Gemini* and Gopher

• Religion

  • Feria, Mass of Preceding Sunday, Second Sunday After Easter (W)

    The earth is full of the mercy of the Lord, alleluia: by the word of the Lord the heavens were established, alleluia, alleluia.

  • Economics: What would Jesus do?

    I'm not sure about Catholic or even Christian, but some form or spirituality or religion or other constraining mechanism certainly seems necessary to me if we're going to have some form of market economy yet retain fairness to both people and planet.

• Technology and Free Software

  • A New Pantheon

    Why invent a new Pantheon? For one, it is a habit with deep ruts in the Western tradition to cherrypick from a minority of those who lived in what is now Greece. Another reason is that if one surveys the old gods versus the way things are, one may find that something is lacking or not quite right. In particular Hermes is the god of (among other things, polytheism plurals) merchants and thieves. There is the Robin Hood type (or "Iron Monkey" (1993) for the same thing in Chinese) even if modern-day America is more about stealing from the poor and giving to the rich. So thieves, merchants, etc. can be good. Spammers by contrast have never been good. At some point the deity "Odin All-Anus" was invented to represent them. There's only so much "brother, have you heard the good word of bitcoin?" one has to pressure wash off the mail server before one sours on spammers; I once remarked to a co-worker that it would be divine justice if a Porta Potty fell from a truck and hit one, and the co-worker replied along the lines of "good, hit them with another". Alas for karma not working that way. That coworker did waste a bunch of time trying to remove a spam that automatically became an Apple calendar event impossible to remove from the calendar of a user whose time was also being wasted. Probably one could have rejected the meeting, but that would verify the address to the spammer, possibly a bad idea, and would not address any root cause.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • On Gemtext Specification 0.24.0

      There is a new version of the Gemtext specification out, and I decided to comment on it publicly, instead of privately, because only this way a discussion involving more people can follow.

    • Ten: Holding

      Got distracted, as per. Daily substantive writing sounded so nice, so achievable, but here we are, blogging.

      There's a finite window when I can do this. When I want to do this. When I have this ready to go. It's basically from the time I get into the office until the time I finish my coffee. After that, I'll look back wistfully and go, "damn, you missed it." I'll open the doc a time or two just to frown at it. Then I'll go on, not really doing anything with my day.

  • Programming

    • History in shell programs

      Shell programs save commands on the prompt to history files, the default history file for bash is `~/.bash_history`. I use the history to remember commands I want to reuse.

    • YAML is half bad

      YAML is a language I’m becoming more and more appreciative of, from really hating it a few years back. It has what I’m gonna call “a full structure” as opposed to Kramdown’s and Pandoc’s set of kluges and extras and “uh... We need it to distim the doshes... In HTML they would just create a <distim> and <dosh> tag or attribute, but here in ASCII art land we’ve got to... Uh... Maybe a @@@$! string can represent some doshes?”