appreciated

An Introduction.

A dis­cus­sion of a va­ri­ety of works that this au­thor ap­pre­ci­ates fol­lows. They are pre­sented here with the hope that they spark some in­ter­est in a prospec­tive reader. This doc­u­ment is writ­ten with the ex­pec­ta­tion that a reader has some ex­pe­ri­ence and in­ter­est in soft­ware de­vel­op­ment.

cat-v.org

cat-v.org in­tro­duced me to the po­ten­tial beauty of a well-written pro­gram. Much of my study of pro­gram­ming and other­wise arts is now ded­i­cated to the pur­suit of that beauty.

The first of mul­ti­ple sec­tions of the site, I found harm­ful.cat-v.org's soft­ware sec­tion. I ini­tially found it cu­ri­ous that sta­ples such as bash or PDF may be con­sid­ered bad or wrong. Near the bot­tom of the in­dex page, it is writ­ten: “At the mo­ment a de­tailed ra­tionale is not pro­vided for most of this, so fig­ur­ing out why some things are con­sid­ered more or less harm­ful than others is left as an ex­er­cise for the reader. Here is a hint: com­plex­i­ty is the bane of all soft­ware, sim­plic­i­ty is the most im­por­tant qual­ity.” De­cid­ing to take upon my­self this cu­ri­ous chal­lenge, I slowly be­came e­d­u­cated upon what it means for a set of soft­ware to be, in a vague and aes­thetic sense, good. Sup­plied in tan­dem with reg­u­lar ex­plo­ration of soft­ware that caught mo­men­tary fancy, the text avail­able pro­vided me some guid­ance.

A later dis­cov­ered sec­tion of the site, quotes.cat-v.org, pro­vided me with philo­soph­i­cal food for thought. Those that have im­pacted me, the per­son, have been re-sourced from their ori­gin, then writ­ten be­low.

• “It is, in fact, noth­ing short of a mir­a­cle that the mod­ern meth­ods of in­struc­tion have not yet en­tirely stran­gled the holy cu­rios­ity of in­quiry; for this del­i­cate lit­tle plant, aside from stim­u­la­tion, stands mainly in need of free­dom; with­out this it goes to wreck and ruin with­out fail. It is a very grave mis­take to think that the en­joy­ment of see­ing and search­ing can be pro­moted by means of co­er­cion and a sense of duty. To the con­trary, I be­lieve that it would be pos­si­ble to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its vo­ra­cious­ness, if it were pos­si­ble, with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to de­vour con­tin­u­ously, even when not hun­gry, espe­cially if the food, handed out un­der such co­er­cion, were to be se­lected ac­cord­ingly.”
  — Al­bert Ein­stein, trans­lated by Paul Arthur Schilpp, Al­bert Ein­stein Philosopher—Sci­en­tist, PDF page 33 and PDF page 35
• “What a mis­for­tune it is that we should thus be com­pelled to let our boys' school­ing in­ter­fere with their ed­u­ca­tion!”
  — Grant Allen, Post-Prandial Phi­los­o­phy, chap­ter XV
• “there is noth­ing as bor­ing as the truth” … “an in­tel­lec­tual is a man who says a sim­ple thing in a dif­fi­cult way; an artist is a man who says a dif­fi­cult thing in a sim­ple way.”
  — Charles Bukowski, Notes of a Dirty Old Man, page 207
• “la inspiración ex­iste, pero tiene que en­con­trarte trabajando”
  in­spi­ra­tion ex­ists, but it has to en­counter you at work
  — Pablo Pi­casso, pub­lished in Tomás R. Vil­las­ante's Las ci­u­dades hablan: iden­ti­dades y movimien­tos so­ciales en seis metrópo­lis lati­noamer­i­canas, página 264
• “I con­clude that there are two ways of con­struct­ing a soft­ware de­sign: One way is to make it so sim­ple that there are ob­vi­ous­ly no de­fi­cien­cies and the other way is to make it so com­pli­cated that there are no ob­vi­ous de­fi­cien­cies.” … “At first I hoped that such a tech­ni­cally un­sound pro­ject would col­lapse but I soon re­al­ized it was doomed to suc­cess. Al­most any­thing in soft­ware can be im­ple­mented, sold, and even used given enough de­ter­mi­na­tion. There is noth­ing a mere sci­en­tist can say that will stand against the flood of a hun­dred mil­lion dol­lars. But there is one qual­ity that can­not be pur­chased in this way – and that is re­li­a­bil­ity. The price of re­li­a­bil­ity is the pur­suit of the ut­most sim­plic­ity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay.”
  — C. A. R. Hoare, The 1980 ACM Tur­ing Award Lec­ture, PDF pages 7 and 8
• “Fools ig­nore com­plex­ity. Prag­ma­tists suf­fer it. Some can avoid it. Ge­niuses re­move it.”
  — Alan Perlis, Epi­grams on Pro­gram­ming, epi­gram 58
• “One of the surest tests is the way in which a poet bor­rows. Im­ma­ture po­ets im­i­tate; ma­ture po­ets steal; bad po­ets de­face what they take, and good po­ets make it into some­thing bet­ter, or at least some­thing dif­fer­ent. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feel­ing which is unique, ut­terly dif­fer­ent than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into some­thing which has no co­he­sion. A good poet will usu­ally bor­row from au­thors re­mote in time, or alien in lan­guage, or di­verse in in­ter­est.”
  — T.S. Eliot, The Sa­cred Wood: Es­says on Poetry and Crit­i­cism, PDF page 138
• “The first prin­ci­ple is that you must not fool your­self – and you are the easi­est per­son to fool. So you have to be very care­ful about that. After you've not fooled your­self, it's easy not to fool other sci­en­tists. You just have to be hon­est in a con­ven­tional way after that.”
  — Richard Feyn­man, 1974 Cal­tech com­mence­ment ad­dress
• “When you're young, you look at tele­vi­sion and think, There's a con­spir­acy. The net­works have con­spired to dumb us down. But when you get a lit­tle older, you re­al­ize that's not true. The net­works are in busi­ness to give peo­ple ex­actly what they want. That's a far more de­press­ing thought. Con­spir­acy is op­ti­mistic! You can shoot the bas­tards! We can have a rev­o­lu­tion! But the net­works are re­ally in busi­ness to give peo­ple what they want. It's the truth.”
  — Steve Jobs, 1996 febru­ary Wired Magazine in­ter­view
• “some peo­ple never go crazy.
  what truly hor­ri­ble lives
  they must lead.”
  — Charles Bukowski, Burn­ing in Water, Drown­ing in Flame, PDF page 192

litcave.rudi.ir

I dis­cov­ered this site some months pre­vi­ous to dis­cov­er­ing cat-v.org. Per­haps I had found it when search­ing for vi im­ple­men­ta­tions, for there was a time dur­ing which I searched for text ed­i­tors for the sake of ex­ploratory en­joy­ment. In any case, the soft­ware de­vel­oped by this site's owner, Ali Gho­lami Rudi, con­tin­u­ally amazes me.

