Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Ljubljana

    We spent the day walking around town, saw the river, the market, the alternative art installations in the courtyard of Metelkova, the bus station, had coffee at Zvezda Kavarna-Lounge because of the many old women I saw there (always a good sign!), saw Tivoli City Park, rested in the hotel room, ate dinner at Šestica … A beautiful day!

  • Driving to Ljubljana

    We got an electric car by mistake. It's a nice car and if charging the car were as easy as refilling petrol, I wouldn't be complaining. But here's the thing: We live in Switzerland. Our phone contracts don't offer free roaming in the European Union. As I have the cheapest phone contract on offer, it comes with very expensive roaming and I have it turned off. My wife has 1G of roaming but she has it turned off, too. Charging requires an app. There's also a web option but we haven't tried it.

  • Piran

    Getting to the Piran garage was painful, navigating its narrow passages was worse, but Piran itself was OK. Old buildings, the ocean, the sunsets, it had an Italian flair.

  • The Ship of Theseus Has a Mind

    Replace the parts one at a time and the ship stays in the harbor. The question is whether anyone is still standing on the deck.

    Everyone knows the setup. A ship gets a rotted plank replaced. Then another. Over years, every original plank is gone, swapped out one board at a time for a new one. Is it still the same ship?

    People argue about this in bars and philosophy classes because it feels like it should have an answer and never quite does. What I keep coming back to is that we usually stop the thought experiment at the ship. We rarely take the next obvious step, which is to ask what happens when the planks are neurons and the ship is you.

  • The Knights Templar (The Tomar Hoard)

    Following on the the intro blog this is actually about the Tomar horde of Templar artifacts. Some is undoubtedly true, some likely/possibly/maybe isn't, but I'm presenting the facts as told to me.

    When I saw the advert on Insta for a Knights Templar hoard being displayed in Kidderminster just up the road from me, I had to check twice. Turns out, absolutely the case. The antique dealer, sometime TV star and eccentric, Hamilton White was displaying his hoard from the Portuguese city of Tomar in Kidderminster so I went along.

    The premise or story behind it, its that, as outlined on the previous blog Templar ships carrying important artifacts left the French port of La Rochelle in 1307 and some turned south for Portugal where the Templars continued under a 'rebrand' as the Order of Christ, presumably still using the ceremonial items they had bought with them.

  • From Concern to Contribution: Designing an Actionable Practice-Based Dissertation

    Taking context seriously is the whole discipline here. A problem of practice lives somewhere, with people, history, resources, constraints, power dynamics, and inherited assumptions attached. Description is not filler you write to reach a page count; it is the foundation of responsible interpretation. Misdescribe the context and you will misdesign the intervention, reliably and expensively.

  • The Solitary Road Is a Myth: Communal Knowledge Formation and the Ecology of a Doctorate

    De Kock looks ahead, and his conclusion has teeth in an era of capable machines. Tools organize data, summarize literature, and assist writing, and they do it well enough that the temptation is obvious. But tools do not exercise judgment. They cannot be accountable to a community. They cannot discern a vocation. They cannot repent, listen, reconcile, or love. The future of practice-based research will demand technical competence and will demand the older, slower thing underneath it.

    Writ large, the argument is about what education is for. Not content delivery, not credentialing, not technical efficiency, but formation for wise action. So the closing question is the right one to carry, and it is not your research question: what kind of practitioner is this research forming me to become? Hold it beside the other one. Your work will live in how you ask questions, how you listen, how you take critique, and how you keep learning after the degree stops being news.

• Poetry

  • towering

    knees buckling
    falling, falling
    in spirals tumbling
    then a giggle escaping 
    positive influence
    not tiny
    but hulking, towering
    

  • Stolen (poe/en)

    she disappeared in sadness
    in repetitive blindness
    what was once clear
    is clear no more, it's...
    heavy, heavy thoughts, weighing
    dragging down the soul
    the crates of pristine hope
    a trope or a vivid dream?
    have i made a step too near?
    can't i recall anymore
    what's momentum, solely
    and what the call of destiny?
    

  • The truth? (poe/en)

• Programming

  • TTY input in a pipeline

    The default lack of control is due to how the pipeline wires up the standard descriptors; when a program is run without a pipeline its standard input is from the terminal, while a program in a pipeline instead has been wired up to output from the program on the other side of the pipe.

  • SEL FORTRAN

    I maintain flight simulators for a living — mostly older models. One of them is particularly important to our company, being qualified for training for our cargo jet fleet. The sim is an interesting mix of mainly 1970s and 1980s technology , with some more recent upgrades, mainly in the graphics system and the IOS.

    The flight model software for that sim was programmed back in the late 1970s and early 1980s — a lot of modules from 1970s simulators were updated or integrated into the 1980s code. The software originally ran on an MPX SEL/32 computer, which was made up of two refrigerator-sized cabinets with spools of tape for memory. When we bought the simulator from another airline, the SEL computer was done away with, and the MPX operating system plus the model software was put on to an emulator that runs on a modern server. The model software is programmed in mostly SEL FORTRAN 77, with assembly code here and there where it is needed.

    Consequently, a big part of my job is maintaining an almost fifty year old FORTRAN software system with several dozen flight simulator software modules. I'm not old enough to be one of those Real Programmers who grew up writing FORTRAN, but rather I became familiar with it after learning a number of other languages like various lisp dialects, C, Haskell, FORTH, and a few others I don't think are interesting enough to mention.