Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • extremely cold weather

    One interesting news story that popped up was just how poorly electric cars and their associated electric charging infrastructure performed during the extremely cold conditions. Yes even Tesla supercharging stations didn't fare that well in places like Chicago.

  • Frames Of Reference- Chapter 13

    “How was your day?” she asks as I clear the porch holding a bag full of shaving cream and some other small essentials I picked up on the way back. “What do you mean?” “You know what I mean.” She grasps it from my clutch, I follow her through the living room into the kitchen and she begins methodically arranging the items on the counter. I remove my tie, taking note of how free my neck feels with it off, how for the majority of my waking hours it bears a striking resemblance to a noose.

• Politics and World Events

  • The worser the better

    I've been thinking about the feminist sex wars of the '80s, MTV's The Real World from the '90s, and how intra-elite struggles, cast as populist, get adopted or rejected by ordinary people.

  • US presidential election

    sigh I guess I'm going to have to talk about the 2024 US presidential election in this post. Don't worry though, I'm not going to dive deep into the candidates or even the left/right politics or even my own opinion on various controversial political subjects.

    We have an international user group here on SDF and it struck me as I was explaining to my family members overseas that there is one really big quirk or irony about the US presidential election that not a lot of people really understand...even a lot of Americans don't understand it. So I figured i'd write about it.

    That quirk is that for hundreds of millions of Americans, the vote they cast for the president in November is simultaneously the most consequential vote for a single person in the free world while also one where their individual vote almost always doesn't matter.

• Technology and Free Software

  • streaming

    Please note that I'm about to rant about a decidely first world problem. You have been warned.

    I just got an email today about how Amazon Prime video titles will now include advertising when watching them.

    Like what is even the point of streaming services?

    You were supposed to be better than cable...You were the chosen one!

    I'm probably in the minority of customer base but i do not watch TV series or streaming series. I am a movie watcher only.

    I don't care for binge watching long TV series.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • HTML 3.2 and HTML 4.0

      In addition to my gopher site, I also have a small website hosted on SDF. It's random mishmash of stuff which is honestly pretty fitting for early web style websites.

  • Programming

    • Scent Map II: Vectoric Boogaloo

      The prior effort to path creatures based on a flow map was quite primitive (though simple to implement) and ran into problems with twisty passages not spreading the scent very far. Another problem is that using the scent map to flee from a monster (the hero, really) can exhibit bad behavior; one might want the critter to flee past the hero to the door, and not get stuck in a corner. So improvements would be to use a better (more complicated) algorithm to fill the map with scent, and to construct a different map for getting away from the hero (monster).

      A breadth first search (BFS) can fill a map, though in C requires that you have an integer matrix to store results in (not difficult, but do check that your laser bats cannot shoot down the entire process) and a queue to shift from and push potential points to (more difficult). A queue can be done with a linked list or an array; probably these two different approaches should be benchmarked to see if one is strictly worse than the other.