Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Governance in a Right To Manage company

    Right To Manage companies ("RTMcos") are a specialised sort of company used in the UK to manage blocks of flats, often in the circumstance where the owner of the whole block of flats has sufficiently irritated the owners of the individual flats.

    The RTMco has two groups of people involved: the members and the directors. Anyone who owns a flat in the building has a right to be a member of the RTMco. The members get to choose the directors, and the directors collectively exercise the powers of the company on behalf of the members.

    Conventionally, the directors will appoint a managing agent to run the building. This agent might be a commercial company that specialises in property management, or an individual who does that, and such agents might well work for many unconnected blocks. In a few cases, the directors choose not to employ any agent, but this is unwise except in very small buildings.

    Having a managing agent is therefore an *informal* requirement. On the other hand, having RTMco members and RTMco directors is very much a legal necessity.

  • Ween Part One: The Boognishing

    In late 1994, I heard an album that was unlike any I had heard. The band was called Ween, and I wanted to help their pony.

    Recently, I have been watching old videos of their performances in the mid 1990s and lamenting that Deaner is not well enough to tour. I have become increasingly concerned that the two times I have seen them live would be my only times seeing them.

    Yesterday, I was speaking to one of my dearest friends and family--JP (one of the live Ween shows I saw was with him). When I told him of my recent concerns, he conveyed that he had attended their last live performance in Spokane, WA. At that show, JP had a vision of the importance of The Stallion. Midway through the show, he began shouting between songs, "IT"S ALL BECAUSE OF THE STALLION!"

    When he relayed this experience to me, I realized that I was woefully uninitiated to the band's lore and needed to journey deep into the Ween experience. I didn't even know their "little guy" drawing had a name and was indeed a demon/god called The Boognish. So I have committed to listening to all their records in release order and journaling here about the experience.

• Technology and Free Software

  • What I have learned from porting DRACONDI onto the TI-74S

    To be honest, I don't remember the last time before the last week when I wrote anything worthwhile in any BASIC dialect. As I already mentioned in my previous post, my programming journey started from an RPN-programmable calculator and then I jumped straight to C and JS. I missed out on Pascal for the most part (although I read about it a lot) and surely missed out on any BASIC environments except for some Mobile BASIC on the Nokia 3100 and VBScript (sic) although I had enough literature to pick it up on the first opportunity. And, of course, once I learned C and C-like syntax, I never since thought of going back to the world of mandatory line numbers and having $ in any string-related things. However, if I wanted to hop on a bike I never had in the childhood, I needed to finally face this and learn the TI-74's BASIC dialect in order to write anything useful and stick to my initial plan, and this was exactly what I did when I wrote my previous post.

  • Historic Ada Project Management

    The "ada/asr" subtree on PAL disk 2 is an archive of the "Ada Software Repository" (ASR) which I find interesting because there seems to be a coherent vision of how software should be developed, and tools to back it up. A lot of the credit for this is due to Richard Conn, whose name I see popping up over the place. I hope he's doing well. I've resurrected some old projects and submitted them to Alire:

    * pager2, a text file archiver/unarchiver

    * ptf, a nroff clone. This is from a family tree including the "Software Tools" and "Software Tools in Pascal" books, which are quite good.

    * x1804, a primitive doc generator, like Doxygen