Blog — Chibici Tiberiu

Building an OS - part 1 - Hello world

Tiberiu Chibici — Sat, 26 Jan 2019 20:50:00 +0000

This is the first entry in a series where I build a small operating system from scratch and try to explain each step along the way. The idea is to start from almost nothing, a bare machine that only knows how to load a few bytes off a disk, and slowly grow it into something that boots, prints to the screen, and eventually does something useful.

In this first part we keep it simple: writing a "hello world" straight in x86 assembly, assembling it into a 512-byte boot sector, and booting it inside an emulator so we can watch our own code run before any operating system is loaded. The full walkthrough is in the video below.

Street network orientation of Romanian cities

Tiberiu Chibici — Thu, 27 Dec 2018 14:24:00 +0000

I kept running into these polar "street orientation" charts on data-visualisation subreddits and wanted to make one for the cities closer to home. Each little rose diagram plots the compass bearings of every road in a city, so a place built on a strict grid shows up as a tidy cross, while an older town that grew more organically scatters its streets in every direction.

Here is the result for every Romanian city with a population above 75,000:

More info

I built this chart inspired by some posts on Reddit, by modifying this osmnx example. For the city list, I took all the cities having a population greater than 75k from Wikipedia.

Source code

Up and running

Tiberiu Chibici — Wed, 31 Jan 2018 00:11:00 +0000

Well, it's finally happening. After a good many "I should really put up a personal website" moments spread over the years, the site is up and running.

I've wanted a small corner of the web that's entirely my own for a long time: somewhere to keep my projects, write the occasional article, and point people to when they ask what I've been up to. This is that place.

I'm planning to write mostly about programming and the side projects I tinker with in my spare time, along with whatever else I happen to find interesting. Thanks for stopping by.