Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • [EN] re: A real-time chess board

    Ha, this is sooo cool. I've been thinking on how to make that real-time chess a reality. Perhaps with hourglasses, or each piece having a digital timer. But that approach is amazing based on all the things you have to consider.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: AEUMNQI Wordo: PLANS

  • 29 years ago today

    Twenty-nine years ago today, on Dec. 5, 1995, I created my first website at a little internet cafe in Seattle. This was before GeoCities or AngelFire was really a thing (or at least I was not aware of those), and the web hosting came with my personal UNIX shell account from the internet cafe, which I could use to log in from there, as well as from places like Seattle Public Library using Telnet on its VT-100 dumb terminals.

    That meant I for the most part had to manually type in HTML into the shell using the PICO text editor (which was proprietary software from the University of Washington, later emulated by the open-source NANO editor). Or, I could FTP from my college computer lab.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Internet/Gemini

    • A housekeeping announcement

      This site is now "willowashmaple.sbs", and is no longer "willowashmaple.xyz".

      If you have subscribed via RSS, you need to change the feed address to https://willowashmaple.sbs/atom.xml

      I apologize in advance for this sudden announcement and thank you for your patience as I also need to update various links on my social media profiles.

    • all the notes

      the existence of dedicated websites that lets you compare features of the plethora of note-taking applications just shows that so many of us--regardless of background--are interested in (sometimes obsessed with) better systems for note-taking, task management, and really just productivity. doing more with less time and less mental overhead.

  • Programming

    • 2024 In Retrospect

      I must admit, I'm not one to discuss my personal life online very often. But I wanted to add this memoirs section because I think I need some place to do so and my physical journals all end up filled with random notes, poems, and silliness. Throughout it all, 2024 has been a phenomenal year for me.

      I got to grow closer to many friends, some long time and some not. I wound up growing close to and finding my true love and soulmate, something that I had long conceded was likely out of my reach. The latter part still has me silently giddy as I blush, waiting for a message or response from them. I even finally rekindled my love for programming again, thanks to OCaml and functional programming in general.

    • Griping With Haskell

      Over the last couple months, I've taken some time to finally learn and use Haskell. I chose this because after using OCaml for a little bit I realized I finally felt ready to approach a purely functional programming language. It took a little bit, but after the first few weeks I actually felt pretty happy in Haskell. It is a very elogent and pleasant language to write, that allows you to represent concepts in very ingenious ways. Lazy evaluation is also something that I will now miss whenever I am not writing Haskell. I like Haskell a lot, and will be continuing to use it.

      However, the language is bloated with warts. Whether they be tooling related, standard library related, or language construct related. While it is very elogant to write Haskell, it is absolutely horrible to build an application in it. So this log will be a little ramble of my experience.