Fore­most, his im­ple­men­ta­tion and par­tial port of Joseph Os­sana and Brian Kernighan's troff is ex­cel­lent. I use it for most doc­u­ments that need be more glo­ri­ous than a UTF-8 text file. This type­set­ting sys­tem en­ables me to cre­ate beau­ti­ful doc­u­ments, and its usage con­tin­u­ally sparks my in­ter­est in font de­sign and data pre­sen­ta­tion. On a tech­ni­cal level:

• Full UTF-8 unicode in­put sup­port.
• 24-bit RGB color ap­pli­ca­ble to any text. See pages 5 and 7 of Neatroff In­tro­duc­tion for usage and other­wise de­tails.
• In ad­di­tion to PostScript fonts, TrueType and OpenType fonts may be used. Whole­some sup­port for OpenType fea­tures is im­ple­mented and ac­ces­si­ble. For usage, see pages 2 and 8 of Neatroff In­tro­duc­tion.
• Space shrink­ing, that which al­lows for more read­able doc­u­ments when used ap­pro­pri­ately. See PDF pages 5 through 6 of Jus­ti­fi­ca­tion in Heir­loom Troff for vi­sual ex­am­ples, and pages 4 and 11 of Neatroff In­tro­duc­tion for usage.
• PostScript meta­data, ti­tle and au­thor and links and book­marks in par­tic­u­lar, may be set. In ad­di­tion, im­ages for­mat­ted as PostScript or PDF may be em­bed­ded, de­pend­ing on which of the two is the in­tended out­put for­mat. See page 6 of Neatroff In­tro­duc­tion and the set of PostScript-specific macros for usage.
• Paragraph-at-once ad­just­ment, that which may be used along with space shrink­ing to im­prove the read­abil­ity of a doc­u­ment. So as to un­der­stand what that means in prac­tice, see PDF pages 7 through 9 of Jus­ti­fi­ca­tion in Heir­loom Troff, and page 7 of Neatroff In­tro­duc­tion for usage.
• Right-to-left text sup­port, with Farsi in par­tic­u­lar be­ing the au­thor's lan­guage of in­ter­est. The au­thor sup­plies a demon­stra­tional doc­u­ment that I yearn to learn to read.

Each of the fea­tures above are use­ful in prac­tice, with an ar­ti­cle of my school work serv­ing as a real ex­am­ple of a doc­u­ment ben­e­fit­ting from the above fea­tures ap­pli­ca­ble to the Latin al­pha­bet.

His C com­piler suite, fea­tur­ing an assem­ber, link­er, stan­dard li­braries, and a com­pil­er, for Linux op­er­at­ing sys­tems run­ning on ei­ther ARM or x86 ar­chi­tec­ture, is both small and largely standard-compli­ant. Ad­mit­tedly, too much of the world's code is de­signed around GNU's com­piler suite for this com­piler suite to act a drop-in re­place­ment in a ma­jor­ity of C pro­jects, how­ever it is in and of it­self very us­able.

Ali Gho­lami Rudi uses Linux, and does not use Xorg. Restrict­ing him­self from con­ven­tional graph­ics sup­port, he de­vel­ops tools that make his predica­ment more pleas­ant. He main­tains a pro­gram that wraps around ex­ist­ing doc­u­ment view­ing pro­grams so as to view PDF and EPUB doc­u­ments within the Linux frame­buffer. He reg­u­larly de­vel­ops a ter­mi­nal em­u­la­tor that al­lows for the usage of TrueType fonts in the Linux frame­buffer. He's come to use vi, and so he main­tains his own vi im­ple­men­ta­tion, that which is small, POSIX portable, and de­signed for UTF-8. His ad­mirable ef­forts often have use­ful and in­ter­est­ing re­sults.

alpinelinux.org

In­trin­si­cally, Linux is a prob­lem­atic and error-prone hodge­podge of con­flict­ing de­signs, even if driven by good in­ten­tions. Linux comes to mind not for be­ing a clean or in­ge­nious Unix clone, but in­stead for be­ing a pop­u­lar and messy op­er­at­ing sys­tem backed by large cor­po­ra­tions.

Dis­dain aside, there are ex­am­ples of good de­sign among the mess, and Alpine Lin­ux is one such ex­am­ple. Im­por­tantly, GNU's soft­ware is largely averted, with de­pen­dence falling upon their li­brary only for the sur­pris­ingly portable binu­tils and GCC, those which a com­pi­la­tion en­vi­ron­ment is often com­prised of, even if POSIX need be brought along with it. The C stan­dard li­brary used is musl, that which is standards-compli­ant, small, and other­wise strives for cor­rect­ness, even when that pur­suit leads to in­com­pat­i­bil­i­ties with GNU's libc. The usual Unix-borne util­i­ties are pro­vided by busy­box. Though busy­box's code is less than glam­orous – see the end­ing min­utes of this pre­sen­ta­tion given by its pre­vi­ous main­tain­er – it is small and ma­ture, and cer­tainly more us­able than the usual se­lec­tion, GNU's core­uti­ls. Alpine Linux's in­stal­la­tion im­ages are gen­er­ally less than 200 MiB in bi­nary size, al­low­ing for RAM boot­ing to be a sane de­fault. The soft­ware pack­ages avail­able in the repos­i­to­ries are nu­mer­ous, and the pack­age man­age­ment soft­ware is ex­pe­di­ent. Though the distribution-specific doc­u­men­ta­tion does have some rough edges, it is ex­ten­sive.

There are mul­ti­ple Linux dis­tri­bu­tions that try to do bet­ter than GNU's libc and core­utils, how­ever Alpine is the only one I've no­ticed to put each of Linux's many pieces to­gether so that the sys­tem works well in prac­tice. In par­tic­u­lar, Alpine Linux is the only Linux dis­tri­bu­tion that does not use glibc that I've been able to wran­gle into run­ning Xorg. The mess of KISS Linux's many split repos­i­to­ries and sparse doc­u­men­ta­tion causes more woes than re­quired of a min­i­mally boot­strapped op­er­at­ing sys­tem. Oa­sis Lin­ux is amaz­ingly am­bi­tious, par­tic­uarly for pre­fer­ring cproc over GCC or clang, yet too un­der­baked to feel use­ful. TinyCore Lin­ux boots to RAM, and its mod­ern in­car­na­tions boast smaller size than any other Linux dis­tri­bu­tion. Un­for­tu­nately, a lack of good doc­u­men­ta­tion averts me from its use, de­spite hav­ing tinkered with it for many hours. The gap be­tween toy and ready prod­uct may be bridged by good doc­u­men­ta­tion. A move away from glibc would be ideal, how­ever sec­ondary to the doc­u­men­ta­tion is­sue. As a side note: I imag­ine glibc is one of the great­est causes of in­crease in bi­nary size from re­lease to re­lease, for it is fa­mously in­fla­tion­ary. What was once 11 MiB – TinyCore Linux 3.0 – is now 21 MiB – TinyCore Linux 13.0.

