Free Software, the Net, and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 23, 2025

• Hariharan ☛ Writing a Gemini Search Engine

  Gemini is a new application layer protocol, a lightweight and privacy-oriented alternative to HTTP. You can find the entire spec here and it is beautifully minimal. Most Gemini clients are terminal-based and it is refreshing to just sit and read blogs without any distractions. And because Gemini is a new and niche protocol, most people in the geminispace genuinely care about the project and you can find really interesting articles and even some interactive stuff even though gemini was not built to upload complex data.

• Events

  • ROS Industrial ☛ ROSCon 2025 & RIC-AP Summit 2025 Blog Series: Singapore’s Defining Week for Open-Source Robotics

    On 30 October, the focus shifted from global to regional at the ROS-Industrial Consortium Asia Pacific Summit, held in conjunction with SWITCH and ROSCon.

    ROSCon focused more on the global community, while the RIC-AP Summit was about the growth and contributions within Asia Pacific: deployments, testbeds, standards, talent, and industry partnerships.

    1.Launch of ELEVATE @ BCA Braddell Campus

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • University of Toronto ☛ Browser version numbers are a bit complicated (for server code)

    Suppose, not entirely hypothetically, that you're writing code that for some reason wants to determine a 'browser version' from something and then cross-check it against other sources of browser version information. Possibly you also want to notice when you're not working with real browsers and not apply your version consistency checks to them. When you're starting out, it looks like what your code should do is return a browser name and version number. Unfortunately, this is a naive view, partly because of all of the browsers based on Chrome (or Chromium) and partly because of mobile device WebViews, which reuse a browser engine without being the browser.

• Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)

  • Andrew Nesbitt ☛ Jekyll Stats Plugin

    Jekyll doesn’t have a built-in way to see how many words you’ve written, so I made jekyll-stats.

    There are existing plugins like jekyll-posts-word-count which use Liquid tags, and Raymond Camden wrote about generating stats with JSON and Vue.js. I wanted something simpler: a CLI command that just prints stats, with optional JSON output for a pure Liquid page.

• Education

  • Mauricio “Pachá” Vargas S ☛ Building Your First Organizational R Package

    Learn to create, deploy, and maintain an R package that transforms how your organization works with data. This hands-on workshop takes you from planning to production. What You’ll Learn

  • APNIC ☛ What training topics can tell us about regional Internet infrastructure priorities

    The region-level numbers don’t tell the complete story though. For instance, the most taught topics across the Asia Pacific in 2025 include IPv6 (23%), Network Management & Monitoring (NMM, 12%) and Network Security (11%). A closer look gives a more interesting picture of the technical priorities within our region.

• Standards/Consortia

  • New York Times ☛ Some of the World’s Atomic Clocks Were Off Last Week (by 5-Millionths of a Second)

    How some of the world’s most precise clocks missed a very small beat.

  • [Old] Ilya Meerovich ☛ Gemini - The small Internet

    Gemini is another alternative to both the web and Gopher that emerged in 2019. This protocol aims to be a middle ground between the minimalist austerity of Gopher and the overwhelming abundance of the web.

    I discovered the existence of both Gemini and Gopher when someone posted a link to the Lagrange Gopher/Gemini client (seen in the screenshot above) on Hacker News, and have been almost mesmerized by it ever since.

  • [Old] Ryan Himmelwright ☛ Started Browsing Geminispace

    Over the past year, I’ve been intrigued by the “small web” and have been trying to spend more of my online time there. I touched on this a little bit in my website redo 2023 post [1].

    While browsing some blogs in a web-ring recently, I noticed a few of them referenced and linked to ‘gemlogs’. I decided to dig a little deeper, and watched a few videos about gemini [3] [4]. One of them also talked about gopher, which I had heard about but never used.

    After these videos, I still wasn’t too interested in gopher… However, I DID want to look into Gemini. So, I downloaded the Lagrange gemini client, and started browsing.

  • [Repeat] Daniel Lemire ☛ JSON-complete data formats and programming languages

    Much of the data on the Internet is shared using a simple format called JSON. JSON is made of two composite types (arrays and key-value maps) and a small number of primitive types (64-bit floating-point numbers, strings, null, Booleans). That JSON became ubiquitous despite its simplicity is telling.

  • The Register UK ☛ NIST warns of NTP inaccuracy after blackouts across Colorado

    His post says he has seen “strong evidence one of the crucial generators has failed. In the downstream path is the primary signal distribution chain, including to the Boulder Internet Time Service.”

    “Another campus building houses additional clocks backed up by a different power generator; if these survive it will allow us to re-align the primary time scale when site stability returns without making use of external clocks or reference signals,” he added.