The EFF just published an article on the rise and fall of Gopher on
their Deeplinks blog.
"Gopher: When Adversarial Interoperability Burrowed Under the
Gatekeepers' Fortresses"
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/gopher-when-adversarial-interoperabil…
I thought it might be of interest to people here.
--
Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael(a)kjorling.se
“Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?”
Migration to COFF, methinks
On 30/01/2021 18:20, John Cowan wrote:
> Those were just examples. The hard part is parsing schemas,
> especially if you're writing in C and don't know about yacc and lex.Â
> That code tends to be horribly buggy.
True but tools such as the commercial ASN.1 -> C translators are fairly
good and even asn1c has come a long way in the past few decades.
N.
>
> But unless you need to support PER (which outright requires the
> schema) or unless you are trying to map ASN.1 compound objects to C
> structs or the equivalent, you can just process the whole thing in the
> same way you would JSON, except that it's binary and there are more
> types. Easy-peasy, especially in a dynamically typed language.
>
> Once there was a person on the xml-dev mailing list who kept repeating
> himself, insisting on the superiority of ASN.1 to XML. Finally I told
> him privately that his emails could be encoded in PER by using 0x01 to
> represent him (as the value of the author field) and allowing the
> recipients to reconstruct the message from that! He took it in good part.
>
>
>
> John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan
> <http://vrici.lojban.org/%7Ecowan> cowan(a)ccil.org <mailto:cowan@ccil.org>
> Don't be so humble. You're not that great.
> --Golda Meir
>
>
> On Fri, Jan 29, 2021 at 10:52 PM Richard Salz <rich.salz(a)gmail.com
> <mailto:rich.salz@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> PER is not the reason for the hatred of ASN.1, it's more that the
> specs were created by a pay-to-play organization that fought
> against TCP/IP, the specs were not freely available for long
> years, BER was too flexible, and the DER rules were almost too
> hard to get right. Just a terse summary because this is probably
> off-topic for TUHS.
>
Born on this day in 1925, he was a pioneer in human/computer interaction,
and invented the mouse; it wasn't exactly ergonomic, being just a square
box with a button.
-- Dave
Howdy,
Perhaps this is off topic for this list, if so, apologies in advance.
Or perhaps this will be of interest to some who do not trace yet
another mailing list out there :-).
Two days ago I received a notice that bugtraq would be terminated, and
archive shut down on 31st this month. Only then I realized (looking at
the archive also helped a bit in this) that last post to bugtraq
happened in the last days of Feb 2020. After that, eleven months of
nothing, and shutdown notice. It certainly was not because of list
being shunned, because I have seen posters on other lists cc-ing to
bt, yet their posts never went that route (apparently) and I suppose
they were not postponed either. If they were, I would now get an
eleven months worth of it. But no.
Too bad. I liked bt, even if I had not followed every post.
Today, a notice that they would not terminate bt (after second
thought, as they wrote). And a fresh post from yesterday.
But what could possibly explain an almost year long gap? Their
computers changed owners last year, and maybe someone switched the
flip, were fired, nobody switched it on again? Or something else?
Just wondering.
--
Regards,
Tomasz Rola
--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... **
** **
** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola@bigfoot.com **
[moved to COFF]
On Monday, 18 January 2021 at 15:47:48 -0500, Steve Nickolas wrote:
> On Mon, 18 Jan 2021, John Cowan wrote:
>
>> (When I met my future wife I was 21, and she wanted me to grow a beard, so
>> I did. Since then I have occasionally asked cow orkers who have complained
>> about shaving why *they* don't grow beards: the most common answer is "My
>> wife doesn't want me to." *My* wife doesn't believe this story.)
>
> I actually had to shave for a while specifically because of my
> then-girlfriend, so... ;p I can see that.
Early on I made a decision that no woman could make me shave my
beard, and I stuck to it. Not that the beard was more important, but
if she wanted it gone, she was looking at the wrong things.
Greg
--
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>
> When I met my future wife I was 21, and she wanted me to grow a beard, so
> I did. Since then I have occasionally asked coworkers who have complained
> about shaving why *they* don't grow beards: the most common answer is "My
> wife doesn't want me to."
>
Moved to COFF ... while bearded UNIX folks do seem to be a common thread, I
think we are stretching Warren's patience a tad. So ... I have sort of a
different story.
I had shaved in off and on during college and in the first few years I was
working but had grown it back before grad school. I still was not sure I
liked having it, and as I got close to finishing, I mentioned to my
officemates at UCB that I'd shave it when Newton (our advisor) signed my
thesis as a signal to everyone I was done.
So the day I came into the office clean-shaven, Peter Moore looks up and
remarked, 'now I know why you wore one.'
So, I showed up at Masscomp without it and was quickly ostracized as so
many of the SW team had some sort of facial hair, I quickly grew it back.
Roll forward 20ish years and my wife egged me into shaving it off one
summer weekend. Our then 5-year-old daughter cried -- she wanted her
Daddy back. I've had it ever since.
That said, 20 years later she and her mother both claim I would look
younger if I shaved it. But at this point, I kinda like not having to
shave my neck and lower chin every day if I don't want to; so I have
ignored them.
Redirecting to COFF. COBOL has really nothing to do with Unix.
On Thursday, 7 January 2021 at 20:25:56 -0500, Nemo Nusquam wrote:
> On 01/07/21 17:56, Stuart Remphrey wrote (in part):
>>> Dave, who's kept his COBOL knowledge a secret in every job
>>
>> Indeed! [...]; but especially COBOL: apart from everything else, too
>> much like writing a novel to get anything done.
>
> As long as we are bashing COBOL, I recall that someone -- name forgotten
> -- wrote a parody that contained statements such as "Verily, let the
> noble variable N be assigned the value known as one".
Heh. In 1973 I was once required to abandon assembler, the language
of Real Programmers, and write a program in COBOL (in fact, a database
front end to COBOL). I took revenge in the label names. From
http://www.lemis.com/grog/src/GOPU
INVOKE SCHEMA KVDMS COPYING COMMON ALL
RECORD COMMON DELIVERY-AREA IS PUFFER
OVERLAY PUFFER WITH ALL
ERROR RECOVERY IS HELL
ROLLBACK IS IMPOSSIBLE.
...
MAKE-GOPU. IF ERROR-STATUS IS NOT EQUAL TO '000307', GO TO
HELL.
Admire that manifest constant.
And yes, this program went into production.
Greg
--
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