Episode: 3804
Title: HPR3804: 2022-2023 New Years Show Episode 2
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3804/hpr3804.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 05:39:49

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,804 for Thursday 2 March 2023.
Today's show is entitled, 2022-2023 New Years Show Episode 2.
It is part of the series HP Our New Year Show.
It is hosted by HP or volunteers and is about 87 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is 2022-2023 New Years Show where people come together and chat.
So what's everybody's big plans for tonight?
Again, what's everybody's big plans for tonight?
Our champagne bottle with somebody?
No, sadly not.
I'll be here.
I'll be here and I'll watch the...
I guess I'll watch the London Fireworks display.
I practiced the first time, it's one for three years,
because it was all bad and canceled with COVID, yeah?
I'm canceling up here.
I'm a tree hug and hippie from New York, but I've been lived in the South since the 90s.
And here in Florida, our governor doesn't think there's COVID,
nor should we get vaccinated or wear masks.
I do all of everything he tells me to not to do.
I do, so I wear masks, I've got five vaccinations, you know?
Right, well, yeah.
Right, well, in that case, okay.
There was a great guy in my log in over here in England, right?
I met him in 2013 once at the pub.
There are the old pub we used to go to,
we used to go back to America with his wife for his two daughters.
We were like 11 and whatever at the time, I think.
And then he went back to Florida,
because he'd been with him with his very little wife, yeah?
And in the pandemic, we started having these virtual and on-get-see luck meetings
and there's a mailing list, obviously.
But he came in from Florida and it was really nice.
And it was like, oh, great.
And he sees all of them.
We could talk to him, he'd be there early and he stayed late.
All those guys, you've been in all kinds of things.
You could learn from about all sorts of things tech-wise and so on.
Really nice guy.
See him there with the fans going to Florida down his noisy cat and everything.
He talked to his wife occasionally because of how the house was done.
But then he disappeared last summer,
or not last summer, the summer before it must have been, actually.
And my friend and me have hit him on the log with friend of mine 10 years now.
We're thinking, where's he gone?
Why is he not on the meeting?
That's a lot.
He just did it this summer.
And then he got to October and his wife sent us a message,
why is a log contact?
She could get into his computer.
He was doing some really good tech job.
No, his wife is locked out of his computer.
And it turns out that, yes, he had died on my birthday as well.
It sounds like the 31st grade of the COVID Delta variant in Florida.
And I thought, when he's only 47 years old as well.
So, yeah, there you go.
He doesn't block the virus.
He wants you to just hack space and things.
But it was just so sad.
He's left two daughters behind as well.
So it's just, it's just awful.
Yeah, sorry about that.
Yeah, I have a lot.
I like to say I lost two good friends.
I lost my mom, my uncle.
I mean, and most of the people I hang out with here just don't mass.
They don't care.
You know, I don't, I gave up kind of caring about what they care about.
So I don't mask what I'm having coffee around them because at least I'm vaccinated.
They wear masks in other public places, but still.
Yeah, there have had five.
I didn't want the AstraZeneca one because there's some stealth cell research.
I mean, why don't I do something on the other side?
Yeah, but I don't have five.
I have five fires.
But, but now, and now the Chinese bulls are open as well to letting people go.
They also go out.
And I was reading that they're going to at least in the UK say soon enough that if you're coming in from China,
you have to be have a negative test with COVID.
I think America is doing the same policy and Italy or some way as well.
Yeah, we're doing that here too.
I've noticed that.
But yeah, I just happened to live in one of those, you know, states 90% of the people seem to not care.
I think so.
Yeah, I got my impression as well that Florida was more like other cinema's were closing lockdown.
And Florida was like, no, yeah, you can go and watch cinema,
much wear face mask, but no problem.
Yeah.
I mean, when he's down, we had the face mask thing as well.
But it was like, it was like, you can hear the cinema.
We're in a big lockdown over here.
Well, the mayor here is not too bad.
And for the longest time, all the buses required you to wear a mask and the uptown trains and stuff,
but they slowly but surely did away with that because they start losing funding.
The governor says, well, if you if you're masking to do this stuff, I'm not giving you money.
Well, interesting.
One of my good friends is a nurse of probably 50 years experience, maybe more.
And she said the masking stuff is of limited utility.
And again, these vaccinations also have been they're not not as they adapted the regulations to let vaccinations,
which are less than 100% effective go through is vaccines.
So COVID vaccines are not like the vaccines for flu or other things that were used to traditionally.
They have triggered the definition.
I mean, I heard something like that that yes, the vaccines were possibly a little bit experimental really,
but on the other hand, I assume they have must, but I mean, he's still catching on me,
even though they've had this vaccine, but I assume they've also helped people not become as unwell with COVID
when they when they quit.
So I wish it the point as well.
Yeah, I pretty much only wear masks because I don't want to get other people sick,
and I may be getting sick.
I volunteer in shelters and stuff too.
So who knows what I might have.
Also, there has been some questions about some of the vaccines and cardiac problems.
Oh, yes.
So there was a story about how if you take the Pfizer job and your meal,
and I think there's a story was actually US soldiers or something at first,
and they took the job and they ended up getting the heart inflamed slightly or something.
And then I remember what was interesting though is when I got one of those jobs from my third time,
I think it was.
I said to the male nurse, actually, he sort of said, oh, yeah, if you get that,
it will go.
And then also the next time a wedding did one, they told me just straight away,
yes, you might have this hot thing, but it's very bad or disappear,
and it's nothing to worry about.
So I don't know.
I've had five of them still here.
I'm good.
Yeah, I've had for the Moderna, so I've had five.
Five is, yeah.
Well, just a lot of the real problem that you had was even Dr. Fauci,
the head of all COVID, and knowledge has admitted that he's told the public
what he believes that they can accept.
So he was saying early on that we'll be back to normal quickly.
You don't need this.
You don't need that.
You're whatever.
And then he was into everybody's got to lock down and it turned out that a lot of that stuff was not true.
Metman, did you get vaccinated?
I've got vaccinated in a one or two boosters I haven't looked at my car.
You have had at least one or two of these COVID vaccine, then.
Right.
But the problem you have is that the COVID vaccine is, well,
it was COVID is the first time that your choice of vaccination has had a serious enforcement issue.
Well, it was, well, faithless.
It was knowing that as they locked down work in a way they have to sort of do it,
because especially I'm going to take England as a good example where I'm in England,
right?
And England is a place where a lot of people, first of all the pubs go for pubs going out to a pub
is very much ingrained into society.
You go out and have a drink with people sometimes or ideally that's what people do for pubs
and there's nightclubs a bit as well, more for younger ones.
And people really like to do that.
They want to go out to restaurants or go to pubs.
They will have food and drinks.
And they won't have fun.
And the cinema and things, that's a bit different.
And they actually, I mean, they did do it.
They did make it up.
And Boris Johnson, who was the prime minister at the time, just before they went to lockdown properly,
he basically said, they basically said, look, you can go to a pub at the moment.
However, you're not really supposed to, ideally, or try not to go because there's this COVID thing going around.
And the other thing is what you can do.
And that's sort of a mixed message.
So, certain people were like, hey, I'm going to pub any way.
I don't care.
Others were like, ooh, I'm going to just stay at home.
