Introduction

This COVID-19 pandemic has left me with lots of free time spent in front of a computer at home. I’d been spending time with my friends playing various videogames online (the Jackbox Party Pack games work reasonably well over Discord or Zoom), and my fiancée suggested that we try to play tractor online… but I couldn’t find one that was easily available over the internet!

What’s tractor, anyways?

Tractor is a trick-taking card game popular in China, played with four or more players and with multiple decks. It’s commonly known as 升级 (“level-up”), 打百分 (“fighting for 100 points”), 四十分 (“forty points”), 八十分 (“eighty points”), or 拖拉機 (“tractor”). You can even find it on Wikipedia! The rules of the game are pretty complicated, and they vary widely: As far as I know, there isn’t a canonical source of rules for the game, at least in English.

In my time at Dropbox, I found myself fairly often trying to quickly read through “traces”, which were essentially developer-formatted text logged from the Dropbox desktop client. The Dropbox client was originally written back before structured logging was common in industry, and in any case setting up structured logs can add a fair bit of overhead to the day-to-day debugging lifecycle.

After spending an inordinate amount of time opening complicated traces in vim and using the rudimentary formatting options available there, plus a bunch of manual labor, I eventually decided to save myself a lot of time by looking for a formatter that could automate the work away.

Resurrecting GLaDOS

After a little over five years, the small form factor desktop computer I built back in late 2012 refused to boot properly. For a couple of months, I resisted–I have a work-issue Macbook and iPad Pro, and I don’t play nearly as many computer games as I used to. It didn’t feel all that necessary for me to have a desktop on top of all of that.

But, it turns out, it’s really quite nice to have a computer setup of your own. I ended up cannibalizing many of the parts from that desktop into a new, mid-tower sized box with 8th-generation Intel technology. And it’s actually really nice! At work, my Linux desktop is also running a circa 2013 CPU, so I legitimately didn’t know how much faster and more power-efficient desktop computers have gotten in the last half-decade.

For the past couple of years, I’ve kept a box in DelimiterVPS’s Atlanta data center named angercore.aeturnalus.com. For just $20 a month, I had a (very old) HP BL260C blade server with plenty of disk space and RAM to run many of my random experimental projects on.

Unfortunately, angercore.aeturnalus.com has been offline for over three weeks, and it’s not looking like it will come back anytime soon.

C:\Users\Robert Ying>ping angercore.aeturnalus.com

Pinging angercore.aeturnalus.com [199.233.247.142] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 69.174.12.218: Destination host unreachable.
Reply from 69.174.12.218: Destination host unreachable.
Reply from 69.174.12.218: Destination host unreachable.
Reply from 69.174.12.218: Destination host unreachable.

Ping statistics for 199.233.247.142:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),

So, I guess it’s time to say goodbye. If I’m really lucky I’ll manage to get some of the data that lived on the box back, but I’m not holding out hope.

A note from July 6, 2018

When I was in high school, I wrote a short post on building a low-cost Arduino on a breadboard. It’s been quite some time since I’ve done any significant hardware hacking, but since my old blog is mostly dead at this point I reproduce that post here

I’ve burnt out a few Arduinos recently, and have found it expedient to just build my own on a breadboard rather than pay $34.95 and buy an Arduino Duemilanove online. It’s cheaper ($7.40, without FTDI or breadboard, SparkFun), and easy to fix if something goes wrong. Note that this tutorial does NOT include a voltage regulator, power will come from the FTDI board.