● 05.09.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 09/05/2023: Personal Stuff and Proportional Coding

Posted in News Roundup at 5:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Personal

• For me it’s liking bare fingers on acoustic guitar strings, attempting to hit higher vocal notes through 62-year-old vocal chords that might have encounters one cigarette too many the night before. It’s ftp’ing files I’d vim’d to a gemini account instead of typing into either a textarea or a javascript-mediated equivalent.

• The city that I live in used to be a steel production town, it has since morphed into a hybrid college town and regular small city, but the scars are still here. An environmental survey of a pond near my house revealed that the only way to clean it would be to either cover the whole thing over and forget it existed, or dig out >6 feet of contaminated sludge from the floor of the pond. There isn’t 0 green-space in the city, but there is at least a 3:1 ratio of abandoned parking lots to flora. Nature within the city is often seen as a problem that needs to be overcome, rather than a harmonious relationship. In spite of this, small plants jut through cracks in the sidewalk made by the roots of trees. Squirrels use the power lines in lieu of dense forests, and geese inhabit the parks in droves, daring anybody to challenge their authority.

• Yesterday I sang the Liturgy in Byzantine chant at another church than the one I usually attend. It was stressful (I was protopsaltis and it was my first rodeo at that particular klḗros), but ultimately it was a good experience. I really enjoyed improvizing during the Anaphora, the Cherubic Hymn, and the communion hymn. The 2 other chanters were good isokratḗs and I appreciated their help in pointing me to the right hymns for the day and filling in the places I was unsure on.

• The weather has been beautiful, and spring is finally here. It’s pretty warm here most days, sometimes even getting to 75℉. I’ve been playing koi-koi with my family and a solitaire matching game outside using a hanafuda deck I recently bought. It’s pretty fun.

• There had always been lilies there, self-sown from wind-dropped seed, floating red and white on the green plates of their leaves. Water, for hundreds of years, had silted down into the hollow, and lay there four or five feet deep over a black cushion of mud.

• [...]

• Life, the history of the world, and all individual histories present themselves to us as a series of events, in other words of brief and dramatic acts. A battle, an encounter between statesmen, an important speech, a crucial letter are instants in history. I remember a night near Bahia, when I was enveloped in a firework display of phosphorescent fireflies; their pale lights glowed, went out, shone again, all without piercing the night with any true illumination. So it is with events; beyond their glow, darkness prevails.

Technical

Internet/Gemini

• This file is being served by a bit of nonsense /bin/sh. It uses ncat(1), part of the nmap package, to listen on the right port and wrap the connection using my letsencrypt key. xq came up with the idea and the core server code for an experiment he’s running for Kristall. I stole it to make this silly thing.

• The last few weeks have been dominated by two things: work and moving. At my job, we are engaged in a large upgrade project that takes up almost all of my time each day. In the evenings, I have been helping to pack, move and unpack dozens of boxes and bins. These tasks have left me very little time to engage in Gemini.

• Compounding the issue has been my recent trouble with our ISP. Not only did I post nothing onto my capsule for a week, but the capsule itself was unavailable for the same period. I’m so glad that issue has finally been taken care of.

Programming

• We are told—correctly—that readability of code is of primary importance in large codebases. And yet, most programmers miss a simple trick that can greatly boost readability.

• You might have guessed it from the title: use a proportional font.

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