It was not for naught however, it showed that I’m becoming a better programmer due to just how quickly I had worked on the project as opposed my very slow development on my previous projects. I do also know even more Lua and that does not hurt at all! It has showed not to use it as a general purpose programming language on its own.
I probably start another project with due time, with different tooling. Haskell and C with Raylib have caught my interest so it will probably be one of those.
My second semester has started so I’ll probably have less time to my own projects and to write posts. Thanks for reading!
Software mentioned:
]]>During the first year, I was first dual-booting Windows 10 and Linux so I used less workarounds. I started with Linux Mint as most beginners to desktop Linux do. I had some trouble with Cisco Packet Tracer since finding and installing the .deb took some effort. My lack of experience probably contributed to that. I did start dabbling in (my now favourite text editor) Neovim, I still Visual Studio Code for school and my own personal projects. A decision I honestly regret, considering how terrible my laptop was. Visual Studio Code would often crash or freeze, making it hard to focus.
Now this is where gets interesting as I was now using Linux(Arch Linux) only on my new laptop. The first hurdle was C# development, I first started with virtual machine through Qemu running Visual Studio. I grew some confidence and actually learned Neovim, I had started with Omnisharp unfortunately that language server is quite weak and slow.
I eventually used a plug-in by the name of ‘rosyln.nvim’ together with the language server Roslyn. This got into tooling such as formatters,linters and language servers, I grew to appreciate them especially formatters as in one of my previous projects a game made with LOVE2D the formatting drove me crazy. Learning Roslyn’s code actions too were quite nice too. At the time I did not know about Visual Studio Code’s C# extension though, I find Neovim more fun so I do not regret it.
I too had to learn how to use Dotnet from the cli but, that was quite pleasant and easy. Here are some commands for any student reading who is like me or just wants to use Dotnet from the cli too.
How to create a console project with a name.
dotnet new console --name <name of project>
How to run a project. Path and project argument is optional, you can also have your working directory as the project.
dotnet run --project <project path>
How to create a new solution with a name.
dotnet new sln --name <name of sln>
How to add a project to a solution.
dotnet sln <path to solution> add <path to project>
For Java development, Apache Netbeans is fortunately on Linux. I did start with Neovim and Jdtls(using the Jdtls plug-in) with newfound knowledge of how to use Neovim, I went back to Netbeans for GUI development and well because we had to use it for TCAs and CBAs. I went into Netbeans with some extra confidence than I had before, probably from my success in Neovim and I began exploring key binds and configuration for Netbeans(and also Visual Studio later on!). I even learned some key binds that the lecturers didn’t know about such as formatting in Visual Studio(ctrl+e ctrl+f) and auto-complete(ctrl+space) in Netbeans.
During client side scripting, I could have just used Visual Studio Code like with C# but, I liked Neovim more and knew how to use the same language servers that Visual Studio Code uses, I also used Biome for formatting and linting for Javascript,HTML and CSS.
Unity development had probably the most bumps as the AUR package for Unity was non-functional for about a month after I started MCAST. I first tried using Distrobox which where I started to learn about containers, I had plenty of issues being a newbie to containers so I opted for a buggy Flatpak package instead and using Neovim as my text editor for Unity. The AUR package was updated after some time which was much smoother, so many thanks to the maintainer nobbele.
For the second semester, since XAMPP is an AUR package I opted to set up Apache,Php and MySql(in my case Mariadb). Since the documentation for doing this on a MAC(That’s what I read as MAC and Linux are both Unix-like) is quite poor on MCAST’s end, I’ll try to make this section more of a guide of sorts.
First for Php and Mariadb, I had followed the Arch Wiki. Activating some Php modules.
Uncomment these lines in your “/etc/php/php.ini”
extension=pdo_mysql
extension=mysqli
You should also install the Apache Php module as we will need it later.
For Mariadb, I had to create a new user and install the database. I was a bit confused due to just how poor the MCAST documentation was but, I figured it. For anyone like me please just read the Arch Wiki it’s a godsend for any Linux user.
Run this command to install the database. Do this before enabling the Systemd service.
mariadb-install-db --user=mysql --basedir=/usr --datadir=/var/lib/mysql
Run these series of commands to create an user for the database with all privileges.
$ Mariadb
#(While in Mariadb)
MariaDB> CREATE DATABASE <database name>;
MariaDB> CREATE USER '<username>'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '<password_here>';
MariaDB> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON mydb.* TO '<username>'@'localhost';
MariaDB> quit
Then make this Php script and run it with “php script_name.php”
<?php
$servername = "localhost";
$username = "<username>";
$password = "<password of the user you created before>";
$dbname = "<name of the database you made>";
$conn = mysqli_connect($servername,$username,$password,$dbname);
if (!$conn) {
die("connection failed" . mysqli_connect_error());
}
echo "Connected successfully";
?>
Now let’s set up tooling for Php. For Visual Studio Code you can install the Phptools plug-in, for Neovim we will need to set up a language server ourselves I will be using Phpactor in this example.
