Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • all the difference

    is there a woman  in your bed      
         who's perfect in all the ways      
                    I am not                
          I only allow  myself to ask       
                      here                  
         to rid myself  of the thought       
            it makes  no difference          
          it makes all the difference
    

• Politics and World Events

  • The Beliefs of a Half Crazy Person

    I am an old man now.

    An old, sick, half-crazy man sitting in a small room with medicine bottles beside the bed and hospital papers piled on the table like unpaid debts to life itself.

    The doctors tell me the cancer is spreading. They speak carefully, gently, with the kind eyes people reserve for the dying. They no longer speak about “recovery.” They speak about “time.” A year, maybe two. Maybe more if the treatments work. Maybe less if they do not.

    Funny thing is, death no longer frightens me the way life once did.

    Life frightened me far more.

    [...]

    I never became what people call “successful.” I never had higher education. Never built a career. Never had a wife waiting for me at home. Never had children calling me father. Most of my life was spent inside group homes and mental health institutions, moving from one small room to another, living under rules created by healthy people for broken people.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Unveiling I/O Riot NG 1.0.0 — Part 1: a guided tour

    I rewrote I/O Riot. The old version, written in C and SystemTap, dates back to 2017. The new version (called `ior`) uses Go, C, and BPF via libbpfgo. It runs on Linux and is primarily a TUI dashboard rather than a record/replay box. It took around two years of intermittent work to reach this `1.0.0` release.

    This is the first of three posts. Part 1 is the demo-driven tour: what `ior` looks like, how the dashboard tabs work, how the live flamegraph reads, how filtering and recording work. Part 2 covers installing it on a fresh Rocky Linux 9 box and the "compile once, run everywhere" story underneath that: eBPF, CO-RE, libbpfgo, static linking, and why a 23 MB binary you build on one machine just runs on every other Linux host you scp it to. Part 3 is the under-the-hood companion: the per-event schema, the syscall-coverage probe generator, async-syscall caveats, and post-mortem SQL on the parquet output.

  • ASCII Chessboard - Noooo 😱: Unicode

    After the discussion on BBS [2], I felt this post was necessary.

    The word "ASCII" is used because most people associate any text-based art with ASCII art - this is why I chose "ASCII Chessboard, No HTML Required" as the title of the post [1].

    But the chess pieces themselves are Unicode symbols and the board is made from symbols from the Unicode Box Drawing subset.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • RSS 4 Noobs (Getting Started)

      I have a habit of insisting RSS is great and that people should be using it, then making no follow-up effort to explain how that's done or why. This is meant as a clear, actionable guide to getting started with RSS feeds if you're not even sure what they are.