And they had to enforce it with a lockdown, really.
Otherwise, I mean, people were breaking lockdown anyway.
They had to set a lot, certain people had people, friends over and things were the households
that, again, that was big no-no, but people were doing it.
I mean, we had a girlfriend or something in a different household.
And you go, oh, I'm going to see them.
Or, you know, if people find their own way to break it and justify it.
So, they tackled all the fun stuff down by by pub, by by cinema, by by a restaurant.
And this annoyed me as well, because I'm in a place where just outside the real city,
I mean, it's quite built up around here.
It's a busy road, but I have good pubs and things down there.
And I've got things around here.
And now what they did as well here in England is they tried a tear system where
it would be done on the county that that a place is in.
So, because it's the city, it was in a different county, technically.
Always be the same place, back in the 1990s, we'll talk about Mal.
They ended up in tear.
Two went more relaxed.
We ended up in tear.
Three were pubs had to be closed.
They could have their pubs open.
And then, also, with the up north of England, they put them in tear.
Four were basing Christmas was pretty much cancelled as well.
And of course, those people complained and said, hey London,
you've got the people who come in in London.
Why don't you put...
Well, you won't go to London, will you?
Maybe to make a point, or because the cases were high, or better both.
They did then stick London and surrounding areas of London to tear forward well.
So, they had the most bushes basically.
The tear forward was locked down, basically.
But they had to close some of this.
People would just be out as normal doing things.
But it was like, you cannot go across the other tear zone.
Less essential for work or medical reason.
And then in Scotland, it was even more locked down.
Because the UK is spitting to four countries, really.
Scotland was even more locked down.
They had that more stricter rules.
Wales had quite strict rules as well.
And Northern Ireland, they take reasonably strict rules.
England was actually the most relaxed out of the lot.
But we still have to start to force the closed things down.
Otherwise, people would be out socialising as normal.
And I think in India.
No, apparently in the Caribbean, they banned alcohol as well.
That's what somebody told me.
When it was locked down, they banned the social drink.
They banned alcohol as well, whilst it was locked down.
And in India, it was like, why are you out here?
Why are you out here?
Get go home, break in lockdown.
That's why I heard as well.
Well, one of the things that I saw in New York City.
You couldn't go into the bars, restaurants, what have you.
But they built these little shacks and bubbles and whatnot out on the sidewalk.
And people were served outdoors in these temporary buildings or fixtures or what have you.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
We had similar when it was down a bit.
But I mean, the pubs had to be closed and they were really fussing.
They lost a lot of money, etc.
But when it eased down a bit, the pubs were like, it was like, okay, you can go to a pub.
However, you're not allowed to sit inside.
So if you wanted to via beer and you had to go inside, or you wanted to go and use the tool.
Well, that as well.
Even the toilet was like, you can go to the toilet, but only one person supposed to be in that want.
But on top of that, you have to go around the face mask inside.
So it was like, really?
And then there then you allowed to sit outside.
And they made some temporary outside sitting places with in the car park and things like that as well.
And some where it's going now and so much to stay, probably really.
But there was the whole mass.
But then when they opened up inside, it was like, you can sit inside.
However, when you move up, but even then, I didn't use the hand sanitizer when you come in too.
But if you need to move around via beer or go to the toilet, you have to put a face mask on.
But then when you come and sit back down your table, you're going to take your face mask off, no problem.
Well, I'm just saying that the regulation in a lot of places and a lot of holes in them.
And if they were following the silence, well, I saw a school band was playing,
but those with wind instruments had holes in their mouths so that they could blow through the wind.
It comes a point where.
Oh, and I already baddened like church.
Yeah, even churches have to close here for a bit.
And then I was thinking about like, and then choirs were like, no, no, no.
It was like, oh man, if you go and sing and they're choirs, you're going to possibly spread the COVID.
So they choirs allowed and all that as well.
And obviously they became like Zoom choirs and they tried musical minds.
It works a well, but it was like, really now the churches are closing as well.
You can't go to church.
Are greetings again to Australia and Melbourne, Sydney, et cetera.
And what made it interesting as well?
When, of course, the politicians themselves broke the rules or bad rules, yeah.
We had, we had, there were some of the health minister in Scotland,
and you did some major after resigned slightly.
And in England, we had the whole party thing and the other guy went somewhere and so on.
It was America, but I assume there was stuff going on living there as well.
Oh, yeah, there was, there was a lot of liberal parties and liberal fundraisers
and whatnot.
Nobody masked up for those.
And the general consensus about the rules in America were that the people who wrote the rules were fine with the rules
as long as they didn't have to obey them.
That's what, before they said here as well when things started to happen, yeah.
Just like that.
Well, they may make the rules, they can break rules and we're supposed to follow the rules,
but they can go and bend and break the rules.
Well, I shout out to Mortency there.
Are you around?
I've seen that one.
Don't you come in and out, but not living there.
Well, I think he was driving part of the time so he can't really manipulate the system.
Speaking of making the rules, I'm going to suggest next year that they at least put Eastern time equivalents on the time zone
so that a poor American can have some fighting chance of actually getting the times right.
Yeah, they're on three fair.
I couldn't agree.
I'm an American.
I probably couldn't agree with you because the amount of Americans that come on this,
they come on this, they if you are, they just do this and leave the Canadians.
Well, not a lot of money though, but they think, but yeah, it would make sense.
Well, the thing about it is we were talking about how the rules are enforced.
Oh, did we just greet somebody in?
Well, one of them, some country just went into New Year, yeah.
Australia has gotten greeted a couple of times.
Happy New Year, Australia.
Australia isn't like full-time thing as well, but like America.
Right, yes, but I'm just saying, I know, and I was trying to follow the notes,
but it's very hard to follow the notes when you have no translation to your local time.
Well, your time for that wasn't there in the UTC, but then you have to work out the other time.
Right, I mean, give us time that's useful, or maybe I should just give up on doing the usual greeting thing.
No, not at all.
You mean you might get wronged somewhere, but so bad, I think it's good times greetings.
Yeah, well, I've been looking forward to this all year, and this is painful.
The show will do the greetings.
I've been looking forward to the show, and I was going to try to do my best on the greetings,
but without proper support, it's very hard.
Yeah, I was looking forward to the show as well.
I mean, it's still a bit early, though, and I assume there'll be a lot more people on here later.
Okay, COVID was, 2023 is going to be like the first normal year in certain ways.
After 2019, I'd like to say that the conference is all on and things high-fi shows, isn't it?
Yeah.
Well, the interesting, the thing that's most interesting to me is that even discussing whether COVID and stuff in America discussing
whether COVID measures were effective or whatnot, there are a lot of, like YouTube, you can't discuss it.
And knowing it here as well, I think it was like a investigation or whatever,
you know, looking into COVID and if they did the right thing or not, and if it's effective and all that kind of stuff.
Well, also, we found out that the narrative we were getting from our government people
was adjusted. The science, well, an interesting data that I found can't really source it,
but a lot of the CDC people were getting residuals from their work on COVID.
They were getting residuals from their work on the COVID vaccine problem.
Were you in money?
I mean, money.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. They've heard that some of them actually got money just from doing that stuff.
Quite a bad money.
Then we had a former health...
If they weren't getting paid to tell you to buy the vaccine companies,
would they have pushed a semi-tested vaccine quite so hard?
