The Vacation

In August this year we went on a week’s vacation to Kovalam, Varkala and Thiruvananthapuram, in the South of Kerala. All three places are located close to each other. This time we travelled by train from Bangalore to Trivandrum. This was a fun experience to be travelling in Indian Railways after a long time.

Instead of my camera I decided to take along my sketching supplies. I took a sketchbook with thick watercolour paper, some pens, pencils and brush pens.

I’m going to write a few posts with one or more sketches chosen from the trip …

The first source-only release coll v0.1.0-alpha.0 of coll is out. It is an ANSI C collections library with only two datastructures implemented at the moment:

• An ArrayList - A list datastructure which manages allocation/deallocation internally.
• A Map backed by the ArrayList (i.e. no hashing) - suitable only for tiny maps.

For further details check the project page coll.

A new release PicoTurtle v0.2.0-alpha.0 of PicoTurtle is out. This is the seventh in the recent series of weekly releases. It is also the first release with a windows 64-bit installer. There are several minor changes and bug-fixes in this release. You can read all about it on the release page.

The windows installer can be downloaded here -> PicoTurtle v0.2.0-alpha.0 for Win/64-bit

A new source-only release PicoTurtle v0.1.0-alpha.5 of PicoTurtle is out. This release has minor bug fixes, better documentation and an improved docs viewer, and a new about dialog. The release page contains detailed release notes.

Few changes in the CMake build to support a windows installer are added to the release. These will be used to publish a binary installer for Windows starting next release.

The first source-only release c-color-names v0.1.0-alpha.0 of c-color-names is out. It is an ANSI C API for the excellent collection of colors in the color-names NodeJS package. I use this for some my experiments and projects.

For further details check the project page c-color-names.

We recently moved to a new place in Bangalore. And I’ve been busy with one thing or another for the past 3 months. However, we’ve settled down now.

My son and I were taking a walk a few weeks ago on a beautiful late Sunday morning. I had taken a camera along to take photos if we spotted something interesting. And we did…

This is a trio rudra-palash flowers - and I really liked the symmetry of these three. I like the way the photo turned out - hope you like it as well.

That’s it for now… Hope …

A new source-only release PicoTurtle v0.1.0-alpha.4 of PicoTurtle is out. The release page contains detailed release notes. However here are a few highlights:

1. Turtle Lua Console - allowing turtle run in an interactive lua console widget. This is similar to the browser developer console functionality - although with fewer features.
2. Find/replace - is enabled in the Turtle Lua editor.
3. LUA_PATH - The path of the currently run lua file is added to the LUA_PATH.

I've been working on a C++/Lua version of PicoTurtle for the last year on and off. This last week I've stretched myself to work on it and make a release. This is a full rewrite of the turtle application that I had earlier built in nodejs and electron. The previous version was slow and it was harder to add features given the tech choices I'd made.

The new version is written in C++. The turtle drawing is done on a skia surface, and the GUI is built using Qt6. Developing with Qt6 was a positive experience - espescially because of …