Linux is messy, and im­prove­ment is ex­tra messy, which has done well to feed De­bian and Red Hat's pop­u­lar­ity; De­bian and Red Hat are ma­ture, and rarely change, and so the same quirks mas­tered years ago con­tin­u­ally ap­ply, for bet­ter and worse. Though there are many dis­tri­bu­tions that try to do bet­ter, and oc­ca­sion­ally do achieve bet­ter­ment, a ma­jor­ity of such dis­tri­bu­tions are gen­er­ally too mal­leable or ob­scure to be re­li­able. Alpine Linux ap­pears to be the only Linux dis­tri­bu­tion in any po­si­tion to upset the fre­quency of use of GNU's C stan­dard li­braries and sys­tem util­i­ties in ac­tual prac­tice, be­ing both well-documented and ma­ture.

bellard.org

I found Fabrice Bel­lard's web site dur­ing the year 2021. I was amazed by how much could be ac­com­plished by some­one both ded­i­cated and cre­ative.

Fabrice Bel­lard started what has be­come the me­dia en­cod­ing soft­ware, ffm­peg. A sub­set of ffm­peg, libav­codec, has be­come a core part of many pieces of soft­ware, with there be­ing a long list of such soft­ware, main­tained by wikipedia con­trib­u­tors. On a per­sonal level, ffm­peg has served as soft­ware for record­ing video, record­ing au­dio, the other­wise en­cod­ing of im­ages and video and au­dio, and in par­tic­u­lar for en­cod­ing an­i­ma­tions from im­ages. If not for it, I doubt the cur­rent ex­is­tence of a suit­able re­place­ment.

Fabrice Bel­lard also started the Linux em­u­la­tion soft­ware, QEMU. QEMU paired with KVM is a go-to when need­ing to em­u­late an op­er­at­ing sys­tem with native-ish per­for­mance. Peo­ple who tinker use it quite a bit, and I imag­ine there are some busi­nesses whose in­fras­truc­ture de­pends upon QEMU.

An en­trant into The In­ter­na­tional Ob­fus­cated C Code Con­test built upon, tiny­cc has be­come a ma­ture C99 com­piler. It is about an order of mag­ni­tude faster than GCC, and pro­duces rea­son­ably op­ti­mal code. C code can be ei­ther com­piled or in­ter­pret­ed, with the in­ter­preter func­tion­al­ity be­ing baked well enough to be ac­tu­ally use­ful dur­ing de­vel­op­ment. When us­ing ei­ther Win­dows AME, Alpine Linux, or OpenBSD, this is my first choice of C com­piler.

Some lesser known how­ever ex­tremely im­pres­sive ex­am­ples of his pro­gram­ming prowess are listed at the in­dex of his site. Some par­tic­u­larly eye-catching ones in­clude

• hard­ware em­u­la­tors that al­low run­ning Linux or Win­dows in-browser via javascript,
• an ex­per­i­men­tal loss­less com­pres­sion mod­el built around neu­ral net­works,
• hav­ing com­puted what was at a time the largest amount of dig­its of PI ev­er, on con­sumer hard­ware,
• in some way that be­fud­dled even the IOCCC judges, a pro­gram to in­flate Lena from it­self, and
• a use­ful software-only sub­set of OpenGL.

other.stanleylieber.com

I found other.stan­leylieber.com after travers­ing web sites re­gard­ing 9front, the fore­most be­ing cat-v.org and 9front.org. I first en­coun­tered it dur­ing the year 2022. This site en­cour­ages the best kind of doom scrolling. Image after im­age, chances are good that one of ev­ery few im­ages strikes in­ter­est. That sort of con­sis­tent qual­ity buys trust, and that trust may be spent in con­tin­ued viewer at­ten­tion. It's a sort of magic that I'd like to cap­ture.

openbsd.org

Hav­ing men­tioned above that Linux is a mess, it feels suit­able to now ex­plain a Unix deriva­tive that is not. OpenBSD split from NetBSD 1.0 in 1995, which in turn was based upon 4.4BSD-Lite, which in turn was based upon twenty-odd years of de­vel­op­ment upon a Unix Ver­sion 6 in­stal­la­tion per­formed at Univer­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley. In the time be­tween 1995 and now, OpenBSD has be­come an op­er­at­ing sys­tem that is stable, se­cure, and ex­cel­lently doc­u­mented. The man­u­als are con­cise with­out er­ring on be­ing terse, the sys­tem de­faults are sane and se­cure, and things do not break often.

Glit­ter­ing gen­er­al­i­ties pre­sented, some real ex­am­ples may pro­vide some va­lid­ity to the claims given. Each pro­gram purpose-written for the dis­tri­bu­tion has a man page writ­ten in a con­sis­tent style, fea­tur­ing English that is ap­pro­pri­ately for­mal, a unique fea­ture among Unix clones. Linux in par­tic­u­lar often fea­tures man pages that are too long to grok and poorly writ­ten – com­monly those writ­ten for GNU's soft­ware – or too lit­tle more than a list of op­tions – most no­tably busy­box. On OpenBSD, for those ex­ter­nal pro­grams that may be in­cluded in an in­stal­la­tion by way of file sets, pack­ages served by the repos­i­to­ries, or the ports tree, all doc­u­men­ta­tion is in­cluded, that much be­ing the best that can be rea­son­ably ex­pected. The pro­gram­mer's doc­u­men­ta­tion – so as to be ex­plicit, this is one such page – is sin­cerely bet­ter writ­ten than any other set I've en­coun­tered.

Op­tions that don't make sense to be en­abled by de­fault are not en­abled by de­fault. Au­dio record­ing is dis­abled, video record­ing is dis­abled, and dae­mons in­stalled are not sud­denly marked to run at boot. This last point may feel ob­vi­ous, how­ever I dis­tinctly re­mem­ber De­bian Linux ex­hibit­ing the op­po­site be­hav­ior. There was a time dur­ing which a younger and less aware ver­sion of my­self had apache start­ing upon each boot of my lap­top PC.

Never has OpenBSD pre­sented me with an is­sue that feels ar­bi­trary. In­stal­la­tion makes sense, post-instal­la­tion makes sense, with wifi setup be­ing par­tic­u­larly well doc­u­ment­ed, and reg­u­lar usage makes sense. Th­ese are vague qual­i­ties that de­scribe gen­eral feel­ings, with those gen­eral feel­ings be­ing my fo­cus. There is a sense of com­fort that eludes any Linux dis­tri­bu­tion I've used. It's a bor­ing com­fort, a stable com­fort, a good one.

