________ ________ ________
2019-01-08 / \/ \/ / \
/ __/ /_ _/
Get me to a doctor, I've got finger / _/ / /
fever! Everyone's doing it! Finger your \_______/_\___/____/\___/____/_
friends, finger your boss, finger your mum! / \/ \/ / \
/ _/ /_ _/
There had been some poking around with /- / _/ /
finger for a few weeks or so in the PUBNIX \________/\________/\___/____/
space, I messed with trying to get a custom
response though lost interest pretty quick and gave it the flick, but then
solderpunk not only pointed out the very versatile finger daemon efingerd but
then nailed it with the excellent fellowsh[1]. It's essentially a minimalist
social network, built on core UNIX utilities, with finger at its heart.
The philosophy of it, inspired by a quote by Dennis Ritchie, is also really
compelling. That's the kind of flavor that really "makes" UNIX for me. It's
interesting to me that plain text programs can have so much personality, but
that's probably something for its own file.
I scratched the finger itch by throwing a few things up on baud.baby. You
can finger
[email protected] of course, for the usual suspects like .plan and
project nicely formatted for easy reading, but you can also finger @baud.baby
itself for the status of the server, plus a short list of recently updated
files. You can also finger
[email protected] for my local weather and a few
other Easter eggs, maybe even the baby has a response for you!
Around the traps, tomasino has @cosmic.voyage not only returning a list of
the logged in users but also which ships they write for and fingering
individual users will list their ships for you too. jynx has
[email protected]
returning the contents of his most recent phlog file which is something I'll
add to baud.baby when I get a chance and is something I genuinely hope gets
adopted more widely, keeping phlog@ as the prefix. It seems like a really
elegant way to give readers a method to quickly check if you've updated.
You'll also find kensanata also doing some interesting finger-gopher crossover
stuff, essentially working finger into a simple gopher client; finger
[email protected] to check it out.
Not too bad for a protocol that's just celebrated its 41st birthday!
PS. I've started working on something for my Gopher space on the Zaibatsu,
there's a lot more work to go into it before it's ready but keep your eyes
peeled.
[1]
gopher://circumlunar.space/0/~solderpunk/phlog/were-bringin-finger-back.txt
EOF