Lonely Cactus

For want of a social aspect to my technology addiction, of late I have been recording video content and placing it on YouTube.  It has been an interesting endeavor, because it involves skills that I heretofore have never trained.  How does one look good on camera?  What does one do with one's hands?  What it the efficient way to record and edit video.  What is the right way to do lighting and audio?  It has been fun so far, largely because the videos I've recorded still look so amateurish.  That I will be able to learn and progress at something new enchants me.

YouTube is an amazing platform, and the result of untold man-years of effort. The voice recognition involved in the automatic closed captioning is impressive.

But as any graybeard GNU-ster will attest, placing you content solely in the hands of a faceless evil corporation like Google is unwise, since I am not their customer.  Their advertisers are their customers, and their users are just free content creators and a source of training data for their AI.  So, in parallel, I've been revisiting the idea of resurrecting my website.

It is a somewhat overwhelming idea for me because there are infinite possibilities.  I could (and should) just do a WordPress instance and call it a day, for that would be efficient, but, I would love to take the opportunity to learn something new.

Over the weekend, I enumerated my many sources of internet content.  So far, I've discovered

• YouTube
• Twitter
• A code blog on Blogger
• A personal website, hosted by a hosting provided, that is never updated
• Another personal website that is just a parked domain right now
• Yet another personal website, on my home PC, that is rarely updated
• A security camera

Over a weekend's pondering, I have decided that I will keep three projects, and that each of these will just be different skins on the same content.

• The true content backend -- not publicly visible -- which will be the source.  Video, images, audio will be stored in their native resolution and formats
• A website.  It will be GNU-friendly.  No weird javascript.  Video will be medium resolution to split the difference quality and download time.  Probably 720p Ogg+Theora+Vorbis.  Audio will be Ogg+Vorbis or MP3.  Images will be JPEG.
• YouTube.
• A gopher server where the 1990s will live on forever.  Video will be shrunk to 352x288 pixel MP4 or CIF-sized 3gp+h.263+AMR_NB.  Audio will be MP3.  Images will be 640x480 GIF.

I will probably end up with a LAMP instance with Python/Django or whatever because hosting VMs like that.

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In my personal archaeology, I also found these projects that are not externally visible or not working

• An instance of the never-completed telnet PupperBBS, which has no content
• A real-time chat service called Jozabad
• A shoutcast/icecast server that has been serving up the same song for who knows how long

In the previous entry, I talked about the ridiculous Gopher project, in which I might try to make a presence for myself in Gopher Space.

So my first though was that I would have a blog and a webgallery over gopher.

The blog entries are a very simple prospect, since they need to be plain text.  I don't really like the block paragraph style, but, I did sketch out a conversion from markdown to troff to text that does some nice formatting.

The directory of the blog entries is a bit more complicated.  I had an idea for a cgi that handled directory structures and indices that are date-based with a parallel directory structure and index that is keyword based.

But anyway, I got stuck on my first step, and fell down a rabbit hole, as per usual.

So I thought to myself, what if I wanted to have comments for my gopher blog?  How would that work?  What technology would I used?  Well, in the original Gopher spec, there is a capacity for a Telnet session.  I thought that I could make a tiny Telnet-based BBS with just enough functionality to let one leave a comment or read comments.

So I went on the internet to find a tiny BBS to examine.  I found just about the simplest BBS one could imagine.  It is called Puppy BBS.
I found it in here: http://cd.textfiles.com/simtel/simtel20/MSDOS/FIDO/.index.html

So there this California-based guy named Tom Jennings who does a lot of stuff in the intersection between tech and art. Once upon a time he was a driving force behind FidoNet, which was a pre-internet community of dial-up BBSs. He's done many cool things since FidoNet.

Check out his cool art at http://www.sensitiveresearch.com/

I guess Tom wrote PuppyBBS as a reaction to how complicated BBSs had become back in the late 1980s.

So I thought, hey, does this thing still build and run? Well, not exactly. First off, it uses a MS-DOS C library that handles serial comms, which, of course, doesn't work on Microsoft Windows 10 or on Linux. And even if that library did still exist, I couldn't try it even if I wanted to. I mean, if I wanted to try it I would need two landlines and two dial-up modems so I could call myself. I do have a dial-up modem in a box in the garage, but, I'm not going to get another landline for this nonsense.

Anyway, I e-mailed Tom and asked if I could hack it up and post it on Github, and he said okay. And so this is what this is PuppyBBS.

Puppy BBS has four functions:

• write messages
• read messages
• upload files
• download files

From there, I started writing a Telnet-based BBS, which PupperBBS.  And that went pretty well.  It took very little time to get the message reading and writing running.  I was on a roll, so I decided that I would quickly tackle the other two functions that PuppyBBS had: uploading and downloading files.  And that was where it all got complicated.