Install Phpactor using Mason.
:MasonInstall phpactor
Then set it up using the native LSP client. Here is my configuration, you will also need to enable it.
vim.lsp.enable("phpactor")
vim.lsp.config("phpactor", {
cmd = { "phpactor", "language-server" },
filetypes = { "php" },
root_markers = { ".git", "composer.json", ".phpactor.json", ".phpactor.yml" },
workspace_required = true,
init_options = {
["language_server_phpstan.enabled"] = false,
["language_server_psalm.enabled"] = false,
},
})
Then for Phpactor, since it needs a workspace just place a .phpactor.json to allow the server to connect. For a formatter, I use Laravel Pint so just put that into your Conform configuration like so.
php = { "pint" },
Now it is time for Apache. There is no guide whatsoever from MCAST’s end, not that it would likely be any good.
First you want to enable Php support.
Comment out this line.
#LoadModule mpm_event_module modules/mod_mpm_event.so
Uncomment this line.
LoadModule mpm_prefork_module modules/mod_mpm_prefork.so
Add this at the end of the “modules” list.
LoadModule php_module modules/libphp.so
AddHandler php-script .php
Add this at the end of the “include” list.
Include conf/extra/php_module.conf
Now we want to set up an user directory as by default Apache looks inside a directory that requires root to access(highly inconvenient).
Change the document root and the directory below it to a directory inside your home.
DocumentRoot "<directory path>"
<Directory "<same directory path>">
And change “require all denied” to “require all granted”.
Now go to the directory where you have set your document root to and use UCL to allow the “http” user to access it.
# Grant execute permissions to http for your home
$ setfacl -m u:http:x ~
# Grant execute and read permissions to http to your DocumentRoot
$ setfacl -R -m u:http:rx ~/<DocumentRootPath>
I would recommend creating a file named index.html and just make it a simple HTML page to check if Apache works. If you are using the Systemd service you will also need to add this option to the service’s hardening configuration(/etc/systemd/system/httpd.service.d/hardening.conf)
ProtectHome=no
Now start Apache either through “apachectl -k start” or the Systemd service and see if it works. If it does not please read the official Apache documentation and the Arch Wiki.
Now we need to set up Phpmyadmin, the MCAST documentation is once again poor for this(mentions wrong file). Just install Phpmyadmin and find its root directory using your package manager and create a soft link to it inside your DocumentRoot like so.
ln -s /usr/share/webapps/phpMyAdmin <root document>
Then navigate to “phpmyadmin/index.php” to access the login page, then login as the user you created before for Mariadb.
Well that was quite long was it not? Thankfully the set up for relation databases is far simpler.
All I had to do was create a Docker container for Microsoft SQL Server, run it and then connect to it through DBeaver.
Here is my compose file.
services:
sqlserver:
image: mcr.microsoft.com/mssql/server:2022-latest
container_name: sqlserver
ports:
- "1433:1433"
environment:
SA_PASSWORD: "<Your password here>"
ACCEPT_EULA: "Y"
MSSQL_PID: "Express"
volumes:
- sql_db_1:/var/opt/mssql
volumes:
sql_db_1:
I tried doing this with rootless Docker but, had some issues and just went for rootful Docker instead.
This is by far my longest blog post to date, far longer than my previous ones. So I hope it was a good read.
Software mentioned in no particular order:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c copy output.mkv
You can also do
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 output.mkv
though this will re-encode the video which is slower,more expensive and results in quality loss according to the FFmpeg docs[1].
I decided to have some fun and tried to mix together audio and video streams. I even created a broken file that would play a different video stream in Mpv than the one in FFplay, unfortunately I do not remember the command for that. I have found out how to create a file with the video of one file and the audio of another file.
ffmpeg -i "input1.mp4" -i "input2.mp4" -map 0:0 -map 1:1 -c copy Output.mp4
It seems that the first number indicates which file to get streams from(starting from 0). So this gets the video stream(:0) from file 0 and gets the audio stream(:1) from file 1 then uses the copy encoder to encode it into the output file.
I’ve of course yet to understand everything, the documentation is quite long. I has been quite fun using what abominations come out from it and actual use cases. FFplay is also an alright multimedia player when I need one quickly, Mpv is still my favourite.
Sources:
[1](https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.html#Streamcopy)
Software mentioned:
]]>Because of this, I’ve decided to start a new project I’m calling “Astronaut Reader”. It’s a TUI RSS reader using Ncurses similar to Canto and Bulletty. I’m currently just experimenting with the curses library for Lua lcurses. The Codeberg repository is located here.
This isn’t my first project, I had made a very insecure password manager in Python last year called Kain. While it’s not very practical due to it storing things in plain text, it did teach me some Git and Python.
]]>