Bitmessage, Photomask Design, Lesbian Gophers
My family minus me has gone for some skiing (no vacation for me at this
moment), and so I had an entire Sunday for myself. Instead of writing a
lot, I played around on my computers -- what else?
I had a review of [1]Bitmessage and managed to get it running again on
my old MacMini (OSX 10.7) and my small VPS (costing about 3 USD/month)
as an unattended daemon node to support the network, using the current
master commit (8e39f42...) in [2]my fork of the Python sources.
On Android, it did not (yet) work out so well: Abit, which I got
directly from its Swiss (yay!) [3]author's website, runs on both my
phone and tablet, but it takes ages to synchronize, and seems to work
only sporadically. It may be due to my incorrect handling, though.
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I also played^W did some job-related work: To make photolithography
masks and generate data for electron-beam writers, you need desing
programs as used in manufacturing of integrated circuits. At our lab,
we have licenses for programs of one of the leading suppliers of the
industry, but they cost a sh.tload of money. I hate their user
interface, in addition.
Since my postdoc work about ten years ago, I was always using KIC, a
small Unix-based tool, which was sufficient for my needs, and I helped
to port it to Debian, with the agreement of its [4]author. I wanted to
improve it still and put it on [5]my github page, but last week, I
noticed its successor XIC has been published as well on Gitlab as
[6]open source, after having been commercialized during two decades!
So I tried XIC on my Ubuntu machines (compilation from sources works
well), and also on a small Windows7 machine at work, and it seems to
run smoothly.
This is a modern GUI based system, and so I will try to promote it at
work, because to me it seems stupid to invest learning time into
proprietary stuff which you have to buy/rent continuously, if you want
to make use of your knowledge.
And although I still like KIC for it's minimalist feature set and small
footprint, I probably should rather invest time into support for and
development of XIC.
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I'm tempted to tell [7]daphne _You're using gopher!? That's so hot!_
but #metoo might be one of those creepy nerds, so perhaps better not...
.:.
References
1.
https://bitmessage.org/
2.
https://github.com/hb9kns/PyBitmessage
3.
https://dissem.ch/
4.
http://wrcad.com/
5.
https://github.com/hb9kns/kic
6.
https://github.com/wrcad
7.
gopher://sdf.org/0/users/daphne/2018/29.01
