● 09.04.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 04/09/2023: Web Environment Integrity Rant and Inbox Zero in Hindsight

Posted in News Roundup at 3:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• I grew up on that big peninsula in Wisconsin that sticks out into Lake Michigan. Nearly every weekend during the summer I could be found on the family boat, jet skiing with friends or just hanging out on the beach. The radio was always playing oldies and boat rock. About half of the CD’s we owned were Jimmy Buffett. We all knew the words to every song, the classics, the deep cuts. His music was the soundtrack to my childhood.

• I saw Jimmy Buffett in concert half a dozen times over the years. The first time I was probably 12 or 13. Pre-show tailgating at Alpine Valley was a mix of celebrating music and a lot of drinking, drugs and sex. Went every other year well into college. Grass seats, singing the same songs, it was always an amazing time.

Technology and Free Software

Internet/Gemini

• So, on the off-chance it does happen, I feel that some of the hackers and hobbyists on the fediverse, gopherspace, and geminispace could start looking into spoofing the PrivateToken challenge that the system is based around. You see, unless I’m talking shit, the second-worst case scenario would result in the entire internet splintering, and so a multi-web browser would be quite handy.

• That’s not to say that splintering would necessarily be Google’s fault. The idea of the so-called “splinternet” has been tossed around for years; but that’s a subject for Wired to cover.

• So probably without those interpersonal ties, this place will be like any other place on the Internet. It’s a common way of thinking that we must be doing our best. So we are pushing Geminispace to be superior to everything else. But it shouldn’t be.

• TL;DR: I had another long weekend, so I drafted up some pages that I’ve been wanting to create. I also decided to scrap some past plans for this blog.

• Work has been busy as usual: I juggled different tasks during the workweek, but thankfully none were urgent. Unfortunately, we experienced rough weather here in the city, which culminated in Friday work being suspended thanks to the developing typhoon. Thus, I had another long weekend.

• Hence, I took the opportunity to work more on my blog, and cross off some tasks that I wanted to accomplish.

• Inbox Zero was the philosophy that there should be super clear edges between “email you’ve never even seen before”, “email you still need to reply to but you don’t need to do anything else first”, “email that’s waiting for you or someone else to do something external”, and “email you’re done with but might wanna look up things in later”, and using folders to do that.

• I’m not sure if people are still using folders and stuff to organize email, but yeah, in general, fishing out “I need to do something” things from your notes or emails or RSS or socials or phone calls or meetings, and then making yourself aware of what are the practical and concrete actions I need to take and what context I need to be in, practicing that is pretty clutch.

Programming

• So, I have a tiny 32-bit application (a Forth) taking up about 4K, written in fasm. Pure minimalism, including an iffy elf header that fasm creates, with a fixed load address. More on that later.

• It’s been unstable, and I tracked the instability down to the initial memory allocation. Right at the start I add my desired memory size to the code base (the top label in asm code), and invoke `brk` system call. This worked as long as I allocated a largish amount, but failed on anything smaller than 16MB or so. Furthermore, it failed intermittently.

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