I don't know, but we had a former health sector, yeah, who did it,
who something went wrong slightly and then they had to kind of like,
well, he says an MP, he quit his health sector, you know, he'd be on a...
I'm a celebrity, he'd get me out of here, a game show thing,
but a few stumps kind of and trying to perpetuate even so for a little bit as well.
But they also had a lot of people asking questions as well,
but it was difficult when people couldn't visit care homes or like,
no, sorry, you're grandma's dying or whatever,
but you can't go visit there because it's COVID,
or literally what you can with face masks maybe,
but that's what got a lot of people when they were told they can't,
even visit their dying family or whatever,
and yet the MPs go and break the rules,
that's the stuff that really got people.
Well, in New York State, the governor had them put known COVID patients into the nursing home.
Yeah.
Yes, the older people are at high risk,
well, let's make certain that they're exposed,
they also get a high exposure.
If the average guy made that kind of suggestion,
he would be considered criminal.
I think we have to make similar here,
or we'll come up with quite.
Well, I'm looking forward to an interesting 2023.
Yes, my, like I was saying,
with conferences back on high-fi shows and things,
beds, you know, it's going to be the year that it's going to be like,
it's going to be more similar to 2019,
I think with some changes here and there,
it's going to be, yeah.
Well, what's going to be interesting
with everything that's coming out of Twitter,
we're going to find out if our government actually works.
Right?
How?
We're going to find out if our government actually works.
Wow, wow, we got stuff going towards that.
Well, there's a lot of Twitter files
are saying that the government,
the department and whatnot was manipulating the 2020 election.
And anyone is also was suppressing conservative views on Twitter.
And that's the president of the government, eh?
Well, I have had me with the British government,
the Russians had influenced a bit with something with elections.
Well, we're not on many platforms.
We're not allowed to question whether there was some interference,
even though there seems to be evidence.
Yeah.
And apparently your big commission took some money,
you'll see me have them with Quattar,
so that's a little bit corrupt as well.
So that's why we've been in the art school recently online,
on the Daily Mail and revenue websites.
Oh, yes.
Some of those European commission regulations
that would have required people to get a license
for every cross-posting on the internet.
I think the man, yeah, that was definitely all of all the government's
fully least little bit corrupt or whatever,
but that's how it is.
Yeah, I have a book that was,
it was an int, I have a book about the internet
that was very interesting.
This guy in America helps convert a lot of organizations
for international standards,
documents into PDF form,
and internally allowed him to put this information up on a server
in America for international access.
But what was interesting is that if you wanted to get these UN documents
from the source in Geneva,
you had to pay an army leg up to the name
because the documents were funding were a slush fund for ISO.
Also, because of the high prices,
every year they would print a ton of these standards documents
and they would sell very few of them,
but the fact that they were being printed by the UN
meant that the printers were making out quite a bit
even if nobody was buying the documents.
Right, so I'll tell you now,
my battery is getting low on here.
I'm on May 7th, apparently,
and on this big laptop,
we have about 5,000 or something.
It'll go, yeah, we're going to have a day, this is from me,
but I'm going to let die,
and then I'll do a break,
and then I'll come back in on the later.
So I reckon I've got around maybe 5, 10 minutes left before that.
So yeah, when it kicks me out later, that's why.
Well, it's been a pleasure talking to you
and having somebody to talk with.
I may take a break here.
Well, I said about 5, 10 minutes, I think,
yeah, so that's fine,
but I reckon they'll pretty much kill
my old purchase time itself off with it's fine.
And then I can recharge it and pay you a little bit of it.
Can pay them a call they can still, or, yeah.
Maybe he's just too busy with his kids or something.
He's not even there.
Oh, they'll keep recording.
I know, but Kevin made phones in there, really.
I expect this will be quite busy in next,
maybe next three, four hours or something,
or I hope so.
So I'll be looking forward to this old wage as well,
overall for a while, yeah.
Well, I've got about seven minutes to my next greetings of...
I think around there, I'm going to probably get kicked off
as if my battery will die in that,
and that's that, but that's fine.
Yeah, well, I'm going to do the next greeting,
and then that's about...
then I'm going to have to take a break.
Yeah.
That's probably critical, yeah.
It's about top and blue.
Yeah, it's just grabbed my food,
and I'm here for the next little while.
Speaking of food.
Well, that just means you're under proper feed line,
super vision.
And I need to make...
Thank you.
This finger in the dike job is not what it's got out to be.
Happy New Year to a small region about Australia,
Adelaide, Broken Hill.
Hello, Geo.
Hey, what's going on?
Time.
I'm just having a bitey.
Oh, OK.
Yeah, we had one here for about 20 years.
It was our first cat combined on the house,
because in the suburbs here, we have a coyote problem.
Yeah, mine's...
It was my wife's catchy pastor,
so I just...
Well, I'm sorry for your loss.
Yeah, it's been...
You still live in alone doing what...
Yeah, yeah.
One of our old Google plus...
Yeah, I'm an older gentleman.
My brother is a long call trucker who doesn't come east
to Pennsylvania.
I got you.
I'll probably be...
Got sick and tired of being a third date.
You know, Georgia would help if you didn't keep putting teddy bears
in people's beds.
That's creeping them out.
Now, now, now.
Now, now.
This is a forest.
Snuck right in here.
I do that.
I'm going to make more probably...
Incriminate you.
Oh, welcome, Sworev,
to our lonely outpost of Ether.
Nice to meet you all.
I just came in here,
because I saw George pimping it out on our telegram group.
May I ask what your tech interests might be?
Yeah, sure.
So, I'm a technical writer.
That's my day job.
I'm also a software maintainer for a Fediverse project
called Funquile.
I...
I sort of Linux enthusiast,
FreeBSD.
Incusiast.
X FreeBSD port maintainer.
Stop doing that,
because I hate packaging software.
Hate it, hate it, hate it.
So, before that,
I was a Windows system administrator in a college.
So, kind of all over the place, really.
Funquile sounds familiar.
What is your product?
So, Funquile is a federated music streaming platform.
Basically, it's a tool you can use.
You can upload your music to it,
stream on different devices.
But you can also publish your music in things called channels,
which allows you to share it like a master on feed
or a pixel-fed feed.
And it uses the activity pub to interact with the sort of wider
fed-of-federated web.
Yeah, so that's where I heard it.
I'm just one of the members of the Linux logcasts.
Yeah.
Since when have you been doing that?
For a few years now,
I was with some of the other dev random
and some of the others back in the day
that are populated in the survivors
who have set up the Linux logcast.
And my interactions with Linux started back in the 80s.
I had an account on the machine at MIT
with the students and scraped together.
And I was on an earlier version of Ethernet called Chaos.
Which, by the way, has been recreated for emulated systems now.
Yes.
I have some interested in the older systems.
That stuff is fascinating, to be honest.
Especially to see where it all started
and how we took it from there, really.
Well, you want some truly interesting reading.
And in Lin Wheeler,
I have a site called garlic.com,
I think, have a lot of posts about IBM
from the early days,
360, 370 days on up.
Did you say garlic.com?
Yes.
They have a lot of postings.
And one of the things that's fascinating
is that IBM Worldwide Network
was not built by IBM management.