POSIX con­for­mance com­pletes this op­er­at­ing sys­tem. It is not a for­got­ten toy, or a promis­ing dream, but a real and main­tained prod­uct, com­pat­i­ble with real pro­grams. A list of some that I value fol­lows.

• tiny­cc is avail­able in the repos­i­to­ries. On the oc­ca­sions dur­ing which tinycc is not suit­able, the com­piler in­cluded with the comp file set, clang, works well, if much slower.
• plan9­port is avail­able in the repos­i­to­ries. sam, acme, and 9term are the main at­trac­tions. I rec­om­mend ex­plic­itly set­ting a bitmap font that suits your pref­er­ence. A per­son­ally per­formed con­ver­sion of Go Reg­u­lar is usu­ally my first choice. There are a va­ri­ety of fonts down­load­able from 9front's git repos­i­to­ry, with the most sim­ple method of down­load be­ing a cur­rent snap­shot of the git repos­i­to­ry. Of 9front's con­ver­sions, I pre­fer De­jaVu Sans. Al­ter­na­tively, sl's var­i­ous con­ver­sions, or the con­ver­sion I per­formed of URW's C059 may be suit­able. P.S.: Con­ver­sion of a scal­able font may be per­formed on Unix us­ing plan9­port's fontsrv, us­ing ei­ther the method de­scribed here or ju­di­cious use of plan9­port's 9p. Also on Unix, Si­grid's ttfs gives per­fect re­sults. Al­ter­na­tively, con­ver­sion may be per­formed by means of ttf2­subf, DRAWTERM, and a net­worked 9front in­stal­la­tion. That last re­quire­ment may be ful­filled by an ac­count with SDF's pub­lic 9front, OpenBSD's vmd – see also wiki.9front.org and arm­eye.github.io, or an in­stal­la­tion of 9front on real hard­ware, the last of which may be dif­fi­cult to sat­isfy as a re­sult of lack­ing hard­ware sup­port.
• cURL is, of course, avail­able in the repos­i­to­ries.
• mutt, the mail client, is avail­able in the repos­i­to­ries.
• NetSurf, a web browser that bal­ances cur­rent web site com­pat­i­bil­ity and re­source usage well, is in the repos­i­to­ries. A prac­ti­cal ma­jor­ity of the HTML and CSS in use to­day are im­ple­mented.
• mμPDF and GhostScript, both of which are par­tic­u­larly use­ful for doc­u­ment con­sump­tion and prepa­ra­tion, are avail­able in the repos­i­to­ries. The prac­ti­cal use of type­set­ting sys­tems, such as the afore­men­tioned neatroff, and the now men­tioned KerTeX and XeTeX, de­pend upon these two pro­grams, or close equiv­a­lents. Al­low me to in­dulge in a tan­gent: us­ing ei­ther of these re­quires dig­i­tal type­faces. For these pur­poses ex­actly, the de­vel­op­ers of mμPDF and Ghostscript, known as Ar­tifex, have worked with URW to pro­duce a pub­lic re­lease of pro­fes­sion­ally pro­duced dig­i­tal clones of pop­u­lar type­faces. Th­ese are suit­able for doc­u­ments and user in­ter­faces alike, serv­ing an im­por­tant role in freely dis­tributed op­er­at­ing sys­tems par­tic­u­larly. They have been spe­cially li­censed to be em­bed­ded in any PostScript or PDF file. Peter Deutsch of Ar­tifex de­scribed the trans­ac­tion as a do­na­tion of com­mod­ity items for the sake of brand ap­pre­ci­a­tion. They are avail­able in sev­eral for­mats – some de­scrip­tions may be found at fonts.github.io's ap­pendix and The XeTeX Com­pan­ion, and some of the OpenType it­er­a­tions pro­vide sup­ple­men­tal glyphs as OpenType fea­tures. There's a lot more out there than these thirty five, and here are some pleas­ant av­enues from which to find more.
  • The LATeX Font Cat­a­logue fea­tures a long list of well-catego­rized type­faces, in a mix of PostScript and OpenType for­mats. Each shown here is dis­tributed freely, and sev­eral con­tain vast char­ac­ter sets de­signed for type­set­ting first and fore­most.
  • The Luxi fonts were de­signed and re­leased by Bigelow and Holmes, of Lu­cida fame, some twenty-odd years ago. The serif type­face in­cluded is de­scribed as “a mod­i­fi­ca­tion of Lu­cida … fit­ted to the same widths as Times Ro­man and with mod­i­fied ser­ifs but keep­ing the x-height of Lu­ci­da”. See PDF page 3 of A short his­tory of the Lu­cida Math fonts, one of B&H's mul­ti­ple good reads to be found on TUGboat. The sans-serif type­face in­cluded in­her­its some of Lu­cida's grace. Much later, in late 2016, Bigelow and Holmes freely re­leased the Go fonts, those which con­tain an ex­ten­sive set of pan-European glyphs, Greek and Cyril­lic in­cluded. Here's a de­scrip­tion of the ra­tionale be­hind these type­faces, ex­cerpted from an in­ter­view with Chuck Bigelow: ‘the most re­cent thing we did – which is not called Lu­cida – for engi­neers at Google who de­vel­oped a pro­gram­ming lan­guage called Go. And one of them, Rob Pike, worked at Bell Labs. And we had li­censed Lu­cida to Bell Labs for a pro­gram­ming lan­guage [sic] called Plan 9, which is ob­scure, but kind of in its cult way, well known. And then they did the Go lan­guage. Just last year, they said, “Look, we have this lan­guage. We dis­tributed it for free. It’s open source soft­ware. Any­body can ex­change it for any rea­son, and copy it, and can even go in and change it.” And we’d never al­lowed that be­fore be­cause we didn’t want peo­ple ar­tis­ti­cally to mess up our de­signs. And we de­fended that even when the big com­pa­nies like Mi­crosoft and Ap­ple wanted to ma­nip­u­late stuff with­out our per­mis­sion. We had to say, “No, you have to have our per­mis­sion. We’ll work with you, but you can’t do it on your own.” But, with Rob Pike there was just some­thing about the pro­posal that we liked. He said, “You know, what do you think? What about it?” We said, “Okay, we can do it.” And we’d done some free fonts, but they weren’t open [the Luxi fonts]. And we took those. And we ad­justed them to the Go for­mat in TrueType be­cause the Go lan­guage, they’d de­vel­oped TrueType ras­ter­iz­ing tools and graph­i­cal tools [see golang.org/x/image/font]. And we set­tled with Go that we would do not just the Ro­man types, or the Latin-based types, but we would add in Greek, and Cyril­lic, and a bunch of sym­bols and graphic char­ac­ters that Mi­crosoft had de­fined. So, in­stead of a font of two hun­dred and fifty char­ac­ters, we had like six hun­dred and sixty char­ac­ters. And we did it in a tremen­dous hurry, al­ways in a hurry. … Whether the type will be­come vastly used, I don’t know. But any­body can use it for web fonts or any­thing. … Early on, we ob­served that pop­u­lar type­faces often had non-Latin ver­sions. Times Ro­man was the first be­cause cus­tomers in other coun­tries would ask for Times Ro­man, but for Greek or for Cyril­lic. And Hel­vetica, when it be­came pop­u­lar, had the same ques­tion. So, we thought we’d re­verse that. Let’s de­sign Greek and Cyril­lic be­fore peo­ple want it be­cause, if it was a mark of suc­cess for a type­face in­cre­men­tally, what if we de­signed them? Maybe it will help them be a suc­cess now.’ For user in­ter­face pur­poses, these type­faces have spoiled this au­thor.
