gopher://movq.de/1/phlog movq 2026-09-27T07:43:10+00:00 2026-09-27T07:42:50+00:00 tag:movq.de,2026-09-27:phlog/probably-missed-roophloch-2026 2026-09-27 -- Probably missed ROOPHLOCH 2026 ============================================ September 2026 was one of the most turbulent months ever in my life. I just didn't get a chance to participate in ROOPHLOCH: gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~solderpunk/phlog/announcing-roophloch-2026.txt I know there are some days left. Maybe I'll come up with something, but it's unlikely. Let's hope next year will be better. :-) 2026-09-26T14:01:18+00:00 tag:movq.de,2026-09-26:phlog/the-asymmetry-of-todays-web 2026-09-26 -- The asymmetry of today's web ========================================== So I have this blog. I write articles and post them there. About once or twice a year, someone sends me an email with a comment or a question. Maybe less. This number has dropped over the years. And that's it. Except sometimes, there's like two or three people a week. That's when I check the server's logs and notice that there have been hundreds of people reading my stuff. (In raw numbers, it's tens of thou- sands of hits, but literally 90-99% of them are bots, crawlers, bull- shit.) This has been going on for a while and I now regularly check the logs. And it turns out, that blog is much more "popular" than I thought. Only thing is, hardly anyone ever engages with me. At least not *di- rectly*. It's pages like HackerNews or Lobsters or Reddit or bloody Facebook where my stuff gets posted. Recently, people started posting links to my blog on Mastodon as well. And they *do* engage, just not with me. Everybody just posts comments on whatever platform they found the link. Often enough, they even think that I posted them there myself, so they ask follow-up questions that never get answered. This whole system is so skewed and asymmetrical. On the one hand, it feels like a solitary activity that nobody ever cares about. But on the other hand, there's all this stuff going on and I have no idea that it's happening. "Pingbacks" didn't take off. Virtually nobody writes emails anymore. And all these platforms are designed to keep the people on that particular platform -- not to facilitate communication with the original author. But then again ... Let's keep it this way. Getting all these replies (and all that *hate*) directly would be pretty stressful. No, thanks. You do your comments on the orange website. And if you have something *really* important to say, then send an email. :-) Still, I think that we have lost something here. A lot of the stuff that I post on my blog now would have been posted in a forum 20 years ago. And forums were small. So there would have been like 10, 20 people who would read it and maybe reply to me directly. *This* is what I'm miss- ing these days. Small, friendly communities. I don't know where everybody went. (I don't even know where the people ended up that speak my native lan- guage. Everything is English these days, even my blog and this phlog. That alone makes it harder to "connect" with somebody, at least for me.) 2026-02-10T16:16:42+00:00 tag:movq.de,2026-02-10:phlog/the-luminous-dead 2026-02-10 -- "The Luminous Dead" (Caitlin Starling) ==================================================== (Some spoilers ahead.) Oof! This was advertised as SciFi horror, which isn't wrong: The main charac- ter explores a deep cave on an alien planet, but for various reasons -- one of the main ones being that she must not give off any scent and must remain mostly quiet, i.e. her voice must not be audible -- she's in a suit with lots of sensors and gadgets and a *feeding tube*. Without the connection to the main computer, she'd be completely lost. But then there's also the woman on the other end of the comm line, who's supposed to tell her where to go and what to do. Buuuuut is she trust- worthy? ;-) And why is it only *one* person in that control center in- stead of a whole team? What I didn't expect was that it would turn into a romance. I usually don't like that at all, but in this book, it worked really well for me. They're (almost) never in the same room, they only talk over the comm line and a video feed, which makes this thing way more interesting. The weird power imbalance (the suit can be controlled remotely) is eventu- ally overcome to some degree and actual trust is established -- I think. It's certainly not the most healthy relationship, shall we say. But it was great to read. The book comes with a map and that is sorely needed. I mean, it's all caves, so it would be hard to not get lost without a map. Towards the end, there's a lot of paranoia and panic, running low on re- sources. There are quite a few moments of "oh my god, no, please don't". Then again, there aren't that many "scary entities" in the caves (or are there?), so I'd rather classify this as "terror" instead of "horror", if that makes sense. It was one of the best stories I read these past few months, if not the best. I'll certainly have a look at Caitlin Starling's other books. This is a nice interview (only watch this after reading the book): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lui6zspzHts 2025-11-19T18:24:34+00:00 tag:movq.de,2025-11-19:phlog/maybe-more-java 2025-11-19 -- Maybe more Java? ============================== For quite a while now, my "toolchest" has looked like this: - C or Assembler for very low-level tasks. - C with GTK for GUI programs. - Python for "normal" programs or larger scripts. - Shell scripts for glueing