Using Debian as a Side Router
Using Debian as a side router offers a more stable and flexible alternative without depending on OpenWrt and LuCI. Configuring Debian directly gives you greater control over the system and avoids the limitations and instability of a GUI. Compared with common side-router setups, this approach makes transparent proxying more reliable and offers another option for those who value performance and efficiency.
Tinkering 2.36K words
How the Great Firewall Works
The GFW does more than monitor an exit gateway: it inspects international traffic through passive taps, copying inbound and outbound IP packets to a cluster for analysis and filtering. Understanding where and how this happens matters when studying censorship circumvention. Examining the GFW’s network topology helps explain its blocking mechanisms and how to work around them.
Tinkering 2.38K words
My Learning Plan for 2024
My learning goals for 2024: reach N2 in Japanese, finish SICP and TAPL, build a kernel with full POSIX support, and update the blog theme. A challenging list, but a clear direction for the year.
Daily 30 words
Installing the RISC-V Toolchain and Emulator
To install the RISC-V toolchain, first obtain the riscv-gnu-toolchain source. Using `--depth=1` when cloning reduces the download size. Check the README’s Prerequisites section and install the required dependencies. On Debian, a simple package installation command prepares the environment for building the toolchain.
Tinkering 384 words
Some Thoughts on Programming Languages
Designing a new programming language is challenging and fun. Setting aside complicated compiler theory and implementation details to focus on where code runs helps clarify how languages are built. Starting from the RISC-VI instruction set, this discussion explores the underlying architecture, layered computer systems, and virtual-machine model, reflecting on the nature of programming languages as well as their implementation.
Tinkering 2.86K words
A Project That Failed: Seven Not-So-Happy Days over Chinese New Year
Inspiration struck during Chinese New Year: an article read on the train about running Go on bare metal sparked an interest in low-level system interfaces. Its successful implementation suggested exciting possibilities for combining a high-level language with an OS. Further research revealed earlier work on the idea, and that growing enthusiasm became a project full of anticipation that ultimately did not work out.
Tinkering 1.46K words
6.5840 Lab 2A: Leader Election
Lab 2A focuses on implementing Raft leader election and heartbeats so that elections and term changes work correctly even under extreme conditions. The lab has four stages and lays the foundation for the distributed key-value store that follows. A design without explicit locks simplifies the Raft struct. The lab instructions provide the necessary background, but compared with the previous lab, this one relies on almost no reference material and places greater emphasis on implementing the system independently.
Notes 2.45K words
Reading the Raft Paper
Raft is a consensus algorithm designed to improve the efficiency of log replication. It is particularly suited to clusters of machines, allowing them to keep providing service even when some machines fail. It uses the replicated state machine model: logs record the order of commands so that every machine in the cluster can reach the same state. In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm explores Raft’s design and compares it with Paxos, highlighting its understandability and providing a foundation for building reliable large-scale software systems. These reading notes aim to help explain the paper’s core concepts and their applications.
Notes 3.2K words
Deep Copying Between Different Struct Types in Go
While refactoring a system, converting entities between layers made deep copying surprisingly awkward. A product VO in the view layer, an entity in the domain layer, and a PO in the persistence layer can look nearly identical, yet small type differences complicate direct conversion. I used reflection to build a general conversion method, reducing repetitive assembler methods and making the code more maintainable and flexible.
Tinkering 571 words
How Java’s this Keyword Can Prevent Compile-Time Constant Propagation
In Java, using `this` can prevent the compiler from optimizing constants. Although `ab1` and `ab2` in this example appear to refer to the same static final variable `s`, comparing them produces different results. `ab1` concatenates a direct reference to the static variable, while `ab2` accesses it through `this`, preventing the same constant propagation optimization. This illustrates how a small syntactic difference can change compilation behavior.
Tinkering 461 words