  • Google Fonts, true­type.org, fontli­brary.org, Use & Modi­fy, De­bian's pack­age repos­i­to­ries, and fontain.org fea­ture ag­gre­ga­tions of open-source fonts, those which any per­son is per­mit­ted to both uti­lize and change. Coela­can­th and EB Gara­mond are head-turners, both of which have been de­vel­oped us­ing Fon­tForge. As a par­tially rel­e­vant bonus, some de­sign tips and book rec­om­men­da­tions are of­fered to aspir­ing fontog­ra­phers by fontli­brary.org.
  • The League of Mov­able Type, Open Source Pub­lish­ing, in­de­struc­tible type*, Vel­vetyne Type Foundry, Col­l­lett­tivo, and Arkan­dis are each dig­i­tal type foundries that solely de­sign open-source fonts.
  • I am per­son­ally fond of RW Gara­mond, a col­lab­o­ra­tively de­vel­oped type­face – see gara­mond.org and ctan.org for the lin­eage – rem­i­nis­cent of the ty­po­graphic style of cen­turies past. It has small caps and old-style fig­ures. Be­ing derived from Gara­mond No. 8, as dis­tributed at ghostpdl/pcl/urwfonts, it is li­censed as ac­cord­ing to the terms of the Af­fero Free Public Li­cense, with­out ex­cep­tion. The li­cens­ing is dis­cussed fur­ther on the as­so­ci­ated Wikipedia page, and de­scribed in full at Ar­tifex's web site.
  • FreeFont is a con­tin­u­a­tion of URW's Nim­bus Serif, Nim­bus Sans, and Nim­bus Mono, each re-named FreeSerif, FreeSans, and FreeMono re­spec­tively. A vast char­ac­ter set is sup­plied. Th­ese deriva­tives are li­censed un­der ver­sion of the GNU Public Li­cense, though with an ex­cep­tion so as to per­mit em­bed­ding each type­face in a PDF.
  • Fontshare fea­tures fonts de­signed by the In­dian Type foundry, with all be­ing free for com­mer­cial use. In a sim­i­lar vein, the pro­fes­sional dig­i­tal type foundry Paratype was com­mis­sioned by the Rus­sian Fed­er­a­tion to pro­duce publically-distrib­uted Latin and Cyril­lic type­faces, with PT Serif and PT Sans hav­ing re­sulted. Adobe pub­li­cally re­leased Source Ser­if, Source Sans, and Source Code Pro. Source Serif in par­tic­u­lar is avail­able in a va­ri­ety of op­ti­cal sizes.
  • The Cooper He­witt mu­se­um pro­fes­sion­ally com­mis­sioned a sans-serif type­face by the same name, that which has been pub­li­cally re­leased in source form.
  • Wikipedia's page ded­i­cated to Open-Source Uni­code type­faces and SIL In­ter­na­tional's font list­ing are each use­ful for choos­ing a type­face with sup­port for a wide va­ri­ety of lan­guages. De­jaVu is my go-to when such a type­face is needed.
  • Thatcher Ul­rich's Tuffy is a rare ex­am­ple of a truly pub­lic do­main type­face.
  • Ed­ward Tufte, an ac­com­plished au­thor, has col­lab­o­ra­tively pro­duced “a Bembo-like font for the computer”, that which is ex­plic­itly de­signed with pub­li­ca­tion usage in mind.
  • gluk­fonts and exljbris each of­fer some free type­faces, with down­load­ing be­ing a sin­gu­lar click, rather than a game of hoop jump­ing. Ty­po­der­mic of­fers some por­tions of type­faces – in­clud­ing the often seen and sel­dom used Price­down.
  • The Brill Type­face is ser­iffed, con­tains roughly 6000 pan-European glyphs, and is free for non-commer­cial use.
  • Hana­zono Min­cho is a mono-spaced and ser­iffed type­face, with its claim to fame be­ing its whop­ping 100-thousand-plus char­ac­ter set.
  • Kur­in­to is a col­lec­tion of sev­eral uni­code type­faces, pre­sented in a user-accessible man­ner.
  • Code2000, a share­ware type­face once hosted on a now de­funct web site, sup­ports a wide va­ri­ety of scripts, by means of roughly 50000 glyphs. The sim­i­larly li­censed Ever­son Mono aims to com­pete with Courier in gen­eral use, in­clud­ing roughly 9000 glyphs.
  • A re­vival of an al­most for­got­ten type­face may found in Igino Marini's ren­di­tion of The Fell Types.
  • Bit­steam's Char­ter and Courier 10 Pitch may now be found in TrueType for­mat at the web site of Roland Stroud, writer and physi­cian. Al­ter­na­tively, Bit­stream's Char­ter and Courier may be found in Type 1 for­mat, dis­tributed with Xorg. Bit­stream's ex­ten­sive Cy­ber­bit, re­leased freely for non-commer­i­cal use, may be found at an archive of a now long of­fline NetS­cape FTP server.
  • Fon­tMe­me, Fon­tesk, da­font, Fon­tS­pace, and 1001fonts each fea­ture lists of fonts free for com­mer­cial use. It's a very mixed bag.
• surf, a web browser that acts as a min­i­mal wrap­per around the gi­nor­mous We­bKit, is avail­able in the repos­i­to­ries.
• Fire­fox: it works, so long as there's a gi­ga­byte or so of mem­ory to spare. The builds of Fire­fox dis­tributed in the repos­i­to­ries are in­ten­tion­ally re­stricted to ac­cess­ing ~/Downloads, and fea­ture the Unix func­tion­al­ity of CTRL + A, CTRL + E, CTRL + W, and CTRL + U in text in­put con­texts. This pro­gram is just about nec­es­sary for bank and school in­ter­ac­tions, and for the pop­u­lar meth­ods of so­cial in­ter­ac­tion over an in­ter­net con­nec­tion. Even Ad­vent of Code needs OAuth, which means third-party cook­ies and JavaScript. Privacy-first Fire­fox con­fig­u­ra­tions do ex­ist, but aren't prac­ti­cal for a ma­jor­ity of the use cases in which Fire­fox or a near equiv­a­lent is needed – gmail.com, out­look.com, dis­cord.com, you­runi­ver­sity.edu, your­bank.com and so on. The best that can be done with Fire­fox is gen­er­ally to use Duck­Duck­Go - or Mo­jeek if you're brave – and to in­stall UBlock­O­rig­in to curve the web's vi­sual har­rass­ment. P.S.: The JavaScript-disabling op­tion pro­vided by UBlock­O­ri­gin is par­tic­u­larly use­ful to se­lec­tively en­able for web sites that have a pay­wall. Pay­walls are often en­forced us­ing JavaScript, in which case this fea­ture dis­ables the JavaScript that does the pay­walling. Some of the fre­quenters of irc.oftc.net's #cat-v well de­scribe the sen­ti­ment I share.