It was built by system administrators
hooking systems together
like the old UUCP
because they needed communications.
And it became a company network
because the technicians
who knew how to hook things together
did the hookups.
And then later on,
management was able to use it as a business tool.
Also, a lot of it was running
on the most despised operating system
that IBM produced,
which is the VM 370.
That was despised by IBM internally.
Right.
Why?
Because it wasn't MVS.
Ah, make sense.
It's not the thing I like.
However, MVS could not do anything
except via no end node.
They couldn't handle the work that VM
was doing, including supporting MVS.
That's what kept VM 370 alive
was the fact that it was used
to largely support MVS.
The IBM's
Bitnet network was also bigger
than the Internet for many years
because of IBM's worldwide reach.
Yeah, market dominance, yes.
Well, not so much market.
Well, yes.
But just IBM had more offices
than US had immensely.
So, you know,
something had to hook them up.
Also, they had about cornered the market
on data line encryption systems
because, of course,
IBM wanted to secure its data
going across country boundaries and what.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm just nice to find
because I went to garlic.com
and it's a very bizarre site.
Like, it's obviously for some sort of company.
You have to actually go to garlic.com slash tilled lin
to actually get to the interesting posts.
But they don't, they don't link anywhere on their main site.
It's weird.
Well, it is a resource for a certain group of people
just, just like the
all the computer folklore use network.
Yes.
I was actually, you know,
I've been reading
folklore.org
which is all about the original
by the early days of Apple
and the sort of making of the original Lisa and Macintosh
and somebody's
put the entire site up on Gemini.
They've done a mirror of it
and they've formatted it for Gemini.
So I've been idling away reading that
in my spare time just to kind of read up on it
because it's fascinating stuff.
Just looking at these people talking about
all the stuff they had to do to try
and squeeze an entire system
onto such a small set of resources.
How they had to steal so much
resource from other things.
That sort of thing always
fascinated me.
I remember watching a,
it was like a short documentary
about the making of Crash Bandicoot
on the PlayStation 1,
the original PlayStation 1,
and about how,
when creating that,
they had to,
the developers wanted Crash
to himself to have quite a large polygon count,
even though the rest of the game
had quite limited polygons.
And to do that,
they had to find more memory
because obviously the system memory
was very limited.
So the developers went around
looking at all of the different places
in the system that had memory
and then started taking the memory
allocation away from different parts
of the system to see if it broke it.
And if it didn't break it,
they added it to the Crash Bandicoot model
as a memory resource.
So they just like,
they just stole a bunch of system memory
that was supposed to be allocated elsewhere.
And they didn't really know
what the actual repercussions
of that would be
because Sony never really documented it,
but it worked, you know,
the game played.
So.
Yeah, well,
so much of the,
the,
the,
the,
and in Lin Wheeler's story,
is,
he started out
in the early days
of the first virtual memory,
360s.
Yeah.
And in fact,
the,
the application environment
used by VM370
wherever user had,
basically had its own
little VM machine
or has own little desktop slice
of the machine.
It originally started out
running on the 360 hardware.
And only later did they make it
so that it would only run
on a virtualize.
You would have to have
an underlying hypervisor.
Yeah.
Also,
one of the early uses of
VM370
was to cover up the appalling
memory problems
that MVT and
the early
massive
a 360
and 370 operating,
traditional operating system
pad for memory leaks and whatnot.
With a VM system,
they could cover up a lot of holes
that would show through
if you were running it strictly
on,
on,
on the resources
of the actual hardware.
So,
so VM370 was to cover
the memory leaks
and the memory
in efficiency of
IBM's other operating system.
It's so interesting to me
because,
you know, working in
web development,
you don't really think
all that much about
resources.
Like, computers are,
you know, so powerful nowadays.
And, you know,
with the web,
it's like,
it's not even a real consideration.
This is not,
you know,
this is not me saying
this is the right thing or anything.
But,
you do just sort of end up,
you do just end up,
like creating
ungodly,
large apps
because,
hey,
we didn't need to worry about,
you know,
memory allocation,
the browser takes care
of all that for us.
And,
yeah,
it's no wonder
computers are in the state
they're in today.
So,
I came back,
I come from
CPM and DOS
and stuff like that.
I was beating DOS
around the head
and shoulders to run
applications
that really shouldn't,
especially,
like FreePascal,
which is a,
which is the core of the
Lazarus project,
which basically is open source
Delphi.
But,
I was running that
on a DOS machine
using a
long file name,
driver
and all kinds
of
reading hack
out of a little
preset.
FreePascal.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I,
I've looked at Gemini,
but
I've had so many other
things to deal with
and I haven't
been able to
explore the Gemini capsule,
you know.
Yeah.
It's,
kind of exploded
onto the scene
a few years ago,
didn't it?
And it was,
I actually made a post
on,
on Mastodon,
because we had the recent
boom of
Twitter users coming
to the Fediverse.
And one of the big problems
I saw was that,
you had a lot of people
who were Fediverse,
you know,
users and have been
for a long time,
basically posting a lot
about, you know,
how great the Fediverse is,
and that was all they
posted about.
Like, new people
were coming in from Twitter
and these people
were just telling them,
no, the Fediverse is great,
which is fine,
but this was the problem
we had with Gemini.
Was that Gemini was a really
interesting cool little project.
It was very, very easy to
set up and get working
with and all that.
And, you know,
it fulfills a niche.
Like, it's great
on this rubbish old
thingpad I've got here,
because I just use a nice
text browser
and everything worked perfectly,
because it doesn't have
JavaScript or anything
like that messing
with it.
The problem was,
and the reason I left Gemini
was every single,
like, gem blog I could find,
every single capsule,
was just people posting
about how great Gemini is.
And that just becomes
very boring after a while.
So I came back to it a few
years later,
like when this Twitter
boom happened,
because I,
because I was reminded
of it and I went back to it.
And it does look like things
have started to get a little
bit more settled
and interesting there now.
Like, there are some
really cool project
that actually use
Gemini's advantages
and strengths,
specifically with things like
tofu TLS certificates.
So there's a micro blogging site
on there called Station,
which is like
essentially a master
on for Gemini.
There's a really cool thing
called Astrobotany,
which allows you to raise a plant
by, you know,
basically going in,
watering it every day
for giving a fertilizer,
stuff like that.
It's got some cool little projects
on it.
There are some decent blogs,
some nice web apps
that do some,
some interesting web apps,
some nice,
like applets that do some
interesting stuff.
But yeah,
I was just initially
put off of it
because the entire thing
was just a big sort of
array for Gemini.
Aren't we the best thing ever?
And I was like,
this gets very boring
after a while.
Every single Gem log I've read
has just been about
how Gemini is better
than GoFur and the Web.
So I was worried
for a little bit
that MasterDom was
turning into that.
You know, I was worried
that it was,
it was going to become
another, another thing
where a bunch of people
joined MasterDom
coming from Twitter
and they saw that MasterDom
was just a bunch of people
talking about how
MasterDom was great.
But thankfully,
it's very quickly,
you know,
found it stride.
By the way,
do you know
what killed GoFur?
I didn't know GoFur was dead.
Is it dead?
I mean,
I thought
there's still some
on there.
Fireboxing.
Nope.
GoFur.
Hey,
none of that.
