● 08.27.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 27/08/2023: OpenBSD Philosophy and Project Gemini Documentation Expanded

Posted in News Roundup at 2:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• I knew immediatly what was going on once it started playing — and not because I’ve listened so many times, it just happens; I can recognize most songs from the intro after two or three listenings. “Af this one, boring” — 1-2 1-2 1-1-2 1-1-2 11-2 1-2 1-1-2 1-2 1231-2 … It’s been a long time I’ve listened to something new that’s exciting! So much so I mentioned it in my tinylog 3 months ago. Still, there are songs, albums, bands that for whatever reason don’t seem to grow old in me.

Politics and World Events

• Sometimes I feel that I’ve said it all here on my capsule, but every now and then I remember some huge topic that I need to get into a li’l more. It’s time to talk about tankies! That’s right, after alienating my ancom friends it’s now time to do the same to the tankie readership!

• Tankies are ostensibly leftists who sided with state socialism after the failed Second International era (1889–1916) and who agree with the Soviet union’s decision to send tanks to brutally crush Hungary’s 1956 attempts to introduce a democratic socialist political system based upon land reform and public state ownership in the economy. There was also similar tank crushery in Czechoslovakia twelve years later but since Dubček’s Prague Spring program was considerably more wack than the Hungarian MEFESZ’s ideas let’s set that aside for the moment. I’m not saying the Prague Spring was as wack as the Stalinist system, it’s just that the proposed MEFESZ reforms were pretty nifty and are much easier to defend so that’s where I wanna start.

• I mean, we need an environment in order to have needs and freedoms in the first place so I’m not sure what kinda logic there’d be in being the freest and neediest citizen on the cinder. Not that I think “militant enforcement” would be a particularly effective form of evidence-based crime-prevention or incentive to not pollute or exploit.🤦🏻‍♀️

• From the 2010s on the word “ecofascism” has started to mean actual racists and xenophobes blaming the enviromental problems on immigrants and foreigners. Which is the stupidest movement I’ve ever heard of since that sorta outgroup-hounding fascism is what’s propping up the corporate exploitation machine in the first place.

Technology and Free Software

• This is a personal take on what keeps me with OpenBSD as my main operating system and daily driver. Note that I’m on no way speaking for the project itself here, only as the “private internet citizen” that I am most of the time anyway. Use it at your own risk. And while security is of course a significant argument behind OpenBSD, I am no security expert and not privy to the debates that are happening in that community.

• So much for the disclaimers, now for the fun part…

Internet/Gemini

• The old list of the first 50 public Gemini severs which used to be linked to from the capsule’s main page has now been moved into the history section. Naturally, there are redirects in place from the old URL to the new one.

• It’s nice to have the broad history of the project outlined, with dates for major milestones, especially for people only learning about Gemini today. But my main motivation for doing this was to compensate, to some extent, for the recent FAQ rewrite recasting the project’s goals and motivations to present what we ended up with in a language accessible to the people most likely to read it today. To achieve this, I have rehosted all the old posts I made in my Gemini “side phlog” in the days before either the mailing list or the official capsule. These posts make repeated reference to the earliest framings of our design criteria, and clearly show which things we were and weren’t thinking about much in the early days.

• In response to [Boost our Gopher activity challenge] by Matto I’ve configured my system environment to try everyday phlogging to my new [Personal soap opera phlog]. If I find more free time, I will continue to develop Gopher topics in my /Novice Series/, /News Series/, and also in the form of notes on the /original Phlog/ (which I will be calling /Technical Phlog/ for now). In the meantime, there will be informal information about what is happening with me every day on /Personal Soap Opera Phlog/. Firstly, it will allow you to develop the habit of frequent writing, and secondly, maybe someone will enjoy reading it.

Programming

• Usually it is the parent process that monitors children with wait(2), though sometimes you may want a child process to detect when the parent has gone away. Perhaps the child is holding a lock, and needs to close that lock should the parent unexpectedly exit. Power users can be fast and loose with KILL signals, or the parent process could crash.

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