Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Beksinski - where the meaning lies

    *"From the first paintings I saw in my childhood in churches and private homes, the idea of a painting slowly took shape in my mind. And I want to realize this idea. It can be realized, of course, through opposition, irony, quotation marks, distance, and persiflage, but it can also be realized literally and naively. So I use props largely consciously, because in my opinion they are connected with the idea of a painting, just as strongly as the frame and the hook for hanging on the back. And why do I use these and not others? After all, there are not that many props. All the greatest paintings in the world are similar to each other, and ultimately, it's not really about what is painted."

    *“Or maybe it would be most honest to admit that I don't know what it's about. I just feel the need to paint.”

    *“I think it's just about painting pretty pictures.”*

    Zdzisław Beksiński. A master of symbolism who renounced the representation of meaning in his works. It feels as if he consciously remained in ignorance. When asked about the meaning of his paintings, he replied that he was not interested in it, that he only wanted to paint beautiful pictures, that the scenes and characters depicted were just meaningless props.

  • Back to the pub...

    ...after a long hiatus. But wasn't this on Gemini? Redirected me to the old http to login and post, huh. Could have sworn...

• Technology and Free Software

  • Scriptonite Is Fast Again

    That's right. A new version of GraalVM dropped and there's a fix for a bug that prevented some JS-related objects from being garbage collected. I stumbled on this a few months back. Memory use by my server kept increasing to the point I had to restart every week or so.

    My fix back then was to convert Scriptonite to CGI. The gc bug didn't matter at that point because a CGI process ends along with the request. It did incur a cost though. The overhead associated with CGI became noticeable if a Scriptonite program hadn't been executed in a while. In other words, it could be slow to start.

  • The Disconnected Git Workflow

    I told you I mostly work offline. And, as you might expect, msmtp requires a working Internet connection to send an email.

    But msmtp comes with three wonderful little scripts: msmtp-enqueue.sh, msmtp-listqueue.sh and msmtp-runqueue.sh.

    The first one saves your email to be sent in ~/.msmtpqueue, with the sending options in a separate file. The second one lists the unsent emails, and the third one actually sends all the emails in the queue.

  • There’s never been a better time to write a program for OFFLFIRSOCH

    People have been talking about “the AI bubble”. My not-at-all-hot take is that the massive investment into these companies won’t last forever.