Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 07/08/2023: RPoD, Thoughts on Guppy Protocol



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • Another weekend done

        At 08:15 this morning there was 1 minute of silence in Hiroshima, in remembrance of the atomic bombing 78 years ago. There were a number of speeches as well, but only a small portion of the ceremony was televised. Recently there have been stories in the news about the bombing, and in the comments the debate still rages on over whether it was necessary or not.

    • Religion

    • Technology and Free Software

      • RPoD swap out complete

        My site (1436.ninja) is now hosted on a refurbished Lenovo ThinkCentre, core i7, 10gb RAM, WD red 500gb conventional hard drive (for now). The website is down (the RPoD Gopher Proxy) due to config issues I don't have time for right now. I switched over to gophernicus as the gopherd. I need to make some script changes to get some things like the guestbook and Port70News back up. This will get done, but around my work schedule.

      • RPoD Changes Coming

        RPoD has intermittently been going down, and always when I am out of town. I have it plugged into an oversized UPS which is plugged into a dedicated power circuit in my home. The 'fix' has been to have my wife power cycle the machine. This occurs once I realize it's down, and when I am working, this can be days.

      • hiccup

        This chicken's head is other than atop its formerly connecting neck!

        Lots of enlightening (emphasis on the 'lighten-ing' part) email interaction with quite the Geminaut.

        House/yard work up the gazoo (anyone else here remember "The Great Gazoo"?).

        Assembled a package of images and text for a private investigator regarding some rather clear cut fraud and other associated illegality of my first wife amounting to my having been "seriously taken" several decades ago. There's likely no monetary recovery, but I'm ashamed to admit revenge of some *not illegal* kind is definitely on the table.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • First Thoughts On "The Guppy Protocol Specification"

          Someone's proposed a new protocol, which is sort of a version of the Spartan protocol over UDP, with in-band support for splitting messages over packets.

          I love thinking about network protocol design, so proposals like this one always make my ears perk up!

          My understanding, having implemented server software for both Gemini and Spartan, is that Spartan is mostly successful at being 90% faster than Gemini by altering about 10% of the spec. These alterations include the entire removal of TLS, and reducing the amount of data included in requests and responses.

          It also includes adding a new text/gemini line type, which is unfortunate because it introduces strict incompatibility with exitisting Gemini software, though robust fallbacks are possible to implement server-side.


* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.



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