● 07.12.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 12/07/2023: Weight Tracker for Palm OS Release and Better Gemini Searching

Posted in News Roundup at 8:35 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• It’s been a dry summer, so far. Forecast keeps calling for rain, but the sky only delivers clouds, mostly.

• I haven’t posted for nearly a week—but never fear, I’m still here!

• Actually I’m on vacation. We’ve been hiking and “swimming”; I’ve been trying not to get sunburned, and mostly succeeding; and trying not to get bitten by insects, and mostly failing.

• So the pleasantly rainy/dismal day sadly morphed into a bright sun in a clear blue sky. I say “sadly” because these conditions tend to tempt my wife into insisted we get a whole lotta this/that/other done, and I’m just so shot from much work the last three days that muscles/ligaments literally sorely need a break. Yet I also know too much sedentary leads the selfsame muscles/ligaments into stiffness perdition.

Technology and Free Software

• I recently heard someone pronounce the word ‘eunuchs’, and it sounded exactly like ‘unix’ – leading to a mini AHA moment.

• Rainy day. My wife’s youngest daughter has work friends (they’re all nurses) over to alcohol-assisted decompress downstairs. Fine with me. I’d otherwise likely have been enlisted for varieties of chores by now. Instead I’m polishing the bookmarks list while visiting links I no longer recall, surfing a bit from those starting points.

• I’m also back to being a bit more minimalist on the Chromebook for recently having experienced bewildering CPU usage. I’m mostly working from the Linux-y command line environment provided (I think..) by the “Terminal” app, which means leaning on elinks, amfora, gemget, my scripts, etc., bothering with the Chrome browser only as necessary – which tends to imply gnarly security environs.

• I’m releasing my first Palm OS application, a weight tracker for Palm OS >=3.0. You might be asking a few questions, like how did I write an app for Palm Pilot? And why, when the platform has been dead for 15 years? But first, the app itself!

• While chatting with a friend about upcoming games, he lamented about having to wait 2 years for the next Spider-Man game to come to PC. I argued that it could surely not take that long considering how quickly most of Sony’s releases have made it to the superior platform. Turns out they haven’t. Not even the relatively recent Spider-Man: Miles Morales or Returnal. So it’s gonna take 2 years after all.

• But will I really be waiting for it? To me, it feels like waiting is merely a figure of speech these days. For most things that I’m waiting for, there’s almost no real waiting happening. Spider-Man 2 is 2 years away and in all that time, there’s a lot of life that’s going to incessantly keep happening. People are going to come and go. Amazing works of art and entertainment will launch and take my world by storm. I might occasionally remember that Spider-Man 2 exists and check the calendar before noticing other things on it that come out sooner. Stuff that’s already been out for a while. Somewhere in the middle of all this, Spider-Man 2 will launch and it too may slip by without catching my attention.

• Today I wanted to do a little more work. I entered the challenge with the plan to spend some time on Scheme.

• In the last year I have done some things in SBCL Common Lisp as well as some things in Elisp, so expanding this with Scheme seems worthwhile. This morning started with a readable display, so I jumped right in.

• On the command line I started “guile3.0 –listen”” and in Emacs I ran “”M-x connect-to-guile””, to get a nice REPL.

• NOTE: “With the disappearance of Blastwave and the removal of free downloads of SunFreeware on 30 September 2013, OpenCSW is the biggest source of Solaris packages. , it had 3739 unique packages for Solaris 10.” – gopherpedia

Internet/Gemini

• I added two more search modifiers to my Gemini search engine Kennedy: “site:” and “intitle:”.

Programming

• No, I don’t mean the bin man (in UK English).

• I have always believed the prevailing wisdom that GC is more efficient than manual memory managememt. And, in instructions executed, I still believe so.

• However, hardware in the past 10/20 years has improved drastically (cache sizes, number of cores, SSD), with the noted exception of main RAM access times. And GC is very efficient in time, but there is a persistent, high, cost in space (I’ve seen figures of 4-8x). And to get performance out of modern hardware, you really want to keep your working set in cache. So perhaps hardware changes mean the prevailing wisdom is no longer valid.

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