You've got something
to say.
Speak up.
We're, we're,
we've got two ears,
one mouth.
There's a reason for that
bias.
But GoFur was basically
what the Worldwide Web was
before the Worldwide Web.
And it came out of
University of Minnesota
they were using it
for their,
basically to organize
their campus
and various activities.
But some bright
sparks said,
wait a minute,
we've written all this
software.
We should start
charging for it.
And as soon as they,
they attach the
catch register,
there was this thing
that was coming out of
Sir and Co,
the Worldwide Web,
or,
or at least,
a web server.
And there were standards
coming out of
Sir.
And nobody was charging
for nothing.
And you could do all
these fancy tricks
with the images
and what not,
or,
or whatever,
or at least you could do
it safe,
as much as you could
under GoFur,
and maybe more.
And setting up a server
didn't cost you
two cents.
So people
dropped GoFur
like a hot rock
and the Worldwide Web
took over.
Yes.
And look where I got us.
Actually,
GoFur is not dead,
but the
fully legal use of
it is significantly
questionable.
The only problem is
that the university
probably has better
things to do these days
than to try to enforce
a license on their
now-
and now ancient software.
Yeah.
I mean,
I've used GoFur
a little tiny bit,
and it just,
while I understand
that in theory,
it's lighter
and simpler even
than Gemini.
I just don't like the way
it's sort of set up
and laid out.
It feels very like,
it feels very like a
sort of
analog to something
like Plan 9,
because it was a
completely sort of
distributed system
in a way that the Web
never really was.
And, you know,
just like Plan 9,
that's a cool idea
in concept and in theory,
but in practice,
it's annoying.
It's just like,
you know,
the whole thing seems
to be very,
you know,
which is why we're
not running
clear 9 on
a digital stuff.
There are so many
reasons we're not
running Plan 9 on our best
stuff.
But, yeah.
I mean,
I think,
I think, like,
with GoFur
and with Plan 9,
what's nice is,
somebody went and did
that, they made it,
and some really good stuff
came from it,
and we've been able to take
that and put it into other
systems.
You know, things like
UTF-8 came from Plan 9,
and, you know,
some of the
ways to distribute
to computing ideas have
basically become
the cloud, you know,
the cloud is now
a replacement for that.
So, you know,
it wasn't a complete
waste,
but, and I'm sure
we got some ideas
from GoFur
that we've implemented
elsewhere.
Something like
Gemini just feels like a,
I don't know,
I like Gemini in theory,
and I quite like it as a,
sort of, an alternative
for purely text-driven
things,
but, um,
yeah,
I'm not exactly sure
about,
it's sort of
use in the future.
Yeah, it's,
it's very odd.
But,
I'm always excited
to try these things,
and I maintain it.
Actually,
um,
I don't know
that Gemini Universe,
but, um,
I do writing
for my private,
um,
enjoyment,
and something like,
Gemini might be
a good fit
for a mostly,
for,
I write in
plain text,
and I'm
playing
asking,
and something like
Gemini might be great
for that,
or for some
of the
documentation.
Again, I don't know
Gemini,
so I can't really say,
but,
it sounds like
it could,
could be a great option
for pure
documentation,
and,
as you say,
text,
text-based work.
Yeah.
You don't,
where you don't worry
about whether you're
a,
a,
a lot of images
into it,
or a lot of,
you don't need,
uh,
a moving icon
or,
or any of the fancy stuff
that the web has been built
around lately.
Yeah.
For me, actually,
the thing that
Gemini excels at,
is,
is accessibility,
and the reason it excels there
is because of
separation of concerns,
and you're saying about,
like, images,
and stuff like that.
Gemini
is not reservable.
There's a code like
some existing
model,
and you can
know someone else,
which,
you can handle images.
So,
you can put an
image
on your
,
on your server.
And basically,
make a link
to that image
in Gemini.
And,
basically,
using my kind of
detection,
a client,
such as,
ah,
view or if it wants to display it in line. But that's for the client to decide. The server has
nothing to do with it. And you know, that's quite nice. And this also extends to text. The Gemini
text standard is exceedingly simple. It's very similar to Markdown, but it's basically the only,
so each block of text, each paragraph, each line, the three characters preceding the line
determine what that line is, which means you can have header one, header two, header three,
block, quote, code block, link, and bullet list. And that's pretty much it. That's the only
formatting you can do. And again, the client determines how that will be viewed. You can't tell
it how that should look. You can't tell a client, I want this text to be blue, I want this text
to be whatever. And this from an accessibility point is great because if you are somebody with
say vision issues, you can set your clients up to always show block quotes, you know, white text on
a black background in this size font or whatever. And every single Gemini site you go to will do that
because the text is so simple. And I actually think that this is something that, you know, the web
as a platform could really learn from because overriding styles on websites is stupidly difficult.
And often and usually leads to breaking things. And if you talk to like web designers,
very rarely have they actually considered what happens when their design comes into contact with a
an accessibility requirement that is not just they need to be able to use keyboard control,
or they might need to use a screen reader. You know, it's from that perspective, I really like how
Gemini is set up. That simplicity unlocks a lot of scope for improved, you know, for improved sort
of accessibility for different people. Just to say, it sounds ideal for what are going to,
as I said, it's to be a replacement for the old Gofer, which was for documenting a university's
classes, function, whatever, documenting it in a way that is accessible to virtually any
person with regardless of their perception difficulty. I'm saying, if you could
also, if you could force people to write it in Gemini first and then put it on the web.
Yeah, and I know, for example, there are several Gemini to web proxies. I know one was written by
Drew Devalt, who at the time was a big big supporter of Gemini, and basically it allows you to
write your Gem log using Gemini and then proxy it through to a front-facing web server,
and it converts that into very simple HTML, because at the end of the day, all of the stuff that
the Gemini format is rendering is something that HTML can render very easily. So that concept
is already out there, and I think, especially, like you say, if a documentation for bloggers,
it's really useful. And I also quite like the idea, again, Gemini is limited, but things like
videos and images, you can link to them and then have the client decide how they want to do,
then to deal with that, which means if you prefer your client to render those things in line and
actually show them as part of the article, you could choose a client that could do that and then
set it to do that. But if you don't and you don't actually want to load images or videos or whatever,
they just remain links. And for me, that's a much better approach than basically having the site
determined for you. This is how these things are going to render. Well, I got to tell you,
there's another thing where they completely miss the boat. We're dealing with an aging population
part of it. I mean, I'm approaching the magic social security ages.
And even when I wasn't, I have one eye that is, I'm nearsighted and I have one eye that is
that without correction would be legally blind. How many of these websites are built by people with
very sharp eyes on very big screens? And the first thing I have to do when I go to the site is go
up to the zoom and start playing it like a flat machine. So I mean, everything looks wonderfully
beautiful, but if you actually just have to black text on a gray background, which is popular with
some people. And you know, Gemini, Gemini as a discipline is, it feels great if nothing happens.
Yeah. I, you know, I make websites and I purposefully make them as simple as possible
while not sacrificing too much in the way of sort of nice design. So I never used on like normal
websites. I don't use JavaScript. I tend to just use CSS and HTML. And the idea there is that,
you know, in every case, a client should be able to override what you're doing to make it work for
users of assistive technology or just people who prefer different, you know, color schemes and
that kind of thing. I also have vision trouble. So I sort of I'm sensitive to that kind of thing.
