Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Coming home

    Apologies for sloppy writing, I wanted to finish this in one go, while everything is still fresh in my mind.

    The first time I moved to another country was in August 2017, moving from Patras to Abu Dhabi. It was also the first time I would live alone, having lived with my parents until then since I studied at my hometown. Leaving for Abu Dhabi was somewhat exciting but also a bit scary and sad. I would be in a long-distance relationship and was also planning on doing a PhD abroad, meaning I would be away for several years.

    I didn't know where I would do my PhD at the time but it was certain I'd have to leave Abu Dhabi after a year. This made my stay there feel temporary. Even though I made friends in Abu Dhabi and look back to many of my experiences there fondly, it never felt like home. Knowing I would leave within a year, I never mentally settled-in.

  • 10 October 2024

    Lately i am really tired, physically, psychological and all in between... perhaps being a father of a young child while also the only IT guy in a company with crumbling infrastructure, combined with being the guy sorting out the financial and buerocratic mess my dad build up over the last couple of decades, and ALSO somehow has to constantly keep our ancient half timbered house from falling apart does somehow contribute to this tiredness... whatever.

• Politics and World Events

  • World Communion Sunday

    My church is praying for my country, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine, Yemen, Sudan, Congo, my town, and North Carolina, each called out from the conscience of a different member. I said nothing, except from my heart.

    My public prayer in church, which from October 7 2023 til Lent this year caused discomfort and concern it'd incite conflict among the members, finally became a sweet smell to God's nostrils.

    There's room for my heart here. There's room for my heart here. I can rest here.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Deploying Common Lisp Programs?

    I have a handful of Lisp programs running on a personal server, as well as some scripts on my desktop computer; and it's gotten me curious how people typically deploy Common Lisp programs.

    This is mostly written from the context of a FOSS project, or I suppose a proprietary project that's only used internally so source code is available.

  • FreeBSD

    My first real concious use of BSDs was through SDF. I joined in 2021 after finding out about gopher and found it rather bewildering. I had used BSD via a mac while in primary school many moons ago but that did not involve any command line stuff. I soon got my head around NetBSD thanks to the tutorials and reading around. However, simply using an operating system does not really help matters. The effort of keeping things working is mostly removed from you. However, this is where you see how helpful an OS is.

    SDF's introduction of beastie which runs OpenBSD as opposed to NetBSD was a useful exposure to the differences in BSDs. I find it hard to make sense of which BSD to use as they are similar and yet different. In the end, I have decided it is about who's documentation you prefer. I played around with NomadBSD which is a live bootable version of one of the BSDs. I forget which. It introduced me to the errata and applying those changes. I borked a few installs through that. However, it is a frustrating OS as it forces the use of OpenBox as a window manager. Not my favourite and the boot times were pretty long. In fairness, they are quick considering what NomadOS is trying to do.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Elpher, Random Links, and Queuing Links (publ. 2024-10-10)

      A major concern that was holding me back on the switch: there is some quirk in the design of the Emacs networking library — I don't understand all the details — that prevents one from using elpher's SOCKS support and certificate verification at the same time. You have to pick one or the other. SOCKS support is needed to route the traffic through the TOR daemon. There is a bug report open about it already. I decided, finally, that I wanted to be using Elpher badly enough that I would just use it without TOR, while keeping the certificate verification.

      Another issue was switching from a tabbed to a non-tab paradigm. I don't really like tabs, frankly, but with Lagrange I could use my elisp to open up a bunch of random links (from the Kennedy database) into separate tabs in Lagrange, and then work through them quickly that way. Also, if I wanted to investigate a link on some page, but not just yet, I could open the link in a background tab.

    • Added bulk update of expire date tu Hunchbin

      Hunchbin is a self hosted snippet service, and file dropper. It also features temporarily bookmarks.

      It is aimed at text mode browsers, like eww, links, and lynx. It can be used with any browser, it uses pure HTML and HTML forms, no JavaScript.

      It is build upon the Common Lisp Hunchentoot web server.

    • misfin link specification proposal

      So after some discussion in IRC as well as careful reading of the relevant parts of RFC 3986, here's what we've come up with:

      misfin:// links must not be used like mailto: links to trigger the client composing a message. This is because the // portion indicates that the address is the *authority* portion of the link, which is accurate when a client is making a misfin:// request to a server but not when the address is simply being passed to another program.

      I understand this is inconvenient since quite a few people (including myself) are currently using misfin:// links on their gemini sites, but this is explicitly disallowed by the URI spec so we should probably make the change.