PuppyBBS used XModem for file transfer, because it was the 80's and that was what people did.  But I thought ZModem, which was faster and more reliable, would be the way to go.  So, I thought I'd just link a zmodem library to the BBS and I'd be ready to go.

But, I couldn't find a zmodem library that was ready to go.  All zmodem code seems to be derived for lrzsz, so I downloaded the code from lrzsz and made it into a library.  To do that, I had to understand the code, so I tried to read it.  That code is so very 1980s.  It is terrible, so I had to fix it.

(Let the record show that by "terrible" I mean terrible from a reader's point of view.  It was written with so much global state and no indication of which procedures modify that state.  There is no isolation, no separation of concerns.  As a practical matter, it works great.)

And that led to a full week of untangling it all, which is what became the libzmodem library.  Now my libzmodem isn't really much more readable than the original code, but, at least it makes more sense to me.

Great, now I linked libzmodem to PupperBBS to add some ZModem send and receive functionality.  Now to test it.  I set up PupperBBS.  I telnetted in to the system, got to the BBS, and tried to upload and download some files.  It became apparent that for ZModem to work, the telnet program itself has to have some parnership with rz and sz, launching one or the other as appropriate.

Since this had to have worked in the past, some internet searches led me to zssh on sourceforge  . zssh has a telnet program that has a built-in zmodem send and receive functionality.  Unfortunately, it wasn't packaged on Fedora didn't compile out of the box, so I started trying to understand it and fix it.

So, anyway to summarize:

1. Let's do a Gopher blog!
2. How do you do comments?
3. Telnet works on Gopher!
4. Let's make a BBS
5. BBS's do Zmodem
6. Let's make a ZModem library
7. Let's make a Telnet client that does ZModem.

And this is why I never finish anything.

My primary New Year's Resolution for 2018 is to start no new projects, and to only finish old ones.  In looking over my repos  -- more aptly titled the graveyard of 1,000 Saturdays -- I have excavated a couple of projects from the earth.

I'm starting, for now, with what is one of the most ridiculous of all possible projects: a gopher-protocol blog.  Do you remember gopher?  It was a protocol and a network ecosystem that existed just before HTTP took over the world.  I presented the world as directories that contained files, and users could poke around and look at those files to their heart's content.

There is a reason that I'm nostalgic for those days, and it lies primarily in how all of the world of HTTP and the world of iPhone and Android applications are really data-mining spy operations.  The gopher protocol is too primitive to allow the wholesale data mining operations that the modern web has become.  I has no client side scripting and cookies.  And because the world of gopher is so strange and hard to reach, there is a bit of a pioneer mindset among aficionados


So yeah, gopher.  A big directory of files of the types on the following list.  Take a look at this table of filetypes that Gopher handles natively.

Itemtype	Content
0	Text file
1	Directory
5	PC binary
6	UNIX uuencoded file
8	Telnet Session
9	Binary File
g	GIF image
s	Sound
I	Image (other than GIF)
0	Text file

Pretty old school, eh?  Just feel the power of the 1990s.

There are a lot of people running blogs in Gopher.  Really they just are directories of plain text files, ordered by date.  It is very pure, but, slightly boring.  So I looked at that list and asked myself if I could create a modern (lol) Gopher blog engine.

You can, of course, write servers that push out dynamic-generated content, but the clients only receive these static files.  Do you remember back when Perl5 was the way one would write CGI scripts that created "dynamic" HTML?  You can to the same thing here: make CGI scripts that create text files or GIF images.

In my conception, a modern gopher weblog engine would have text files of blog entries, a gallery of GIFs, and a commenting system.  Lacking any other gopher available method, the commenting system would be a Telnet session.

So I have picked up a couple of old ideas: a weblog software with a Gopher interface, a web gallery with a Gopher interface, and a tiny Telnet BBS where people can leave comments.  I've (re)started with the BBS, because it is the most ridiculous.

My New Year's Resolution for 2018 is to start no new projects.  For 2018, I will only finish my many, many uncompleted projects.

I've started up with one of my most pointless coding projects: a telnet BBS.  Writing a BBS in the late 1980's and early 1990's was something of a rite of passage.  Much like writing your own blog software was in the late 1990's and 2000's.

But going back to the idea of finishing things, I've given myself some additional constraints.

• Write as little code as possible.
• Use common libraries and components sensibly and liberally.
• Bend my concept to the strengths and constraints created by the libraries and components, instead of wrangling them into matching my vision.

This ends up being very hard to do.  To be specific, it is very difficult to quash my ego and perfectionism; that perfectionism is why my repo has two dozens projects, of which only three are functional.

One of the forces that pushes me to write my own code, instead of using other people's code, is that reading and understanding other people's code and documentation is hard and it doesn't feel like an accomplishment.  To properly use another library, one really does need to put in the work of reading the docs and understanding their logic, which is deeply unsatisfying.

Will 2018 be the year I recover from Incompletion Syndrome?  Time will tell.