  irc.otfc.net, #cat-v: 2023 June 28
  11:40:44 in­voked → i don't feel shame in us­ing fire­fox, it's mostly res­ig­na­tion mixed with dis­gust
  11:43:39 si­grid → it's not re­ally about shame, I use fire­fox too

• ffm­peg, the me­dia con­ver­sion and record­ing and play­back util­ity, is avail­able in the repos­i­to­ries.
• ImageMag­ick, the im­age con­ver­sion, trans­for­ma­tion, and fil­tra­tion util­ity, is avail­able in the repos­i­to­ries.
• git, of course, is avail­able in the repos­i­to­ries.
• dark­httpd, a suit­able HTTP server for lo­cal file trans­fer, is avail­able in the repos­i­to­ries.
• DRAWTERM, an ex­cel­lent pro­gram for graph­i­cal lo­gin to a 9front sys­tem, is avail­able in the repos­i­to­ries.
• neatroff, though unavail­able in the repos­i­to­ries, com­piles and runs with­out has­sle.
• mtPaint, a pro­gram suit­able for dig­i­tal draw­ing and an­i­ma­tion, is avail­able in the repos­i­to­ries.
• pkg_lo­cate, analagous to De­bian's apt-file, greatly sim­pli­fies search­ing for cor­rect header files for source code com­pi­la­tion.
• ir­cII, the most ma­ture main­tained IRC client, is in­cluded in the repos­i­to­ries. So as to un­der­stand the myr­iad of com­mands spe­cific to IRC, the in­for­ma­tion ac­ces­si­ble through this pro­gram's /help com­mand is the best-written doc­u­men­ta­tion I've found. This IRC client is not only ca­pable of DCC file trans­fer, it fea­tures the orig­i­nal im­ple­men­ta­tion. Should the DCC file trans­fer give you trou­ble, as it has done for me, at­tempt us­ing irssi, that which is both ca­pable of DCC file trans­fer and avail­able in the repos­i­to­ries.
• OpenX­com, a source port of X-COM: UFO De­fense, is avail­able in the repos­i­to­ries. A clean copy of the game data may be found in the gog.com re­lease, and then ex­tracted via in­noex­tract, the lat­ter of which is ad­di­tion­ally avail­able in the repos­i­to­ries. This be­ing my first and only ex­tended ven­ture into a strat­egy game, I thor­oughly en­joy it. Some well-produced cov­er­age of this game may be found here.
• st, a rea­son­able ter­mi­nal em­u­la­tor, com­piles with­out has­sle. There are no “Gotcha!” mo­ments to be had here; the same con­fig.h and patches that work on Linux work in this con­text too. Us­ing a graph­i­cal ter­mi­nal em­u­la­tor re­quires a good monospaced type­face. Raph Le­vien's In­con­so­lata is pop­u­lar for good rea­son. Go Mono is an­other per­sonal fa­vorite. Mark Si­mon­son, a pro­fes­sional type de­signer with an im­pres­sive ca­reer, freely re­leased Anony­mous Pro. Adrian Frutiger's OCR-B is a long-held stan­dard in fixed-width text, and this free adap­ta­tion by mul­ti­ple au­thors works well in a ter­mi­nal. Maybe less im­me­di­ately at­trac­tive but un­de­ni­ably uni­ver­sally leg­i­ble is Courier, with its reg­u­larly avail­able de­scen­dants be­ing the purely com­mer­cial it­er­a­tions dis­tributed with Win­dows and MacOS, IBM's of­fi­cial dig­i­ti­za­tion of the orig­i­nal – this one doesn't feel right, FreeMono – rea­son­able, Courier Prime, and Bit­stream's freely dis­tributed Type1 it­er­a­tion – this one's just right. Ty­po­der­mic's fonts free for com­mer­i­cal use in­clude NK57 Monospace, that which comes in a va­ri­ety of weights and widths. Mi­crosoft's Cas­ca­dia Code is an­other suit­able choice, and those with ac­cess to Win­dows Vista or later – or maybe to a copy of Pow­erPoint, or sim­ply Fon­tShop – may use Con­so­las, which is great. Fans of bitmap fonts may be pleased by The Ul­ti­mate Old­school PC Font Pack, that which is com­posed of bitmap fonts ex­tracted from a wide va­ri­ety of decades-old per­sonal com­puter firmware. Some par­tic­u­lar stand-outs for 1920 by 1080 pixel dis­plays in­clude IBM PS/55 re. and Cor­data PPC-400. Spleen 8x16, con­vert­ed by means of bd­f2­subf, has come to be my fixed-width re­place­ment for Pel­lu­cida Mono – see TUGboat, Vol­ume 26, No. 3, and TUGboat, Vol­ume 39, No. 3, and $PLAN9/font/pelm – when us­ing acme. un­scii con­tains even more char­ac­ters. uni­v­ga is an oldie and a goodie. XOrg's misc 10x20 is work­able. ProFont OTB has grown on me.
• vitetris, an im­ple­men­ta­tion of Alexey Pa­jit­nov's Tetris that will run in a usual ter­mi­nal em­u­la­tor, is avail­able in the repos­i­to­ries.
• gtyp­ist, a sin­cerely ben­e­fi­cial ncurses typ­ing tu­tor, is avail­able in the re­posories.
• Flu­idSyn­th, a util­ity for ren­der­ing MIDI data to PCM au­dio, is avail­able in the repos­i­to­ries. So as to use this soft­ware, you will need at least one sound­font. Many com­plete op­tions are listed on the Flu­idSynth wiki, the MuseS­core hand­book, and syn­th­font.com.
• sox, that which is par­tic­u­larly use­ful for mix­ing au­dio, is avail­able in the repos­i­to­ries.
• LMMS, a graph­i­cal pro­gram de­signed for mu­sic pro­duc­tion, is avail­able in the repos­i­to­ries.
• Fon­tForge and the LCDF Typetools each fa­cil­i­tate in­spec­tion and cre­ation of dig­i­tal type­faces. They're both avail­able in the repos­i­to­ries.
• lldb and gdb each may fill the essen­tial role of a de­bug­ger. lldb comes with the dis­tri­bu­tion's comp file set, and gdb is in the repos­i­to­ries.

