Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Happy birthday to me

    Hey Gemini, long time no see. Just a quick update: I'm not disappeared. Lots of exciting things have happened in the mean time. I found a new, non-retail job, I've scheduled a date or two, and I've listened to some nice music. Oh, and yesterday was my birthday.

  • bad beach

    I hate the beach. I *despise* the beach. there's horrible sticky sand every-goddamn-where, there's horrible sticky sun on your every inch of exposed skin... it's horribly sticky hot -- and by golly the salt, is it sticky and horrible!

    but I'm not going to sit here and pretend like that's the real reason I hate the beach. not that I could really just sit here and put the real reason to words, if I really wanted to -- it's kinda etheral and unwordable in the same strange way we all perceive objects to be, wordlessly. the pavement tiles grin as eyes in mockery of your defeat. but that said, I really, REALLY hate the beach.

    [...]

    the paved promenade descends a gently sloping hillside populated by some unlucky pine trees, which now find themselves in a made up landscape. lonely climbing plants cling to the right hand bank of the promenade, and to the left some 30 meters of beach stretch out to the sea; betwixt them, some dunes, which we aliens have decided are sacred natural landscape which shalt not be disturbed -- they protect against coastal erosion or something, and some rare species of beetle live there I think. so we surround them with wooden fences. some beat up information panels, with text written in three languages because that's how we aliens ever only learned to translate human, tell you all about that, or at least what can still be read. this, of course, makes the dunes an excellent place to dispose of property. we may be aliens, but we're only human after all.

  • writing 4

    so it's back to this. I have gone full circle. today I essentially reformulated in my mind the ideas of want.gmi and went to write it all down before realizing I had already done did it, about an odd month prior. it all comes back to this doesn't it. what do I even want? I'm less and less sure every single day.

• Technology and Free Software

  • How does TLS use less CPU than plain TCP?

    I have to services written in Lua [1]—a gopher server [2] and a Gemini server [3]. They both roughly serve the same data (mainly my blog [4]) and yet, the gopher server accumulates more CPU (Central Processing Unit) time than the Gemini server, despite the Gemini server uses TLS (Transport Layer Security) and serves more requests.

  • all the ways in which terminals' text rendering is bad

    terminals really want text to be a 2d grid of characters which can be rendered by just mapping each character onto a box on the screen. now, if your language uses a latin script, this can probably be made to work good enough. unfortunately, it turns out that language is complex, orthography is complex, and if you try to generalize this approach to text rendering to handle unicode properly, you're gonna end up with Problems