But Gemini, like you say, it just makes it so much simpler because as a sort of a standard,
like normal writer, for example, let's say you're just somebody who writes a blog, you can't do
anything to affect the way your website looks, your GemLog looks. The most you can do is, is in,
you know, put images, put some maybe some ASCII art, which again, the client can ignore if it wants to,
because it comes at a preformatted block, you can say, don't show preformatted blocks. You know,
it's the client has so much control there, which to me just feels like the logical way round to do
it. The other thing is because of the way that Gemini kind of works with every single action being
a single request to a server, you get a very, very small footprint and also any advanced actions
that you want to take has to be written server side. So we go back to server side rendering and
server side scripting rather than relying on the client to do all the heavy lifting, which is kind
of the way the web has gone now. It's like, you know, the server gets away with doing very little
and instead the client computer has to get more and more and more powerful to deal with, you know,
all of the stuff that the designer wants to deal with. And I think Gemini, as a protocol,
having that very, very clear separation of concerns of this is what the client has responsible for,
which is the rendering of the content and the sending of requests and dealing with certificates.
And the server is responsible for everything else. It's just a really a very neat and clean,
clear cut way of doing it, which I quite appreciate. So that, in a lot of ways, that's,
that's where Wayland comes into the desktops and twisted the pure, the simple X protocol
into something that makes a pretzel look like a stray date. Yeah.
It's absolutely right. It's it's, yeah, it's this thing of one of the big things that the
solder punk who is the person who designed the Gemini protocol. One of the things they have,
they very strongly pushed against right from the beginning was expansion of the spec. The spec
should not be expandable in any real way because as they pointed out, that was kind of what happened
with the web. The web just kept expanding new specs kept getting added. And we've got to the
point now where, you know, we have this, we have this kind of triopoly of web browsers. You have
Chromium based, you have WebKit based and you have Gecko based. And the amount of resource that
would be required for somebody to come in and create a brand new, you know, a brand new web browser
from scratch that can actually handle all of the different sort of specifications of the web
would be enormous. It would be like an absolutely enormous undertaking. And, you know, if even
Microsoft has backed away from doing it, there's a problem with that. And that just comes from the
fact that the web is infinitely expanding in terms of its scope. And the same thing happened with
X, as you said, like X started as a very simple sort of protocol to render, you know, graphics across
networks and has become this ungodly complicated, extremely powerful hydra of the protocol.
So Gemini has it built in that the spec can't really expand. It just isn't, you know,
expandable in any meaningful sense. If you wanted to change something or add something to the
specification, it would require so much work and so many different sort of sign-offs from people
who have been instructed to say no, but it just probably would never happen. And it's that kind
of beauty and simplicity thing that I quite like about it. And there isn't even, I mean,
Gofer is technically simpler because it doesn't have to deal with things like TLS certificates.
And there's another new approach called and Gemini, which came out called Spartacus, which is
very, very similar to, is it Spartan? Spartacus? Spartan can't remember, but very similar to Gemini
would be exception that it does not require TLS certificates. Everything is just plain text and is
just transmitted without encryption of any kind. Whereas Gemini is very strongly backed by sort of
tofu principle use of TLS certificates. So, take your poison, but I personally quite like
the idea of using certificates for things. I think that as an authentication mechanism,
on the few sites that I've used on Gemini, which use authentication, the TLS certificate
solution has been very elegant. So, you know. Well, I have an, I am planning on using installing
or what have you. So, my stuff is going to be strictly in-house. But I do like the idea of
having some capability of putting in certification locally. But again, I'm going to have to learn
how to generate my own certificates since I'm not planning on anchoring things enough to get
official certificate. Yeah. And the way the Gemini works, like I say, uses tofu. So, trust on
first use. You don't need, a self-signed certificate is considered to be absolutely fine for a Gemini
site. You don't need to go to something like Let's Encrypt and have a CA sign off on it. The idea
is that the client trusts the certificate the first time it connects to the site and then
basically checks against that every time it reconnects. So, if you change a certificate,
then people would see a warning saying you've changed it. But in theory, it's just a sort of
authentication mechanism from that perspective. But self-signed is very much the standard on Gem
logs. Like my Gem log just has a self-signed certificate that I made using OpenSSL on the command line,
just stuck in it folder somewhere. So, you know, you don't have to go through the whole,
you know, request a CA certificate from a certificate authority and that sort of thing,
which is far preferable, in my opinion, because I, for something as simple as what Gemini sort of
is proposing, I'm sort of of the opinion that it's much easier to trust a server that hosts some
content than it is to put my trust into certificate authorities who, you know, let's face it, I don't
know. I don't know if I can trust them, whereas, you know, if I've connected to gemmy.dev and
their content appears to be their content, then, you know, that's as far as the trust need go.
There's no sensitive information being transmitted. I shouldn't need to have the certificate
authority sat in between us that I have to independently vet, you know, trust.
Well, as I said, I'm an old, old internet hand and I was running into,
I have a number of computers and I was looking for a protocol to transfer files between them.
And I'd rather the things be have some level of security, which is to say, I don't want everything
plain text like old-fashioned pure FTP. My solution is that I use it as a HK's and with a S secure copy
or more securely SFTP. I mean, for transferring files, Gemini is not the solution, but things like,
you know, I highly recommend if people are interested in Gemini and something a little bit more
advanced that Gemini can do beyond just, you know, posting text articles, which is obviously
the primary use case. I do highly recommend people taking check out something called station,
which is station.martinru.com on Gemini. It's a, like I say, it's a micro-blogging site. It is a,
sort of a Twitter-like thing, which allows you to post, you know, updates, post comments,
like things, and it uses TLS certificates to do all of this to authenticate you. So when you first
sign up, you put in a username and you provide a TLS certificate to authenticate yourself.
What you can then do is you can set up an additional account password and then when you go to
another computer and generate a new certificate, you can basically pass that certificate to the
server and say, I would like to associate this with my account. You put in your username and
your password and then it associates that certificate to your account. So it's using quite a,
it's actually quite a sort of interesting example of how TLS can be used, TLS certificates can
be used on Gemini to authenticate users across different devices and to, you know, and obviously
using TLS to encrypt the data between the client and the server.
Well, it reminds me of the old PGP. A little bit, yeah. It's slightly less cumbersome because,
again, the client is in control and if you have a modern-day client, like a really good example
of a client, if anybody's interested in trying Gemini and just wants something that will take
care of all this stuff for them, the best one I know of is one called Lagrange because Lagrange
has like a one-click system for creating certificates for you and basically it just backs on to
OpenFSL on the on the on the client, but, you know, you basically just say create me a new certificate,
it does all of that bit for you. So it's alleviating a lot of the barriers that, you know, PGP
add, although I was talking to George and apparently there's a really nice system for using PGP
now called Mail the Loan. So if you're a user of like Web Mail, you know, that's also been
reduced somewhat as a barrier. Yeah, no, no, no, as I've specifically mentioned you because I don't
know much about it. Well, I learned about it at Maz and it's a nice little setup. I ended up
installing it. It works pretty much all of my Gmail works with all the Web Mail, store them locally
as well, but I mean, they're on there and I've sent you stuff sometimes. Yeah, yeah, we tested it
out and it works perfectly. I think when it comes to that kind of encryption, the biggest barrier
has always been the complexity for the average user. So the more tools that we can get that just
take down those walls, the better, frankly. I'm the sort of person, I'm still quite old school,
I still prefer to do things, you know, on a command line, I still prefer to do things using,
you know, just the GPG tools built in, stuff like that. But, you know, if I wanted my dad to use
encryption on email, I just send him a link to mail below, just getting to that.
