Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Elastic Volunteering Time Off

    My employer, Elastic, has a number of philanthropic initiatives but definitely the one I love the most is the Volunteering Time Off (VTO). We are given 40 hours per year from our working hours to contribute to projects and initiatives we care about. Employees have full freedom to choose what they want to do with that time and are encouraged to use it.

  • Chapter Four: Pegular Expressions

    You *can* use a third-party regular expression library if you really have to, I dunno, validate an email address or something. But most of the time, if you’re writing Janet, you’ll be writing PEGs instead.

  • Time passes too fast...

    Its the early afternoon, it rains and suddenly it occures to me that i haven't visited the pub for a long time, so instead of driving directly home i take a little detour...

    "Barkeeper, my i get a coffee please?"

    Its weird when you realise how fast time can progress, i mean, the one moment you are still freezing at a bus stop in the midst of winter and now its full on summer, just a perceived day later. I am sure "running through the day" like i do at the moment doesn't help either, with elderly parents and a very young kid it never gets boring ;-)

• Politics and World Events

  • Fundamental Laws

    The code of Hammurabi is one of the oldest and most well preserved legal texts and at some point supposedly governed the ancient Babylonians. The laws of the code are inscribed onto basalt, and while the Babylonians may have had further laws to supplement these, it is safe to say that 282 inscribed ones were considered most fundamental, requiring the need for inscription.

    Looking at what the ancient Babylonians considered to e fundamental gives us insight into changing attitudes regarding what ought to be legislated. The code for instance contains laws regarding the giving of testimony in court, laws regarding marriage, divorce, and adultery, as well as assault, robbery, and destruction of property. These topics are still regarded as rather fundamental in modern society.

• Science

  • AM Radio

    Before the days of the internet, I classified people into two camps: radio people and TV people. I don't think I was unusual in doing so.

    TV people -- those who owned TVs -- were the dominant majority.

    But I knew a number of families who had no TV and most viewed it as a moral choice. They were avoiding the impact of mass media biases, advertising, and the 'dumbing down' of the culture, although no one used that phrasing back then.

• Technology and Free Software

  • ngIRCd and Munin

    Mostly fiddling with the regular expressions. Adding an optional comma. Making it case-insensitive. The usual, I guess.

  • first CLI post

    Posting from the CLI. First attempt failed. Don't think it liked CAPS in the slug. I'm using the command:

    cat > post-name
    [post text]
    

    Pretty neat.

  • Programming

    • Eglot for Go, Perl and Markdown

      Apparently there's a way to have Oddµ and Eglot cooperate in Emacs using Marksman.

    • Janet (The Programming Language)

      I look forward to finding some time to read it. I have used Janet for a few small tools in the last 1-2 years. I always liked the idea of LISP-like languages, using Clojure for a bit, and writing a few small things in elisp, trying to use a dozen or so Scheme variants, but Janet was the first such language I thought had a good mix of comfortable syntax, portability, and not too bloated implementation (Clojure, in particular, failing massively on that last one). I used it for the Advent of Code 2023 to get a good reason to explore the language more and it worked well. Forced myself to figure out how to use the Parsing Expression Grammars and now I do not want to go back to Regular Expressions as far as I can avoid them (when applicable). I have not tried to embed Janet, but it looks like it can be useful for that as well and the API did not look too scary.