called the Nestedness Theorem, which is that the rightmost open paren is always safe to evaluate. However, my current approach is more-or-less similar to this, hence I did not rewrite it. I also added additional error checking; the program now checks if parens are balanced.

I was previously connecting to my home server through a static IP, however I realized that my usage needs could be met with a dynamic IP using a dynamic DNS. I thus set up a DDNS on the server and bound its internal IP to ensure that I could boot into it after it rebooted. Home servers are excellent for maintaining private remote project repositories, hosting messenger bots or services like IRC bouncers and testing out dynamic websites.