A WHOLE NEW DAY ALL OVER OVER AGAIN
So we spent the last week on vaycay, and drove home yesterday. I'm
preparing an Extra Special Episode of "Palaver" on all that, but it's
going to take time, as I have over a gigabyte of audio to plow through
(most of it's crap, so I'll be panning for gold), as well as some video
and still photos. Not sure if I should put the video and photos into
the RSS feed, or just mention them on the show, and people who are
interested can go look for them. On the one hand, people who are
looking for audio-only would be pissed to have different files show up;
on the other hand, the visual stuff will also be a part of the episode,
so if a listener signed up to get the show, they ought to get the
friggin' show. I'll probably tar.gz the different materials together on
the gophersite so that people who prefer direct downloads (like me) can
grab it all in one go, but I'll have them there separately too, 'cause
I'm a thoughtful soul.
And speaking of downloading from a gophersite, over the course of the
week, I was on my wife's machine, and I ended up at:
gopher://mirror.lug.udel.edu/1
Now, if you haven't been there, you'll find it to be a kinda-sorta
gopherized version of Distrowatch.org, acting as a mirror for a large
number of Linux distros, and other FOSS projects. And it's updated
regularly with all the newest stuff. Very cool, right? Well, it WOULD
be, if the damn thing worked. I hadn't been on a system so slow and
crummy since we left home to go on vacation (my net connection at home
being woeful). I tried several times, but it kept stuttering and timing
out and freezing up. I'll bet they allocated half a MB of memory or
something for the gopher server. Hello?! When you have a rich load of
content, lots of people are going to want to use it! Sure gopher
machines can get by with less RAM than their http equivalents (or so the
legend goes), but you STILL have to allocate enough to cover your
expected traffic.
I mean, I'm no starry-eyed gopherite here: I know that the "gophernet"
is bleak at best, with a truly huge number of dead, undeveloped, and
outdated links. It's for this reason that it pisses me off to no end
when people who ought to know better treat it like the red-headed
step-child of networked computing. It would be the PERFECT delivery
system for these larger files, if it was only given the resources it
requires. Oh, I'm sure their system works great for serving up text,
but I wasn't there for text. No one will be going there for text. If
your gopher server is going to be serving up big files, then, for cryin'
out loud, give it the RAM and TLC it needs. Even gopher can't make
resources appear out of thin air.
Piss me off...
