I’m currently reading Rust Brain Teasers by Herbert Wolverson. It’s a nice book of bite-sized puzzles in Rust that are ideal for the way I like to learn (randomly jumping around from subject to subject that happen to interest me). Each puzzle presents some code, asks you what you think it does and then shows you the hidden complexity. At the end of each section are some links to further reading.

It seems amazing but the last time we did a release of The Server Framework was in 2021. Since then the mainline development of the framework has been pretty stable with no new bug reports. Most of the time the code doesn’t need a new release to handle minor changes in compiler version and often it’s easy enough for client’s to do these changes themselves. I’m planning a maintenance release, 7.

I’ve finally done what I should have done several years ago and shut down the LockExplorer site. I haven’t had the time required to keep the tool up to date and fewer people were interested than I originally expected. I may make the source code available at some point.

One of my clients has been reporting an intermittent issue with the deployment of new releases of their game server. This runs as a Windows service on many, many, cloud machines and, just sometimes, the service seems to have issues during start up after upgrading the code on a machine that it has otherwise been running fine on. I’ve been adding debug code to our service start up code to try and work out what’s going on and today we had our first hit.

I’m currently reading Rust Atomics and Locks by Mara Bos and it’s excellent. Really approachable, concise and detailed. A pleasure to read.

I have just completed migrating the blog from Movable Type to Hugo. Hopefully everything still works and is in the right place, but do let me know if you find any issues. The comments have been migrated to Disqus. I’ve been wanting to update my websites for quite a while now. I spent quite a lot of effort trying to find someone to do it for me but all of the web companies seemed to lose interest when they realised that I didn’t want an ongoing “SEO” package (I’ve always viewed SEO as “snake oil”).

Previously published This article was previously published on lhexapod.com as part of my journey of discovery into robotics and embedded assembly programming. A full index of these articles can be found here. Back in 2010 I thought that the birth of my first son, Scott, would be just a small blip in my journey into robotics but, looking back, it seems to have been the end of that chapter. Of course, raising children takes time, and Scott was just the first; he was followed shortly after by Max and if I thought assembly and robotics was complex to learn it’s nothing compared to raising kids!

Previously published This article was previously published on len-learns-rust.com. A full index of these articles can be found here. Now that I have my generic IdManager I’d like to use it from multiple threads. As I said, this code would normally be used for things like connection ids for network protocols and I’ve spent the past 20 years or so writing servers that use small numbers of threads to handle many thousands of connections with work for each connection being given to a thread from a thread pool to perform.

It felt like things almost got back to normal in 2022, which was good. We like normal… It was another good year for us and we’re still happy doing what we love, writing C++ on multiple platforms and developing interesting code for diverse clients. Our gaming clients are all doing wonderfully well; our industrial control clients are happy and planning new projects; the large American postal company that will remain nameless is looking to extend the system we built for them a few years ago and our SIP TLS Gateway project now supports secure WebSockets as well as TCP.

Previously published This article was previously published on len-learns-rust.com. A full index of these articles can be found here. I’ve now built a generic IdManager which does everything I want it to do, for now. I’ve bumbled along in a very non-scientific manner, mostly using the compiler errors to guide me towards things I’ve then looked up on the web. The code works and is tested, but it’s now time to go back to the books with a series of questions that this journey has got me thinking about: