● 06.13.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 13/06/2023: GPL and Upgrading Debian Bullseye

Posted in News Roundup at 11:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• I was just over at Tinny and Reg’s old place. Yeah, you know the last one. I went to drag over some pallets, to prop up the right front of their old van laying in the grass aside the sheds. It was hard to set inside the back of it, there on the plywood sheet the kids lay in there. Hot too, even with the hatch removed.

• Those kids still come around there sometimes. They once had more in store. I surely can’t fix that, but I’ll add what I can. Even if it’s just someplace dry and shady to while away the summer, one bottle-flip at a time. A space is a space.

• My family visited the UAF botanical garden this last Saturday. It was a little disappointing, because a lot of plants had not flowered yet, and the ones that had flowered, had been beaten up badly by a recent wind and rain storm. But nonetheless I got some good photos. Sorry, I don’t know the identification for most of these flowers; I didn’t see much at the garden by way of signs or labels to tell me what is what.

• I spent the last few days in Tokyo. It is an amazing place. The people are very proud of where they live and they take good care of it. They are nice and welcoming. It makes me think that Americans have forgotten how to be kind and how to care for our culture.

• Almost no one in Tokyo looks at you on the streets, at least not in the eyes. I feel like this is respectful, but VERY different than in the US.

• This phenomenon is the same in big US cities, though. Certainly, in Chicago people also avoid looking at strangers. It just felt like I was so separate from the citizens of Tokyo.

• I had a bad dream about you last night as I slept here next to Mt. Fuji, Brandon. The gist of the dream was that I was driving both your cars around and someone was trying to take them from me. I awoke grunting as someone was trying to take our Jeep! I think it happened because just before bed last night, I posted on here my first thoughts that weren’t about you. My brain was connecting you to where I am now.

• So, some quick advice: Don’t get COVID.

• I went back to Seattle in the beginning of March, wore a mask the whole time (my partner did not. I think this is important). We got to drop in on Emerald City Comic Con, which was well missed, and I was so happy to be there, and also just walk around the city again. I miss walking around cities.

• My partner was sick by the time we were done at ECCC (they did wear a mask there, as we do for conventions). By the time we got home, I had cold-like symptoms. That Tuesday I was fully sick with it.

• [...]

• Anyway, three months out, I still have a little bit of a cough, and my brain fog has mostly cleared up. I truly believe it could have been so much worse, if I had not gotten vaccines. I wish I had gotten the booster before I left town.

• A friend from out of town is visiting us this week, and to show him around the area, we’ve done many activities we don’t normally do. My favorite so far has been a visit to a nearby amusement park, which we haven’t been to since 2017.

• My family gave me three old hard drives to try to pull data from. The oldest was from our family Windows 95 PC, the second had Windows 98 installed, and the newest was salvaged from my dad’s Windows XP system–which was heavily used by my sister whenever she snuck into his office room after bedtime. I was able to successfully clone the 98 and XP drives, but the 95 drive appears to have some sort of logic fault that prevents the head from reading the platters properly. I don’t hear any clicks, whines, scrapes or beeps when it powers up, and my computer can even detect the correct storage size, but it can’t read any data. I may need the help of an expert on old hard drives.

• The recent big buzz on Gemini seems to be about user authentication. The question is, in short, if one creates accounts on two different services with the same client certificate, how can one prove the accounts belong to the same person? Without some way to see information about users’ certificates, and without third-party tools such as PGP, this doesn’t appear to be possible.

Science

• On some notes they’re disguised: one on UK bank note they’re musical notes, although the music doesn’t make sense. On others they are zeros mixed in with other digits.

• The pattern has a very specific purpose: it’s very quick to automatically detect, and it says “I am a bank note”. Various pieces of hardware and software look for it, and will refuse to copy the image if it’s found.

Technology and Free Software

• I’m reading the release notes, and following the instructions. I started reading at 14:20, and I logged into the server at 14:34. – 2021-08-30 Upgrading Debian Buster (10) to Bullseye (11)

• I do not have much corporate experience, but recall folks saying “do not bring in GPL” at some FAANG or the other. Other random comments indicate this is a fairly common corporate position. Still others use copyleft licenses as a poison pill: pay up for your proprietary or I’ll tap this enforcement card. Sleepycat Software comes to mind, though Michael Olson is doing different things these days. The AGPL has likewise been weaponized in the cloud wars. Others can maybe ignore the GPL as they don’t distribute anything—welcome to cloud city, where our deals never change!—or they make their money elsewhere, so why not open up the code? However, a GPL does not seem a common or anyways exclusive license choice here.

• I came across this incomprehensibly gorgeous animation series by David James Armsby and I have not emotionally recovered from it. The love and respect he has for dinosaurs is tangible. I cried at least 15 times. His process videos are also very worth watching because of the sheer amount of preproduction work he does – including very large fully painted dinosaur sculptures(??!?!??!)

Internet/Gemini

• As of now, all of my personal side projects that I’ve shared are basically complete (I just have to add query support to Cosmarmot). Lately I’ve been playing with writing GTK4 apps in Common Lisp, my reasons being that I really enjoy the look of a well-designed GTK/Libadwaita application, especially one that supports responsive design for narrow windows and mobile, and fits in well in my Gnome desktop, and because the Common Lisp bindings are so good thanks to the very good GObject introspection bindings. I’ve done enough to start to get comfortable with writing GUI code, something that has never been my forté. The last time I dipped my toes in desktop GUI programming was writing panel widgets for Gnome 1 (!) in Python. I do feel like writing something fun in it, though.

• I have two ideas, and I’m only probably going to work on one. Both of them are kind of unnecessary for their respective ecosystems, but each would add something that hasn’t appeared or hasn’t become common yet.

• Recently I was thinking about the limitations of gemtext, and how to work around those. For inspiration, I started thinking about how those issues were handled in other limited formats. I thought back to what’s often considered the most limited format: plaintext files.

• Plaintext is limiting because it has no formatting at all. There are no semantic elements. That’s also part of it’s strength, allowing it the most universal support.

• Comparing gemtext to other, intentionally more advanced markup languages would not be a fair comparison. But what about a step down to plaintext?

• This post is made to give you basic understanding of what Gemini is, what are Capsules and Gemlogs, modern-day use of retro image techniques and text-based art

Programming

• You can clone an object to get more than one. The variables in scope 2 are only available to the clones. But…

• If you update a variable in one of the clones, the others don’t see the change. When you make a clone, the current *value* is given to the clonee but the cloner keeps its own copy.

• So my code for keeping track of the number of active clones fails.

• Last week my job hunt came to a close when I accepted a software engineering role with a pretty large, well-known company. The timing couldn’t have been any better either since my last class is over in two weeks.

• I’ve been looking forward to it more and more as it’s had time to settle in. The office I’ll be working at is in a good location and we’ll be really close to family. I also feel excited about the opportunity long-term. I’m sure there’ll be room for growth inside the company and whenever it’s time for me to move on I’m confident I’ll have gotten some valuable experience.

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