Gemini Articles of Interest

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 13, 2023

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

• Technology and Free Software

  • Upgrading Debian Bullseye (11) to Bookworm (12)

    I’m reading the release notes, and following the instructions. I started reading at 14:20, and I logged into the server at 14:34. – 2021-08-30 Upgrading Debian Buster (10) to Bullseye (11)

  • The GPL: A Postmortem

    I do not have much corporate experience, but recall folks saying "do not bring in GPL" at some FAANG or the other. Other random comments indicate this is a fairly common corporate position. Still others use copyleft licenses as a poison pill: pay up for your proprietary or I'll tap this enforcement card. Sleepycat Software comes to mind, though Michael Olson is doing different things these days. The AGPL has likewise been weaponized in the cloud wars. Others can maybe ignore the GPL as they don't distribute anything—welcome to cloud city, where our deals never change!—or they make their money elsewhere, so why not open up the code? However, a GPL does not seem a common or anyways exclusive license choice here.

  • Dinosauria

    I came across this incomprehensibly gorgeous animation series by David James Armsby and I have not emotionally recovered from it. The love and respect he has for dinosaurs is tangible. I cried at least 15 times. His process videos are also very worth watching because of the sheer amount of preproduction work he does - including very large fully painted dinosaur sculptures(??!?!??!)

  • Internet/Gemini

    • And now for my next trick

      As of now, all of my personal side projects that I've shared are basically complete (I just have to add query support to Cosmarmot). Lately I've been playing with writing GTK4 apps in Common Lisp, my reasons being that I really enjoy the look of a well-designed GTK/Libadwaita application, especially one that supports responsive design for narrow windows and mobile, and fits in well in my Gnome desktop, and because the Common Lisp bindings are so good thanks to the very good GObject introspection bindings. I've done enough to start to get comfortable with writing GUI code, something that has never been my forté. The last time I dipped my toes in desktop GUI programming was writing panel widgets for Gnome 1 (!) in Python. I do feel like writing something fun in it, though.

      I have two ideas, and I'm only probably going to work on one. Both of them are kind of unnecessary for their respective ecosystems, but each would add something that hasn't appeared or hasn't become common yet.

    • Gemtext can be worse than plaintext

      Recently I was thinking about the limitations of gemtext, and how to work around those. For inspiration, I started thinking about how those issues were handled in other limited formats. I thought back to what's often considered the most limited format: plaintext files.

      Plaintext is limiting because it has no formatting at all. There are no semantic elements. That's also part of it's strength, allowing it the most universal support.

      Comparing gemtext to other, intentionally more advanced markup languages would not be a fair comparison. But what about a step down to plaintext?

    • Gemini: Exploring the Cozy World of Capsules and Space

      This post is made to give you basic understanding of what Gemini is, what are Capsules and Gemlogs, modern-day use of retro image techniques and text-based art

  • Programming

    • Variable scope acts like a devil for the user 👿

      You can clone an object to get more than one. The variables in scope 2 are only available to the clones. But...

      If you update a variable in one of the clones, the others don't see the change. When you make a clone, the current *value* is given to the clonee but the cloner keeps its own copy.

      So my code for keeping track of the number of active clones fails.

    • New Chapter

      Last week my job hunt came to a close when I accepted a software engineering role with a pretty large, well-known company. The timing couldn't have been any better either since my last class is over in two weeks.

      I've been looking forward to it more and more as it's had time to settle in. The office I'll be working at is in a good location and we'll be really close to family. I also feel excited about the opportunity long-term. I'm sure there'll be room for growth inside the company and whenever it's time for me to move on I'm confident I'll have gotten some valuable experience.

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