The pro­grams that come with the dis­tri­bu­tion and are de­vel­oped by the dis­trib­u­tors are ma­ture. ed and sh are each de­signed for hu­man use, as op­posed to busy­box's maimed ed im­ple­men­ta­tion, or De­bian's Almquist Shell. The vi im­ple­men­ta­tion han­dles UTF-8 unicode, while also not tak­ing 20 or more MiB of bi­nary space. This is not the norm on mod­ern Unix; usu­ally, ei­ther the very large Vim or the Unicode-mangling busy­box vi are used. For those who crave emacs, there is an orig­i­nal mi­cro emacs im­ple­men­ta­tion in­cluded with the dis­tri­bu­tion. So as to pre­vent carpal tun­nel caused by re­peated use of CTRL on an ANSI or ISO PC key­board, I rec­om­mend remap­ping CAPS LOCK to the left CTRL key, as doc­u­mented here. For those who have con­tent to host, OpenBSD has its own HTTP server, and its own SSL im­ple­men­ta­tion to match it. OpenBSD has its own sound sys­tem, its own man page pro­grams, its own kernel-resident vir­tual ma­chine soft­ware, and most fa­mously, its own SSH im­ple­men­ta­tion. Not only do these im­ple­men­ta­tions mark past cre­ative ef­fort, for their de­vel­op­ment is on­go­ing. Re­cent re­leases are an­nounced first by mail­ing list, which are then often re-announced on the web. Devel­op­ment is con­sis­tently con­stant.

There was a sin­gle fea­ture that ce­mented my de­ci­sion to stick with OpenBSD. Aside from Xorg's in­stal­la­tion be­ing largely au­to­matic, the touch­pad driver worked. When us­ing De­bian, the de­fault touch­pad driver was … aw­ful. I found a sin­gu­lar al­ter­na­tive driver, that which worked about as aw­fully. De­spite hag­gling with xin­put, it never felt good to use. Months after the fact, I found some magic words which work to bet­ter the be­hav­ior of one of those drivers, Sy­napics: syn­client AccelFactor=0, and for those who like tap-to-click, syn­client TapButton1=1. I suf­fered the same is­sues on Alpine Linux, and have now con­firmed sim­i­lar be­hav­ior on CRUX Linux. And yet, upon in­stalling OpenBSD and then start­ing Xorg, and then mov­ing the mouse, it felt good! There was no chop­pi­ness; the move­ment was smooth. Though there was some mouse ac­cel­er­a­tion I did not like, that was sim­ple enough to dis­able via xin­put, after which the touch­pad be­hav­ior has been per­fect, far bet­ter than any­thing I've found be­fore or since.

OpenBSD pro­vides my best pre­ferred dig­i­tal work en­vi­ron­ments, both on lap­top and desk­top hard­ware. For many months, a 12-or-so year-old lap­top – of this make and mod­el – dual boot­ing be­tween Alpine Linux and OpenBSD by means of GRUB has per­formed grace­fully – they re­ally don't make lap­top key­boards the way they used to! On a desk­top PC, a dual boot be­tween Win­dows AME and OpenBSD by means of rEFInd serves well.

Envisioning Information

I found this book after hav­ing read about its au­thor, Ed­ward Tufte, in the 9front doc­u­men­ta­tion. Hav­ing come to love 9front's text ed­i­tors – sam and acme, I felt in­clined to read some of the in­spi­ra­tional work. Un­der­stand­ing that sam and acme's de­signs were prod­ucts of the 1990s, I was drawn to­wards En­vi­sion­ing In­for­ma­tion, the work that Ed­ward Tufte pub­lished in 1990. I ob­tained a dig­i­tal copy, trans­ferred it to a 2013 iPad, and over the course of some weeks, read.

What I found within the pages con­tin­u­ally earned my at­ten­tion, and then earned my earnest thought. A ma­jor­ity of the pages fea­ture ex­am­ples of ei­ther ex­cel­lent or poor data pre­sen­ta­tion, along with dis­cus­sion and anal­y­sis of the given ex­am­ples. A purely tex­tual ex­cerpt that par­tic­u­larly struck me fol­lows.

What about con­fus­ing clut­ter? In­for­ma­tion over­load? Doesn't data have to be “boiled down” and “simplified”? Th­ese com­mon ques­tions miss the point, for the quan­tity of de­tail is an is­sue com­pletely sep­a­rate from the dif­fi­culty of read­ing. Clut­ter and con­fu­sion are fail­ures of de­sign, not at­tributes of in­for­ma­tion. Often the less com­plex and less sub­tle the line, the more am­bigu­ous and less in­ter­est­ing is the read­ing. Strip­ping the de­tail out of data is a style based on per­sonal pref­er­ence and fash­ion, con­sid­er­a­tions ut­terly in­dif­fer­ent to sub­stan­tive con­tent. … So much for the con­ven­tional, facile, and false equa­tion: sim­ple­ness of data and de­sign = clar­ity of read­ing. Sim­ple­ness is an­other aes­thetic pref­er­ence, not an in­for­ma­tion dis­play strat­egy, not a guide to clar­ity. What we seek in­stead is a rich tex­ture of data, a com­par­a­tive con­text, an un­der­stand­ing of com­plex­ity re­vealed with an econ­omy of means. … But, fi­nally, the deep­est rea­son for dis­plays that por­tray com­plex­ity and in­tri­cacy is that the worlds we seek to un­der­stand are com­plex and in­tri­cate.
— Ed­ward Tufte, En­vi­sion­ing In­for­ma­tion, page 51

After read­ing and thor­oughly en­joy­ing this book, I found my­self try­ing an es­say of his, ti­tled The Cog­ni­tive Style of Pow­er­point: Pitch­ing Out Cor­rupts Within. I found my­self en­amored in a way sim­i­lar to my re­cent ex­pe­ri­ence with En­vi­sion­ing In­for­ma­tion, though fo­cused on a new topic upon which I was also une­d­u­cated. It is here that I came to un­der­stand the value of real para­graphs. A tri­fecta of ex­cerpts fol­lows.

