Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • last week of spring

    the novena was lovely. the familiar words kind of fade into the background like some elaborate mantra meditation. there's enough variety and breaks between the sets of mysteries for the brain to not completely zone out, but enough repetition for bits of trance-like relaxation. an hour of prayer forming this sort of loving container for the whole of your real self, without judgement. you can bring your vulnerabilities, your hopes, it's whatever you need it to be. after the big novena finished i wanted to join in the rolling 54-day thing the way of the rose has going on but so far it doesn't hit the same. 15 minutes is not enough to settle into it.

  • If you don't do sustainability, the trees stop coming back

    Where I grew up, there's really just one company. They have a monopoly on all the core, regional industries, and they also own all the newspapers for good measure. The real foundation of their empire, though, is forestry.

    I remember riding in the back seat of my parents' car as a kid, travelling to the next town over, watching the trees pass by from the back seat. You could tell where they'd been and where they hadn't. It was especially obvious in the square plots you'd see where all the conifers were planted in a neat grid. You wouldn't expect to see conifers in those parts—this was far from a boreal forest. On their own, the more cold-tolerant trees wouldn't have spread to the area; the conditions weren't right for them. They would have had too many competitors, and they would have found the soil profile too uncomfortable for their roots. But this place wasn't like your usual temperate forest. While they would have struggled to adapt to the environment, they had no trouble adapting to a market in search for a tree crop with a short turnover time and reasonable quality that was well suited for the industry's preferred clear-cutting practice. And so, the environment had to adapt to them.

  • The Sun Oven

    It's summer here in middle America. The country is feeling it this week in particular, so much so that the politicians are screaming for an emergency declaration. I don't know who around here is so unacquainted with summer that they need FEMA to have special powers to help educate them in the ways of living with heat, but apparently there are some.

    For me, the sun and heat mean it's time to get the Sun Oven out[1]. The primary goal is to reduce heat generated in my house, so that the A/C doesn't have to work quite as hard, and so we can all be a little more comfortable. The secondary goal is to have fun.

• Rambles

  • What's up? 2024 edition

    I know there was no 2023 edition. Nor a 2023 reading list. Shame! Shame! as Panopticon would sample! [1] And that's the only political reference of this post, I won't be getting into the current shitstorm occuring in France.

    I started a new job one year ago, as the sole developer for an environmental association and it's been terrific: my skills finally have some use for useful projects and the colleagues are great! The major downside is that it takes most of my time, moreover being on the other side of Île-de-France, the larger Paris' area. I also have been accepted as the bass player of a musical theatre company, where the other musicians have vastly superior abilities than me so I have to practice a lot and learn to read sheet music, an ordeal I always postponed. We are going to play a musical called Urinetown in July and it's going to be AWESOME!!

  • VVO Map Movement Achieved

    Lots more work since last update. I created 56 different portraits and ingame sprites (10 classes, 6 portraits/sprites per class, except 1 class that just has 2 for now), which doesn't matter yet but will in the future. Then I did a lot of infrastructure work, probably more than I can remember -- upgrading the client and server to communicate with secure websockets, starting to build out the database tables, adding login authentication and a session token, refactoring the message passing between client and server in a reasonably extensible way, implementing the once-per-second game ticks on the server, all while learning how this stuff works in Go (for the server) and Pygame (for the client) and working through various gotchas and idiosyncrasies.

• Technology and Free Software

  • SFTP, hurried work, UPS

    After fixing a couple of leaks in the libssh2 bindings (one was merged into the upstream, another one still hangs as a pull request), and trying it on a newer system (Debian 11 instead of Debian 9, with libssh2 version 1.9.0 instead of 1.7.0), observed that it still leaks memory. Composed libssh bindings, noticed that it occasionally enters an endless loop somewhere in sftp_open, and loads a CPU core completely with libssh version 0.7.3. But then tried it on Debian 11, with libssh 0.9.8, and looks like it finally works without leaks or loops. Took me a while to find a working option, for such a seemingly common protocol.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Thirteen years

      Today it's thirteen years since I installed Gophernicus on my VPS and started this gopherhole. The top-level menu went through several redesign attempts through the years, but it still remains more-or-less the same as in 2011 and has been visited more than 116000 times since.