Gemini Articles of Interest

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 23, 2022

A Gemini client^* is needed for the following links.

• About mandating tools to developers

  The point I am trying to make is this: for me, computer screens are 80x24 characters, monospace font, shell interface (I'm using the i3/sway window managers on Linux systems). That's how I got raised. That's how my pattern recognition works. I can find interesting things in logfiles, just by scrolling through them. Of course I rely on "search" a lot. By the way: "less" got me to change from "more" literally in seconds, because it could move "backwards".

  I understand, that people socalized in another epoch find other things normal. But please leave me alone, if you would please be so kind as to. I do learn new tools if I need them, e.g. git wasn't always there. Someone remember RCS? It was quite capable at its time.

  To explain, what I'm doing at dayjob: I'm not a computer science major, but one of physics. I work in a role as a systems integrator. I receive hardware, I use serial interfaces and very awkward things to build a first stage boot loader, I use C and make to build a second stage boot loader (u-boot) matching the board. I build a linux kernel and a minimal userland. In other words: I write shell scripts to automate all this. Emacs shell-mode and flycheck work faster and further than my brain does. If I did a good job, then copying "the image" onto said hardware will make it boot up, come to live, talk to it's hardware environment and do its job. Hardware does not have a screen, so no GUI! :)

  [...]

  Another long time ago in some psycho team booting whatever bullshit event, I found a nice gem. The lady running the event asked us to find a profession, the connotations of which would describe, how we actually worked.

  I chose a seaman/skipper.

  Why? I want to understand the operation to be carried out. I want to choose the tools, resources and if possible people to run the operation. Then we would set sail. And I do not want to be bothered until we return. Especially, I don't want to learn, that the thing was canceled, or that the goal is moved every week. If we run into trouble exceeding our capacities or knowledge, I'm going to ask for help.

  Guess what. It never works like this. But it has helped me understand, why I would quit on the spot.

  Never forget that the super fancy white collar manager can not make a release or fix a bug. Literally. They are totally dependant on all the other people, not only the developers. If I am not making the release, because I know, it is not ready for primetime, there is no release. This might cost your job, so use it wisely.

• Modern Wonders 6: Programming Microcontrollers at Home

  Isn't "Programming Microcontrollers at Home" a modern wonder of our time as well, that many just take for granted? Especially after the appearance of the Arduino hw/sw system, seemingly out of the blue?

  [...]

  I would like to get the point across, how unbelievably high this pile of individual wonders is to create another, greater wonder. And I would like to encourage anyone, who has not travelled this road, to feel a bit more humble about all the technological wonders we move through our hands maybe daily, and without paying much attention. I would like get the point across, that the CPU in your smart phone is a very big brother of the humble microcontroller mentioned, and the magic incantations are a lot more involved to get this big brother to life.

  I tend to understand "paying by credit card" as an experiment, and I tend to cheer at the cashier, when the experiment works. I don't take it for granted.

• enabling-gemlog-comments-over-email

  From what I gather, the most common ways to enable easy replies/comments on gemini is by encoding the reply in a url and making a request, or using http.

  The space in a url is very limited; something like 1024 characters, and using http works, but it sort of defeats the point.

  So I was thinking about a solution. Gemini is mostly a write-only medium, but a little more interaction when so desired would be nice.

• How I feel after getting 'let go' by my former employer

  Honestly, after the dressing-down I received, I should have refused to work with N. P.; I should have spit on his shoes and driven home.

  I hope the board will get in touch with me. I have some things I'd like to say.

  Finally, here's a sample of the feedback I received from N. P. when he was my supervisor. I have lightly edited it to remove personal information, but otherwise have kept it as I received it. Please note that I’m not a prescriptivist, but what he sent me was the worst attempt I have ever seen at communication in a professional context.

• My new used ThinkPad T460s

  Finally I got my hands on a used and refurbished ThinkPad T460s. I got it for ~350€ from an Amazon Seller. After some troubles involving sending the first package back (the laptop was completely broken), I got a fully functional and as good as new T460s.

  I was long thinking about getting a new laptop for experimenting and testing purposes, so I don't need to use my daily driver/gaming laptop for this. An older ThinkPad is the ideal device to tinker around in my opinion.

  What I mainly want the T460s for is checking out all kinds of free operating systems on bare metal. That will be a better experience than using VMs I believe.

^* Gemini links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.