Wow it has been a long time since I have posted here. Like many
others I have spent a lot of time with gemini lately, but that
does not mean an end to my love affair with gopher. I prefer
the gopher community I think (gemini has too many web folk
that want it to be something I dont want it to be), and do
intend to post more here.
It has been a weird year, as you all know. I have been working
from home and I bought a house in the mountains. Moving to the
mountains has been key for my mental health I think. I love
it up here so much. I am looking forward to us all being
vaccinated as a small measure of safety in uncertain times...
but it seems like kids are not approved for the vaccine and
I have a young daughter, so really it will not expand our
ability to go places very much or change too much other than
a little peace of mind for ourselves.
In the last few months I have tried, and failed, to get back
into working on music or writing. I just dont have the time
and energy. I do still manage to find coding time (usually
during work hours, when I should be doing actual work), and
have worked on a few projects. I resurrected the hobby
language I was working on. It is a concatenative programming
language similar to forth. I re-worked how emory is laid out
and how strings work. This enabled me to expand the standard
libraries, add super basic file and tcp support, and build
something in it: I built a gopher module as one of the pieces
of standard library that comes with the interpreter. From
within an interactive session (at the repl) you can load up
a gopher client written in the language itself. It only
supports type 0 and 1 files/links, but is usable at a basic
level. It felt so cool to make something usable in a language
that I made. Now, I didnt code a TCP stack, so really the file
and tcp functionality is just a wrapper around golang's api
and simplified to work with my language... but it works.
I have spent a bit of time updating the README for the language
as well as putting together fairly extensive documentation and
a guide. What I have finished is available over gemini (gopher
coming soon):
gemini://rawtext.club/~sloum/nimf/
Once I got that up, I realized I could write a converter from
gemtext to html pretty easily. So I wrote up a really quick and
dirty conversion tool in awk and made an html version. To that
output I added a simple stylesheet that I am really quite proud
of. I think it is elegant and clean and reflects gemini/gopher
roots (links only appear on their own line still and the styling
is minimal). It also supports your systems UI theme in browsers
that support that and will render in a dark or light theme
depending on that setting. Anyway, if you are interested the web
version is available here:
https://rawtext.club/~sloum/nimf/
I have stayed away from working on Bombadillo, my smallnet client,
for the past months. I kind of consider it "done". Yeah, it has
a few bugs, and yeah it doesnt do everything some fancier clients
do... but it works for me and I made it for me. I am still really
fussed about the FOSS community and do not like developing software
in that framework. Everyone seems to feel entitled to my time and
to some level of control of my project. To which my response is
almost always: you are welcome to fork it. I make stuff for me, and
if it is useful to others that is nice and makes me happy... but I
do not feel I owe them any changes, updates, fixes, etc.
I heard someone going on a rant recently about so-called "ethical
software", which they deemed unethical. I get where they are
coming from... but as a user of the floodgap free software license
I absolutely get and support some basic forms of "ethical software".
I tried for a long time to find a license that provided free use for
individuals (including forking, new versions, etc) but restricts the
use to non-commercial usage. Not that any companies are wanting to
use my software, but I am pretty anti-capitalistic. I do not want
things I make involved in that world. According to just about
everybody, software that is not allowed for commercial use is not
free or open source software. Fine. But it seems like the community
is shooting its own foot with that view. It makes it so that I have
to choose between fully open with no caveats whatsoever, or private
copyrighted software that does not give users the freedoms that I
would like to give them (I posess no ability or knowledge to roll
my own license that does exactly what I want and could actually
stand a legal challenge). Why should that be that there is no
middle path where I can give away to people and they can give
away to people, but no one can sell sell sell? So far the floodgap
license I mentioned seems the closest thing, though I dont see
many people using it and I doubt it would hold up in court. I
think Creative Commons has also gotten rid of their non-commercial
license (or at least discourage its use). Have we gone so far that
no one can imagine a reasonable use for things that remain out
of the grasp of commercial interests?
Anyway, that turned into a bit of a mini-rant. Sorry.
I hope everyone is staying safe and healthy and warm. Have a
good rest of your winter, hopefully spring will be good for
everyone!
