philwilson.org

I’ve been really interested in Gemini space for about a year now, having read the protocol and used a few web proxies to explore Gemini space. 

I finally gone whole hog and downloaded a Gemini browser, Lagrange on my home computer in order to explore Gemini space better, faster and using the experience the actual Gemini users get. (Kudos to Lagrange for being a browser written in C which actually compiled first time when I wanted to make a small change!)

Gemini has been great!  

It’s incredible to find all these people publishing content on the internet which is totally invisible to the web. It’s been said many times before but it really does feel like the early days of blogging, where people are exploring the new formats, new types of engagement and ways of browsing, editing, uploading and exploring each other’s content.

The limitations of the format (no styles!) means there are some really interesting pieces of functionality in the client, like auto-selecting a colour palette based on the domain name, or adding in-page references or tables of contents as part of the native browser, rather than through a plugin. This works especially well in Gemini because there is no server-side layout to consider, so the browser is free to use the full width of its window to provide affordances in a consistent way across multiple sites.

Another of the really interesting aspects is Titan. This is an extension to the Gemini protocol which allows for editing and uploading of content in Gemini space, in a way much more similar to the original envisioning of the read/write web by Tim Berners-Lee back in the 90s. A good example of this is through using the Phoebe wiki software.

And so the question remains what best to do to join in with this fun?

Well, it turns out that it’s absolutely trivial to run a Gemini server on a Raspberry Pi, of which I have many in a box, and so I chose agate (download binary, execute binary), created some pages, added some firewall rules and lo! up and running!

So, plenty of playing to do now and to see if I can use some conversion tools (and editing discipline) to multi post both to here and its Gemini equivalent. Exciting!

I had to write some PHP to tell me when to put out my bins because my council doesn’t follow their own rules for collections.

Every week my council organises the collection of our 5 bins – but there is a pattern to how they are collected.

This is a pretty simple pattern, with 3 of the bins going out every week and the two largest (general waste and garden waste) alternating each week.

Except that it’s not. 

What actually happens is that for the first three months the garden waste is collected in the first week and then for the second three months the black bins are collected first, and so on. Mostly this works out fine and it looks like the collections simply alternate each week. But August 2023 (which is in the middle of the third quarter of the year) had 5 weeks, meaning there should have been two weeks in a row where the general waste was not collected, and the garden waste was collected. This did not happen.

This means that the document they provide residents with dates of collections is now wrong. The PDF with this info is also wrong. The way to find out what’s being collected is to use their website. The website does everything using ajax and does not push state to the URL, and so the page with your individual information on it is not bookmarkable. This is annoying.

Luckily, watching the network requests revealed a very simple JSON file that covers the bin collection timing of my area and thus I could extract it trivially to provide the useful service that neither the council leaflet nor website provide.

We have a few large projects on at work to replace key legacy systems and are discussing how to do that.

Most of the discussions so far have tended to end up in a position where an incremental piece of delivery of the large overall system has been rejected because we know it will require rework later.

In this case, knowing about the rework is good!

For large projects which do not plan to deliver in an incremental way, the total amount of work required is unknown. It is in our interests to make as much of that work as known as possible as early as possible, but if a large system does not go into production until is fully complete, then the amount of bugs and rework to be done are both a) unknown in advance and b) time-critical. This is the worst of all worlds.

Far better is to incrementally deliver over an up-front longer timescale (you’re going to have a longer timescale than your big bang delivery plan accommodates anyway, you can just choose to ignore that fact by drawing a gantt chart of how many days a task 2 years from now will take) and know that what you’re delivering actually works, and that reworking it will be a time-bounded effort because you will have both the experience of doing the delivery and evidence of real-world usage and behaviours of your system.

A few years ago I read Ivanhoe and, as intended, ended up suitably grumpy at the French and felt sorry for the Saxons.

Last weekend some roadworks forced me to drive through Cricklade for the first time. Cricklade was founded in 878 by the Saxons, and its church is dedicated to Samson of Dol, one of the Seven Founder Saints of Brittany.

One of the other notable British missionaries to Brittany was Gildas, who died in about 570, and who wrote the frankly wonderful De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (“On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain”) – an excoriation of the kings and priests who failed to stand up to the Saxons when they invaded and allowed the country to fall into what he considered ruin when the culture of Sub-Roman Britain was overthrown. The following is from a 19th century translation:

>KINGS Britain has, but they are as her tyrants: she has judges, but they are ungodly men: engaged in frequent plunder and disturbance, but of harmless men: avenging and defending, yea for the benefit of criminals and robbers. They have numerous wives, though harlots and adulterous women: they swear but by way of forswearing, making vows yet almost immediately use falsehood. They make wars, but the wars they undertake are civil and unjust ones. They certainly pursue thieves industriously throughout the country, whilst those thieves who sit with them at table, they not only esteem but even remunerate.

I keep thinking about how genuinely upset GIldas must have been to have written these screeds against the immorality of the country’s leaders. I guess nothing really changes.