Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • What determines which side of the bed I sleep on?

  • The First Law Book Series

    The First Law is a trilogy of books by Joe Abercrombie. They are set in a fantasy world where there is feudal state in the middle, vaguely Arabian sultanate to the south, former empire to the east/west (I forget which), industrial place in the opposite direction and then a wild northern realm filled with wild men to the north. There is not much originality in this map but hey, it works. It is easy to follow without someone drawing it all out. There is magic but it is dwindling. There was a time where there was no seperation between the demon realms and human realms. Magic was rife at this time. However, since the seperation, the magic has reduced. In terms of technology, this world is at the start of gun powder appearing in one realm. Think 1400/1500s.

    The series follows a group of people from different realms. We have Logan, a north man fugitive who has been seperated from his gang and so tries to reach some form of civilisation. We also meet Glotka, an unfortunate chap who was a dashing officer in the army but was captured and tortured. This torture broke him and turned him into this gurning cripple who is in constant pain. We first meet him as he faces his usual nemesis - stairs. This makes the reader sympathise until they realise what Glotka is descending the stairs to do - torture. He is part of the inquisition and spends his time overseeing the torture of others, using his first hand experience. We also follow Jezal dan Luthar, a cocky officer in the Union army who fancies himself.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Software Releases/Announcements

    • Alhena 5.4.3 With Gopher And More

      The headline feature is, you guessed it, native Gopher support. Most common selector types are supported and handled like you'd expect in Alhena (inline images, embedded media, etc).

      The 'h' selector - basically HTML served over Gopher - renders in Alhena's built-in HTML to Gemtext converter if "Convert Web Pages" is turned on. I added the same feature to Gemini. If the mimetype returned by a Gemini server is text/html, the document is converted and displayed in Gemtext. Relative links in HTML served over gemini and gopher work.

  • Programming

    • Fixing Bash

      On line 5, all the files are put into an array in memory. This will become less efficient as the number of files increases, possibly to the point of running a low-memory system out of memory. Directly looping over the files (above) or using find(1) (below) will avoid this problem.

      On lines 10 and 14, basename(1) is called twice. This could be reduced to a single basename call, or zero calls if shell-internal code is used to do the same thing. Forking out to external programs can be expensive, even on an OS where forks are fast.

      Various assumptions are made about the characters of the filenames; in the (very unlikely) event that the filenames contain "<", ">", or other such characters that would render the XML invalid, or worse. This is more of a concern if other people are using your tools, and less if you mostly know what you're doing and do not often create filenames with characters significant to XML in them.