I'm enjoying being on Pop!_OS 24.04 with the new Rust based COSMIC environment, but I kinda wish it already had the extensive theming that GNOME based environments do. It's not enough to make me want to switch back to GNOME but I want to make my desktop look funky.

The more I program in C, the more I appreciate how powerful macros can be. You don't really need anonymous functions if you can just #define one inline before you need it, and then #undef it afterwards. It looks like you're calling a function but it just expands out to your code in the end.

I think that even if these branches never made it into production, it was still worthwhile spending time on them, because you learned something you didn't know before and can carry that knowledge with you into the future. Like artists' sketches, they are how you improve longterm

One of the things I have learned about largely self teaching C is that a lot of resources seem to be stuck with ANSI C, when C23 is so much easier to read and write. There's no need to be as terse as many C developers conventionally are.

Now that I've finished with regex, I can turn my attention back to the HTTP server I've been implementing based off the RFC documents. It's wonderful how simple and complex HTTP is at the same time.

Implemented an NFA regex algorithm in C based off Russ Cox's "Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast", really enjoyed exploring how regex works and now have a base that I can build on in future projects

First set up the DNS zone, then set up the webserver with SSL, then set up the mailserver with SSL, configure email addresses, configure DKIM, DMARC, SPF, Google Postmaster Tools and Bsky DNS records, verify, validate, etc. etc. Phew!

I thought setting up this account with domain name attached would be a bit of fun, but when you manage your own entire server stack it turns out to be a lot of work.

It's complete slop, but also very useful to have some AI garbage generated for your display picture etc.