Which BS is that, I hear you ask? With so many possible domains to choose from?

It’s my interactive geometry tiling BS this time. In the simplest description, the program should provide a triangle and allow the user to draw on it, and then expand that into a tiling across a whole plane. Eventual goals include different kinds of triangles and tilings (30-60-90 triangles into hexagons, 45-45-90 triangles into squares, and then later stuff that’s not quite as regular and that will form octagon/square tilings, and so on), weaving of the lines that are drawn, and so on.

It’s sort of embarrassing to see how many times I’ve gone and worked on this same basic idea without ever having really completed it. I remember doing stuff in Turbo-C on a DOS PC for drawing in VGA resolutions (ooh! ahh!) in the early 90s, and then again in a Java AWT applet in the late 90s. I have various residues of Adobe JSX scripts to do similar stuff in Photoshop and Illustrator, trying to use their discontinued ExtendScript interface. I have an attempt written in Processing. I have at least two previous attempts in JavaScript using Canvas.

Well, here I am, doing it in JavaScript and (quelle nouveauté!) SVG.

So far, I have the 30-60-90 triangles working. I can set pen widths and colors. I can save/load works-in-progress, and render and export the SVG files. I don’t yet have editing or removal of lines implemented. I haven’t even started thinking about the weaving problem again.

Watch this space (but not too closely) for updates. Maybe I’ll actually finish this time ’round.

I thought I’d update this VPS from Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS to Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS. I ran do-release-upgrade which gave all the appropriate warnings and stuff, and proceeded to upgrade. This VPS is hosted on Linode, so there’s a local Ubuntu mirror — the download is blindingly fast.

The do-release-upgrade process appears to run in a Unix screen window. Unfortunately, that interacted poorly with the terminal I was using, so any time I moved my mouse, it spewed control characters as input. That was bad when it was prompting … something? … probably about my nonstandard sshd configuration.

Anyway, Linode provides a web-based console access, so I was eventually able to fix the broken sshd, PHP, and Apache configurations. Only about two hours of downtime. Not bad for New Year’s Day.