If you've ever been a kid (most of us have) then you remember how awesome a New Thing was. The toy under the tree, the birthday gift, whatever - new things have a nice "sheen" to them. The niceness of them being new. Which (at the time) seems like an "add-on" to the current things of niceness one owns. Time and energy to enjoy BOTH things, right? Until more time/energy gets allotted to the New Thing, then the old thing becomes mostly JUST that - old.
I think the WWW will suffer this folly. AI will become so beneficial, so useful, so enthralling and (dare I say it) utilitarian, that the Web (itself) will seem like a protocol that acts as only that - a protocol (not even the Web, but the Internet protocol, pre-dating the WWW by many years). Why? Because what becomes "old" before anything else? Where is obsolescence more obvious and expected, other than technology? It sort of what a/the thing (laptop, phone, watch) has going for it - it's the "latest tech"!
This Saturday, I got too bored and decided do some long overdue housekeeping on my website. I wanted to minify the HTML files, one because this website runs on Drogon's template engine, which is just like PHP and won't collapse whitespace and indentations, and two because I dislike that the HTML I'm sending out looks like a mess. Yet I can't find a HTML minifier for C++ on GitHub. I've known that HTML is difficult to parse. Espically the fact that HTML, like Markdown, does not have a BNF grammar. The best anyone can do is a simple `.*`. But I looked into HTML's parsing rules. And thought to myself, this isn't that hard if I don't want to maintain it. Espically the HTML5 standard is very clear on how to handle out of spec HTML.
It's been longer than I had anticipated since my last entry, I am surprised that my last entry was almost 3 months ago. My first tutorial is a continued work in progress and I remain steadfast in my desire to write more and eventually write daily. Blog posts may not be daily but I would like to write daily for content to be contributed to this capsule. Since my last entry, I've been browsing gemini and even Gopher much more than the general http web.
A major project that I've been working on is making the ultimate terminal computer using a Raspberry Pi 400. This can be thought have as a more modern dumb terminal but much more capable. While there is a window manager in the form of i3, all the applications are terminal based. I plan to do a write on it in the future when I've completed it but for now you'll have to contend with your imaginations as to what I could possibly be running. Well lynx is my web browser and neomutt is my email client so that should give you come clues when I say that every app used is a terminal app.
Approximately every six months, I approach #zig - a language in its pre-release stage, so there's constantly something new emerging in it.
This time, I wrote `nap` - an "analog" of the `sleep` utility that takes a string in the format 1h15m and then prints the remaining time until the command execution is completed every N seconds.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