Well, what I ran into, again, I haven't had a chance to implement any of it, is if I take my old
FTP server and then plug in a SSL certificate, then it has this Gemini sort of security
between, it becomes from FTP, it becomes FTPS, which makes it like HTTPS.
And because I'm not planning on doing it industrially, as long as I can create that certificate
and plug it into my server, it will provide just enough security for the application for my particular
file transfers in-house. Yeah, I mean, SSH is, I think, reasonably secure for most operations
period, frankly, I mean, there's a reason that, you know, we still use it for things like
logging into service securely, logging into things like, you know,
it's a pushing commit to GitHub and that sort of thing. I think it's a pretty good,
let's face it, anything that isn't used in a password is pretty good in my books.
But what I'm saying is, again, I haven't implemented this, this is not SFTP, this is FTPS,
which is FTP over SSL. Yeah. And if I don't have to keep handing out certificates, I mean,
if I don't have to keep handing out, I realize that SSH keys are great for password and is
logged in. But I'm saying, if I can just put a certificate in and then have the FTP server handle
and client handle, handle securing the transfer, that's just enough security. Yeah.
You know, and I'm looking at that and I looked at all of the, I looked at Samba, I looked at
SSH, FS, etc. And I said, for my particular youth with it, you know, just around around the house,
I'd like to, I like FTP, but I don't like the plain text version of it. But if I have SSL in the
way, it's just like jumping from HTTP to HTTPS without having, and, and again, I'm using
user certificates. Heck, this, I've got a youth mumbled that we're using right now has the
user certificate, user made certificate. And after wandering all over the file transfer
universe, I ended up right back at FTP plus SSL. I think just using the SFTP, which is just FTP
inside the SSH wrapper, I think it's more secure and easier to use. That's just my personal opinion.
I use it all day, every day at work. And most of the secure file transfers we do, the vendors we
work with, especially banks, will support FTP with TLS, but they prefer SFTP with key authentication
without passwords. You don't have to use a graphical tool like FileZilla and add the key in
for your connections. So you can always connect with a graphical tool or command line. You can
now an interesting, I don't know if this is current because it was dated six months ago,
FTP, SSHFS, the maintainer is stepped away. So I understand that it was at least for a time in
orphan. I don't know if that's current information, but that's what I was in one of my latest
forays on YouTube that they were saying that the original maintainer is stepped up.
Yeah, it looks like it's been archived. It's interesting, it is. I use it every day. Like I say,
I do use Gemini because I have this incredibly slow thinkpad, which can really only deal with
text-based applications and browsing the web using links is a nightmare because most websites are
terrible. So using Gemini, which is specifically set up to be handled by any kind of client,
by the graphical text-based is vastly superior. The vastly superior way of running the web and
the screenshot I just sent you, that's a person called, and they call them some gemmy.dev,
I don't actually know what their name is, obviously, it's synonymous, but they've created a bunch of
really cool tools for Gemini. So they've got a search engine called Kennedy, a weather service
called Chili Weather, a front-end for Wikipedia on Gemini, NewsWaffle, which is the app I sent
you, which basically allows you to read news from any source you want to, you can just put a
source in and say, if I wanted to get news from the register, I could add it as a, I could say,
enter your favorite news. I put it in https.register.com and it would do its level best to go and make that into
a readable format for Gemini. So there's a bunch of really cool stuff being done on Gemini,
and it's great for people who are using slower machines, or just like I say, who want to be able
to read something like BBC News without having to encounter the absolute trash design that BBC
News has, especially with regards to things such as accessibility. I'm not saying BBC News is the worst,
but it doesn't do its due diligence to make sure it actually reads well. The front screen of
BBC News is a nightmare, you know. I used, I'm going to say in the early 2000s, what computer can I
used to sneak back to high server, or at home, or use kind of their reason, I had to land, I would
browse, they didn't really catch it. We'll all end up going the way of Richard Stolman,
and having a server download the raw HTML for us, and then forwarding it to an email address
that we then just read the HTML in EMAX. That's how it's all going to go, eventually,
if the web will become so unbearable. Hey, I'm mostly using Neo of him at the moment, but
yeah, EMAX is also great, you know. I'm just saying that that's a famous thing is that
Richard Stolman doesn't browse the web using a web browser. He just sends the link to a thing,
I think he sends it. Somebody will send him a link via email. His server will like rip the HTML
out, and he will then just read the HTML code, because he's a very sad man with a lot of time.
Yeah, but we won't go there. Drinking coffee, right?
Speaking of EMAX, actually, since I'm back in the UK temporarily, I have access to my
GNU EMAX manual, but EMAX 26.1, this editor, no. It's built into the editor, there's no reason
to have the book necessarily. I bought it back at, there was a conference in Bristol in the United
Kingdom called FreeNodeLive, and the FSF were there, and this was back when I was like an FSF
associate, like a sort of associate member, and I purchased the book for a stupid amount of money
just to support them. And this was just before the whole thing with Stolman went down.
Yeah, 558 pages to explain how the text editor works.
So, so one of the odd camps you missed. Oh, shut up.
But one of the odd, I've never been to one.
All of them, yeah, all of them. But I've only, was there with the Keith and Luke, and I'll throw him on.
O'Reilly's was there. So I bought this just because it was there in this light reading,
this Linux shell handbook, and he goes, I don't know why the heck you're buying that,
you could just pull up the man command. Yeah, well, I will say there's something nice about
having a book, and there's something in my opinion fairly unpleasant about reading man pages.
I don't know what it is, particularly about man pages. I don't like the way Geroff edit it,
like format things. I think it's ugly and difficult to work out. And also, I do feel that most
people who write software are very bad at writing man pages or documentation in general.
But that's because I'm a technical writer, and I need to convince people that my job is worthwhile.
We won't get into, because this is bright, kind of, but yeah, we won't get into it.
Always validating your job, so it's to try to use the software without your documentation.
Yeah, yeah. It's pretty, when you find a piece of software that someone's documented really well,
it's an absolute joy, honestly. Like, there's nothing better than like being able to run a sort of,
you know, help command or a man commanded actually getting the information you want directly at
your fingertips. That's really useful. I think the biggest thing for me that I'm lacking with
command line tools is I want to see more specific examples of uses. It's fine. It's all fine and
good telling me like, you know, what do all of the flags do? But actually, most of the time,
I have a specific use case, which I think is very common. And I'm just like, I just want you to show
me, you know, what would I type in to get that result? And then you can explain after that,
what do all of the flags do? Open SSL actually is a really good example of this.
If I just want to generate a very basic sort of, you know, key pair for a sort of web server,
just want there to be an example of that. And every website you go to that, you know,
does instructions, just gives you the example first and then tells you. And like, the man page could
do that. You know, there's nothing to say that you couldn't do that in the man page, but, you know,
that's just me and it's me being, you know, barely newbie person, I suppose. You are.