other tools together. Rust is very, very slowly creeping in as well, I sometimes use it for "systems programming" or other "low-level-ish" tasks. But I'll be hon- est, Rust is so hard to learn, I always shy away from it and don't use it often enough. Regarding GTK: I loved it during the GTK2 days but now I have to admit that I'm not that much of a fan anymore. It has become a pretty heavy toolkit by now. I've pretty much stopped using it in my own code and this now leaves a gap. I've dabbled a bit with PyQt6. And I've noticed that I'm slowly getting tired of Python's dynamic typing. I find it more comfortable to have a compiler that reliably tells me when types are wrong (or when there are typos), because frankly, I don't think I've ever really made use of dy- namic typing *at runtime* (except for parsing JSON files into dictionar- ies, I guess). My brain doesn't work that way. I want static typing. I want to get all kinds of stuff out of the way before the program even runs. That's just not the case with Python, you always have to test each and every code path just to catch typos (or more serious errors). Some people might say that this is good practice anyway, but I'm not con- vinced -- how many projects really do have 100% test coverage? (I didn't find tools like mypy or Python's type hints to be helpful.) Long story short, I used IBM Java 1.0.1 on OS/2 Warp 4 for Advent of Code in 2024 and that was a surprisingly nice experience. That's an an- cient version, of course. I wasn't new to Java, but I stopped using it while Java 6 was still the most recent version. Java is bad in these regards: - Does not produce native binaries. You always need a JVM. - Memory management is annoying. Having to decide up-front how much RAM my program is going to use is a bit silly. - The code can get rather "wide" because many class names are very long. But on the other hand, these properties are great: - Compiled language, static typing. - Memory safety is not an issue. - Produces small "binaries". - The offical documentation is really good and a pleasure to work with. - It can do proper multithreading (unlike Python). I've already used multithreading extensively during my Java 6 days and it was nice to work with. - OpenJDK is Free Software now. - It appears to be very stable with few surprises and shenanigans, old stuff still works, probably because it's used so much (?) in enter- prise software. And JVM ramp-up times are not an issue anymore. This used to be annoy- ing, but that's a thing of the past. A "java Hello" takes 33 ms on my box. I'm currently toying around with making a little file manager in Java that uses Swing for a GUI. Swing is *not that bad*. I'll also try to catch up with new features that landed in Java. And then we'll see. Maybe I'll get fed up quickly. Maybe not. 2025-11-02T17:13:11+00:00 tag:movq.de,2025-11-02:phlog/workflows-and-file-management 2025-11-02 -- File management and workflows in terminals or GUIs ================================================================ My desktop stopped having icons about 15 years ago. And I stopped using GUI file managers around the same time. It's all terminal-based since then. It's well-known by now that I have a certain affinity for the Windows Explorer of the 95 to 2000 era. Every time I start a Win2k VM, I can't help but think "wow, this was nice". Or maybe I'm just growing tired a bit of my current workflow and setup. PCManFM is surprisingly similar to Windows Explorer and you can even make the Qt version look somewhat similar. I've been playing with this program for the last couple of weeks. It took me a while to realize that it's not really about file manage- ment. It's about the entire workflow. Just using PCManFM every now and then isn't meaningful. I've build so many small things that only make sense in a terminal. I'd have to change everything from terminal-based to GUI-based again. I'd need to have a desktop with icons again, I'd need to have a start menu again. I'd need a Git GUI integration. And so on, and so on. Not only is that a lot of work, it's also less powerful. I think a better way forward is to keep perfecting my terminal worklow. There are rough edges that could need some improvement. As a first step, I polished up some scripts -- some of which I've been using unchanged for over a decade! -- that help with file management. For example, I have a "clipboard" system for the terminal, i.e. I can mark some files for copy/cut and then do the paste operation in some other terminal. And I have "vmv", an interactive version of "mv" that makes use of Vim. Stuff like that. What really isn't great, though, is my very frequent use of "cd $project". I'd like to have something like OS/2's "work folders" -- or whatever they're called in English, I don't know, sorry. The feature goes like this: You can mark a folder as a "work folder" and that makes it a "container" for a "session" of programs. When you open that folder, all the programs open with it. Close it and all the programs close. That means you could make, say, "~/work/C/my-http-server" a work folder and every time you open it, a Vim with the source code opened appears, the documentation for some library opens (because you need to look up stuff often), a terminal opens where you can run tests, and so on. Just *opening* these things would be pretty easy, just make a shell script. *Closing* them all in one go, *remembering their settings* and so on, that would be the hard part. I doubt that I'm going to implement all that. But maybe parts of it. Somehow.