A better Trader has been a work-in-progress project of mine for a very long time. The web UI was done in vanilla javascript, with old school imports, and PHP-style server-generated html, then added jQuery, then bootstrap, then started removing jQuery, then moved towards more-static html with JSON payloads for the data, then pined for better node imports, then then then. You get the point.

I went too long without a rewrite, so I recently became a weekend warrior skeletoning up the next gen web ui. Parts include:

• Vite due to its blazing hot-loading, tree-shaking, polyfilling goodness
• React because it’s good enough and gets the job done
• Bootstrap because I won’t have time to finish the mobile apps for a while

For my UIs, D3 is the most important library there is. So the skeleton is based on responsively displaying a handful of some of Mike Bostock’s greatest hits (imho). This was quite important to me because D3 examples have been somewhat obfuscated when they were migrated to Observables notebooks. The skeleton makes it much easier for me to quickly get working D3 examples by copying Mike’s Observables code into a cozy little container with all the bells and whistles in place.

Let me know what you think of it.

Reddit | Live Demo | GitLab | GitHub | Wiki

Browsers are here to own our desktops. But they will never deliver the absolute horsepower of a natively-coded world-class desktop app or game.

These days, when you try to run one, you will find it is crippled by the browser’s 100 open tabs (admit it, you have that many open…). And lord knows you don’t want to close them all.

I am the user. I am the king. Not the last 20 sites I happened to browse, each of which is allowed to take a huge chunk of our system resources for whatever task they deem important. Once you’ve rabbit-holed down a few holes, you have given your entire system resources to them.

Don’t put up with this. OWN YOUR OWN SYSTEM.

To really take it back when you need to play a game, work in your DAW, or play a 4k video at high frame rate, you need that browser to give up ALL its resources. And in linux, that is super easy.

• Find the parent browser process pid:

ps ax --forest| grep "[0-9][\_ ]*/usr/lib/firefox/firefox$"

• “STOP” it. This is the magic that tells linux to just stop serving the parent process and all its children, stripping all CPU allocation from the tasks, without actually closing anything (especially your precious tabs scattered across all your virtual desktops). It’s amazing, it will freeze your browser in its tracks in an instant:

kill -STOP #pid-from-previous-step#

• Start your powerhouse desktop app and do your thing.

• When you’re done, you can “CONTINUE” the stopped process, kicking off the CPU to immediately start servicing all that javascript again:

kill -CONT #pid-from-previous-step#

I’ve scripted this up so I can press a media key to “stop” firefox and start up Kodi with beautiful performance. Here’s my javascript “continue” script, which uses my rad-scripts tooling:

#!/usr/bin/env node
import * as rs from 'rad-scripts';
const ffPs = rs.run_command_sync('ps ax --forest| grep "[0-9][\_ ]*/usr/lib/firefox/firefox$"');
const ffProcId = +( ffPs.trim().split(' ')[ 0 ] );
console.log( `Parent firefox pid = ${ffProcId}` );
rs.run_command_sync_to_console(`kill -CONT ${ffProcId}`);

Boost 1.77 is working well with it, and I’ve fully migrated to boost::json, which is working out great. The straw that broke the camel’s back was map.contains(), lolz. I was ready! I feel like I’ve had a hot bath. Nice.

Bash is the worst pile of anti-patterns and hacked up bullshit, but what would you expect from something that’s been our emergency-room band-aid for as long as we’ve been alive? This is just a reminder, for your career’s sake, to NOT make it one of your “specialty languages”. Learn what you have to. And double down on a modern, sane scripting language. I’ve tooled up node to do all things command-line, I recommend you do the same – but even writing little Java or C++ command-line apps is better than letting bash poison your brain! Just say no. And some day, our great-great-grandchildren will have a replacement. No, not another sh variant. A true sane modern programming language. okbyeeee!

Hate of the day: I love how [rm -f ] “fails” (non-zero error code) but [mkdir -p …] “succeeds”, and there is no [mv -f …]. The Unix philosophy: do one thing, and do it well, but always slightly differently than anyone else would have done it. Sure it’s bizarre bazaar chaos, but it’s “beautiful”. Ummmm…. no, fuck you, I don’t want to memorize your chaos.

UPDATE: Dude. In my defense I was in pain and jacked on meds when I wrote this, haha. Step away from the oxy, take less Adderall… calm ye self down. “Whatever Works”.

UPDATE 2: Yeah, the horror is real. Yet another damning example of why, for your career’s sake, you should focus on a real scripting language and not (ba)sh’s arbitrary stupidity.

The thread_local scope tells the compiler to create one unique version of a variable per thread. Then you can access it without worrying at all about in what thread you are. (Grammar Nazis, help me out here. I think I got that right…) It is absolutely genius for making multi threaded programming that much easier. W00t.

UPDATE: of course, every razor blade comes with its share of nicks. In this case, the expectation that different objects in the same thread would still have different thread_local members. Nope! Vet your ideas before you change to this scope too fast! Me, I’m all better now, and still love it. Good luck girls and boys.