Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: YEILQUC Wordo: CULTS

• Technology and Free Software

  • [19] itching to get my hands on a gizmo

    a gadget. a doohickey, of sorts. something analog that i can use for day to day life.

    an mp3 is a good choice. mp3s are always cool, no matter what the year. last week-ish, this cute secondhand hello kitty mp3 player that's officially licensed by sanrio just went on sale. with a huge price drop!! and let me tell you, i was SO close to buying it...

  • The candid naivety of geeks

    Amazon recently announced that, from now on, everything you say to Alexa will be sent to their server.

    What surprised me the most with this announcement is how it was met with surprise and harsh reactions. People felt betrayed.

    I mean, come on!

    Did you really think that Amazon was not listening to you before that? Did you really buy an Alexa trusting Amazon to "protect your privacy"?

    Recently, I came across a comment on Hacker News where the poster defended Apple as protecting privacy of its users because "They market their product as protecting our privacy".

    I mean, once again, come on!

    Did you really think that "marketing" is telling the truth? Are you a freshly debarked Thermian? (In case you missed it, this is a Galaxy Quest reference.)

    The whole point of marketing is to lie, lie and lie again.

  • Say no to 1000 things

    Desktop developers like to add new features at every new release.

    Go to the supermarket, and count the labels that, in flashy symbols, mention that they are new, use a new formula, have new components, and so on ...

    In the eighties I worked at a company that produced a good working Penicillin, but the marketeer department complained that is was not new, making it harder to sell.

    Sometimes it seems that the entire world is trying to compete with new features, new shiny options, and so on.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • “Donkey”/“Zebra” style bridging

      Let’s say I wanted to connect AT proto and ActivityPub from the ActivityPub side of things.

      I’m gonna call this style of bridge “Donkey”.

    • Adventuron

      Adventuron is a tool wrapping a specialised language for creating text adventures that can be exported to HTML or 8-bit platforms. It has a Spectrum aesthetic and was intended for children to use as part of the UK's Key Stage 2 and 3 curriculum.

  • Programming

    • A small event loop library

      Event loops libraries are optimized for the case of programs with huge number of sockets, timers, etc. It’s great, big programs needs performances, but what about small programs?

      What is a “small application”? It’s hard to say, but I’d define it as a program that needs less than, say, 50 sockets at runtime. Something like that. The definition is fuzzy on purpose. A server is probably not a “small application” even if the size of the codebase is modest, because it may need to handle a huge number of events. A client may have a decently sized codebase, yet not need to handle more than a bunch of sockets at the same time.

      When I’m working on an application that needs to monitor just a few connections and maybe some timers, libevent feels a bit overkill, even if it has handy APIs.

      In this post I’m going to describe a small event loop built for small applications instead. I wrote it originally for amused, my music player, and then used it also for telescope, my “small internet” browser.