Geminispace/Gopher

• Nagless

  Alerts tend to go out via email, or did back in the day, or still do for folks who have email infrastructure, so a good place to put a declutter layer is on a mail server. Some account will accept all the monitoring alerts and determine whether to forward the alerts, or not, based on whatever logic is deemed necessary to balance the need for timely notification of important events versus not drowning the on-call in noise. Very important alerts may also be sent to everyone via a pager system in addition to email. The declutter layer could also redirect alerts to, say, an IRC channel, or might have logic that varies where the alerts go depending on whether someone is near a computer, or not. Too much logic of course is bloat and may well come with errors that require time to debug and fix, or may cause too many alerts to be missed. "…and that amount of Wu Wei is just right," said Goldilocks.

• Changed VPS location, OS, super-server daemon

  I decided to finally ditch my very last Alpine Linux machine, which also happens to be the VPS which powers my gopher hole, over to Chimera... While I was at it I changed the VPS location from the Dallas metro area to the Washington D.C. metro area to get lower ping times... Plus it makes it that much easier for our paedophile president to pull the plug on me for posting seditious and/or terrorist content. yay

  Chimera Linux does not have an inetd, and it sure as hell doesn't need one... I once lamented in the distro IRC channel that the lack of inetd was holding me back from switching from Alpine, this was a mistake. Chimera does have cronie and ncat, the combination of which allows @reboot crontab entries to be damn near the same as /etc/inetd.conf entries.

• Maybe more Java?

  Rust is very, very slowly creeping in as well, I sometimes use it for "systems programming" or other "low-level-ish" tasks. But I'll be hon- est, Rust is so hard to learn, I always shy away from it and don't use it often enough.

  Regarding GTK: I loved it during the GTK2 days but now I have to admit that I'm not that much of a fan anymore. It has become a pretty heavy toolkit by now. I've pretty much stopped using it in my own code and this now leaves a gap.

  I've dabbled a bit with PyQt6. And I've noticed that I'm slowly getting tired of Python's dynamic typing. I find it more comfortable to have a compiler that reliably tells me when types are wrong (or when there are typos), because frankly, I don't think I've ever really made use of dy- namic typing *at runtime* (except for parsing JSON files into dictionar- ies, I guess). My brain doesn't work that way. I want static typing. I want to get all kinds of stuff out of the way before the program even runs. That's just not the case with Python, you always have to test each and every code path just to catch typos (or more serious errors). Some people might say that this is good practice anyway, but I'm not con- vinced -- how many projects really do have 100% test coverage? (I didn't find tools like mypy or Python's type hints to be helpful.)