It's true. I don't know why you trust me with our infrastructure.
I've been doing it for many years now. I'm unfortunately, I don't know what's
fit in our entire infrastructure. But, uh, I must, uh, object the EMAX manual does not tell you how
EMAX works as to how to use it. That's true, because there is no set way that EMAX works.
Actually, I have a book here and if I take a few minutes, I may be able to dig it out of my
fast stack of books here about how to build it. It is also now degenerated to something you can
get in PDF online, but I pay cash money for it. It goes through all of the things from keyboards,
from, uh, different memory models, excruciating detail.
Now, if it does not tell you how to write an EMAX in lids, but it tells you why you would use
lids to do it. Does she really like parentheses? Well, as a introductory project, I was
tasked in college with writing Tico in Pascal and our instructor knew what she was doing, which was
deadly. It was deadly because the instructor would hand out, this is today's project is this
little puzzle piece. And we're trying to learn the language and programming structure and deal
with her cryptic descriptions of what we were trying to do. And we were trying to do it on a
cray computer, which is to say we did not have any of the nice features of your average PC,
Borland, Pascal. We weren't lucky if we had a line editor. I think a lot of stuff was, was if you
need to correct it, uh, delete and write over. But the successful people on that project, uh,
use more, more of a Xerox method than an IBM. Right. Because when, when the teacher is two
semesters ahead of you, if you're going to pass this final project, you find somebody whose project
works and then you go in and edit variable name. Yes. As they say, good artists imitate great artists
steel. Seemingly busy watching videos. Busy celebrating Alpane with the families.
Now I remember there was that meme of two programmers talking to each other. One of them says,
bro, I stole your code. And the other one says bro, it wasn't my code. Oh yeah. It's basically
like my very limited experience as a professional programmer, which literally lasted a few months,
I hated working as a programmer. Um, I mostly just stole code off of other people. And then when I
asked them to explain it, they would be like, I don't know, I saw it from someone else. It's like,
it's so true. I don't know if anyone's written a line of code since, so the early 90s. I think
that's when we stopped as a species producing new code. Yeah, I've got to make some coffee.
Before you go, I have a use net group for those of you who are suffering from means system
maintainers. I think all the only use net user in tech. Well, it's not really use net, but I mean,
it is use net, but, but I'm getting it off of Google groups. So I'm, I may be considered
not necessarily kosher, uh, Alts, Siss and men recovery. Okay. It is a, a Siss and men
and recovery, getting over the trauma of system, system, it's a moderated group.
If you remember, if you remember a classic, uh, Siss and men posting the Siss,
this operator from hell, you know, I would say we'll solve your, we'll solve all of your problems
with that file. Just type rf, slash, you know, rf, slash star dot star. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if anybody
reads, uh, in the register, um, a series, a comedy series called B.O.F.H. I highly, highly recommend
if you are somebody who worked in, um, systems that like systems administration or tech support,
it's a very cathartic comedy series, um, about, I'm not, you know, because this is a, a broadcast
thing I won't mention what it stands for, but, um, it's something operator from hell, you can work
out the rest. Um, but it's, it's just a very cathartic one because it's always about this,
operator and his pimply faced youth assistant, uh, who abuse their stupid staff who keep asking
them for stupid things on computers. It's very funny. I'll send you a good example of it.
Right, I'm going to go and get some more coffee, but I shall be back.
I think I'm going to do this thing. Greetings to Japan and six more Tokyo's, you'll
go on time, Dilly. Yes, happy new year.
It's rubbishy instant coffee, but it's coffee nonetheless.
Well, I'm drinking water at the moment for, for as long as possible, because I have a problem
with dehydration, but I, but I have Mountain Dew and Coca-Cola in reserve for later in the
nation. Okay, I mean, what, um, is it sort of morning for you for the moment?
By daylight, it's 10 o'clock, uh, because I've been up most of the night, you know, things
get a little fuzzy. Yeah, well, I mean, by definition, definitions get a little fuzzy. Yeah,
I, my last job I was doing security in a little gatehouse midnight day officially, although
as the company was losing the contractor, throwing it away, actually, we started having those
64 hour weeks where who cares what time it is on back to work. Also, I was taking a lot of
coke and caffeine, uh, now the, the black colored coke, not the white colored. We weren't
having enough money to buy the white colored stuff. But when you're looking at the same stretch of
empty dark road, um, let's see, was the last time I looked at that 15 minutes ago or two hours,
really doesn't make that much difference. The reason I say our company was throwing it away was
that we were paid a magnificent seven or seven, fifty an hour. And the company who was bought
my former employer, we were the highest paid of their, of the crop. And they went to the condos,
we were providing security for and the condo guys would say, could you do X, Y or Z? And they would
say, sorry, no, thank you. We'll see you next month. And after a while, the condo association
decided they could have somebody else tell them. But then again, our condo gate was a stop sign
and a speed bump. So it's not exactly worse yet. Um, when I was there, my final stretch, we were
only doing patrols on weekends. We had one young lady whose wife, whose, whose mother was a,
she was a single mother and her daughter was, shall we say, popular. And she had a double
glare condo. It had the front door on one level and emergency exits to the bedroom level upstairs.
Now for one thing, most of the week, we were supposed to secure the, her, her virtue at about
a hundred yards without a rifle. And also this condo had it on one side of the double driveway
was an area that was not under our security protection. So people could just say that we're
visiting over there and we, we couldn't stop them. This place wasn't well-fensed. Well,
when this young lady's 18th birthday came around, the security team celebrated it almost as much
as she did because you could go to the front door and the parties of interest could be, could be
leaving out over your head at the floor you couldn't see. We were good, but seemed to,
cement floors was, was beyond our compliment. Although it was the kind of place where a lot of
things were more features than, than, uh, effective, you had a fence around the pool. Good. It was
two foot high, which meant that it could stop anyone trying to rescue somebody, but probably
wouldn't stop anybody trying to get in. I did have an interesting conversation with someone
in a state police uniform and a car marked state police. The gentleman said that may I check
on my girlfriend and I did a bit of who's on first. And sure, tell me who it is and I'll give
them a call and you can go up and have coffee with them. Or you can tell me what official police
business you have with that person and, you know, I'll lock up my little gate house and,
and I'll escort you up there and everybody will have fun. What I can't do is let a random police
person drive around our parking lot looking for interesting persons numbers or whatever.
That's what I'm not supposed to do. So you can, you can take one from column A or one from column B,
but column C is locked up. Well, especially since it was rumored that some people on our condo
might be selling pharmaceuticals, not exactly FDA approved. And it was also known that,
one of our people tended to help people with their in, well, let's say this person was in
competition with the state lottery among others. In fact, one day we had a jogger come in
inquiring about something random while this gentleman had had a guess and a trail car enter
the property. The jogger was being my attention while this was happening. So it's pure speculation
that the visitors were, were of interest to the government. And the jogger was a decoy.
I didn't know that, but it was a, we didn't have many joggers come into the property.
Yeah, it's self a long bell. As for Richard said, you know, you may suspect the milk,
if you, you can question whether or not the milk's been watered, especially if you find a
problem. You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio does work.
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