dustycloud/posts/mid-2020-updates.md

title: Some updates: CapTP in progress, Datashards, chiptune experiments, etc date: 2020-06-30 19:14 author: Christine Lemmer-Webber tags: goblins, captp, datashards, chiptunes

slug: mid-2020-updates

(Originally written as a post for Patreon donors.)

Hello... just figured I'd give a fairly brief update. Since I wrote my last post I've been working hard towards the distributed programming stuff in Goblins.

In general, this involves implementing a protocol called CapTP, which is fairly obscure... the idea is generally to apply the same "object capability security" concept that Goblins already follows but on a networked protocol level. Probably the most prominent other implementation of CapTP right now is being done by the Agoric folks, captp.js. I've been in communication with them... could we achieve interoperability between our implementations? It could be cool, but it's too early to tell. Anyway it's one of those technical areas that's so obscure that I decided to document my progress on the cap-talk mailing list, but that's becoming the length of a small novel... so I guess, beware before you try to read that whole thing. I'm far enough along where the main things work, but not quite everything (CapTP supports such wild things as distributed garbage collection...!!!!)

Anyway, in general I don't think that people get too excited by hearing "backend progress is happening"; I believe that implementing CapTP is even more important than standardizing ActivityPub was in the long run of my life work, but I also am well aware that in general people (including myself!) understand best by seeing an interesting demonstration. So, I do plan another networked demo, akin to the time-travel Terminal Phase demo, but I'm not sure just how fancy it will be (yet). I think I'll have more things to show on that front in 1-2 months.

(Speaking of Goblins and games, I'm putting together a little library called Game Goblin to make making games on top of Goblins a bit easier; it isn't quite ready yet but thought I'd mention it. It's currently going through some "user testing".)

More work is happening on the Datashards front; Serge Wroclawski (project leader for Datashards; I guess you could say I'm "technical engineer") and I have started assembling more documentation and have put together some proto-standards documents. (Warning: WIP WIP WIP!!!) We are exploring with a standards group whether or not Datashards would be a good fit there, but it's too early to talk about that since the standards group is still figuring it out themselves. Anyway, it's taken up a good chunk of time so I figured it was worth mentioning.

So, more to come, and hopefully demos not too far ahead.

But let's end on a fun note. In-between all that (and various things at home, of course), I have taken a bit of what might resemble "downtime" and I'm learning how to make ~chiptunes / "tracker music" with Milkytracker, which is just a lovely piece of software. (I've also been learning more about sound theory and have been figuring out how to compose some of my own samples/"instruments" from code.) Let me be clear, I'm not very good at it, but it's fun to learn a new thing. Here's a dollhouse piano thing (XM file), the start of a haunted video game level (XM file), a sound experiment representing someone interacting with a computer (XM file), and the mandatory demonstration that I've figured out how to do C64-like phase modulation and arpeggios (XM file). Is any of that stuff... "good"? Not really, all pretty amateurish, but maybe in a few months of off-hour experiments it won't be... so maybe some of my future demos / games won't be quite as quiet! ;)

Hope everyone's doing ok out there...