In the re­ports, ev­ery sin­gle text-slide uses bullet-outlines with 4 to 6 levels of hier­ar­chy. Then an­other multi-level list, an­other bu­reau­cracy of bul­lets, starts afresh for a new slide. How is it that each elab­o­rate ar­chi­tec­ture of thought al­ways fits ex­act­ly on one slide? The rigid slide-by-slide hier­ar­chies, in­dif­fer­ent to con­tent, slice and dice the ev­i­dence into ar­bi­trary com­part­ments, pro­duc­ing an anti-narra­tive with choppy con­ti­nu­ity. Medieval in its pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with hier­ar­chi­cal dis­tinc­tions, the Pow­erPoint for­mat sig­nals ev­ery bul­let's sta­tus in 4 or 5 dif­fer­ent si­mul­ta­ne­ous ways: by the order in se­quence, ex­tent of in­dent, size of bul­let, style of bul­let, and size of type as­so­ci­ated with var­i­ous bul­lets. This is a lot of in­se­cure for­mat for a sim­ple engi­neer­ing prob­lem. The for­mat re­flects a com­mon con­cep­tual er­ror in an­a­lytic de­sign: in­for­ma­tion ar­chi­tec­tures mimic the hier­ar­chi­cal struc­ture of large bu­reau­cra­cies pitch­ing the in­for­ma­tion. Con­way's Law again. In their re­port, the Columbia Ac­ci­dent In­ves­ti­ga­tion Board found that the dis­tinc­tive cog­ni­tive style of Pow­erPoint re­in­forced the hier­ar­chi­cal fil­ter­ing and bi­ases of the NASA bu­reau­cracy dur­ing the cru­cial pe­riod when the Columbia was dam­aged but still func­tion­ing … At the same time, lower-level NASA engi­neers were writ­ing about the pos­si­ble dan­gers to the Columbia in sev­eral hun­dred emails, with the Boe­ing re­ports in PP for­mat some­times at­tached. The text of about 90% of these emails sim­ply used sen­tences se­quen­tially ordered into para­graphs; 10% used bul­let lists with 2 or 3 levels. Th­ese engi­neers were able to rea­son about the is­sues with­out em­ploy­ing the baroque hier­ar­chi­cal out­lines of the orig­i­nal PP pitches. Good for them.
— Ed­ward Tufte, The Cog­ni­tive Style of Pow­er­point: Pitch­ing Out Cor­rupts Within, 2nd Edi­tion, page 12

Ger­st­ner's blunt ac­tion shut­ting down the pro­jec­tor sug­gests that there are bet­ter tools for do­ing busi­ness anal­y­sis than read­ing aloud from bul­let lists: “Let's just talk about your busi­ness.” In­deed, Ger­st­ner later asked IBM ex­ec­u­tives to write out their busi­ness strate­gies in long­hand us­ing the pre­sen­ta­tion method­ol­ogy of sen­tences, with sub­jects and pred­i­cates, nouns and verbs, which then com­bine se­quen­tially to form para­graphs, an an­a­lytic tool demon­stra­tively bet­ter than slide­ware bul­let lists. “Let's just talk about your busi­ness” indi­cates a thought­ful ex­change of in­for­ma­tion, a mu­tual in­ter­play be­tween speaker and au­di­ence, rather than a pitch made by a power pointer point­ing to bul­lets. Pow­erPoint is presenter-oriented, not content-oriented, not audience-orient­ed. PP ad­ver­tis­ing is not about con­tent qual­ity, but rather pre­sen­ter ther­apy: “A cure for the pre­sen­ta­tion jit­ters.” “Get your­self or­ga­nized.” “Use the Au­toCon­tent Wizard to fig­ure out what you want to say.”
— Ed­ward Tufte, The Cog­ni­tive Style of Pow­er­point: Pitch­ing Out Cor­rupts Within, 2nd Edi­tion, page 4

At a talk, pa­per hand­outs of a tech­ni­cal re­port ef­fec­tively show text, data graph­ics, im­ages. Printed ma­te­ri­als bring in­for­ma­tion trans­fer rates in pre­sen­ta­tions up to that of ev­ery­day ma­te­rial in news­pa­per sports and fi­nan­cial pages, books, and in­ter­net news sites. An ex­cel­lent pa­per size for pre­sen­ta­tion hand­outs is A3, 30 by 42 cm or about 11 by 17 inches, folded in half to make 4 pages. That one piece of pa­per, the 4-pager, can show im­ages with 1,200 dpi res­o­lu­tion, up to 60,000 char­ac­ters of words and num­bers, de­tailed ta­bles wor­thy of the sports pages, or 1,000 sparkline sta­tis­ti­cal graph­ics show­ing 500,000 num­bers. That one piece of pa­per shows the content-equiva­lent of 50 to 250 typ­i­cal PP slides.
— Ed­ward Tufte, The Cog­ni­tive Style of Pow­er­point: Pitch­ing Out Cor­rupts Within, 2nd Edi­tion, page 30

It is through these para­graphs and others that I came to re­al­ize the inap­pro­pri­acy of deeply heirar­chi­cal lists, that re­al­iza­tion hav­ing prompted me to rewrite this page of ap­pre­ci­a­tions. For the sake of com­par­i­son, a copy of the pre­vi­ous it­er­a­tion, last touched 2023 march 31, is kept.

Advent of Code

Ad­vent of Code has taught me how to use a struct, why and when data struc­tures should be cal­loc'd in­stead of dumped on the stack, how to use free, what “Di­jk­stra's Al­go­rithm” is, and a lot of lit­tle de­tails in-between. Par­tic­i­pat­ing has closed the gap be­tween the­ory and prac­tice, and for that I am very thank­ful. Linked here is a video snip­pet of an even­tual so­lu­tion after three hours of at­tempt.

miscellany

• Ken Thomp­son par­tic­i­pated in a cap­ti­vat­ing in­ter­view by Brian Kernighan.
• Rob Pike ir­reg­u­larly up­dates his blog. Russ Cox reg­u­larly up­dates his series of ar­ti­cles, and oc­ca­sion­ally shares videos of what ex­pert pro­gram­ming looks like. Both he and David Given can be down­right mes­mer­iz­ing to watch while dis­play­ing their prowess and ex­plain­ing their logic.
• Doug McIl­roy con­cep­tu­al­ized Unix pipes. He re­cently gave some fas­ci­nat­ing con­text to Unix's up­bring­ing, fea­tur­ing an ex­ec­u­tive with poor vi­sion and a he­li­copter.
• Some time ago, Rob Pike gave a con­cise overview on where mod­ern com­puter lan­guages fail. More re­cently, he gave a talk on his most re­cent so­lu­tion, Google's Go pro­gram­ming lan­guage. In a sin­gle sen­tence: a healthy blend of sim­plic­ity, con­cur­rency, sta­bil­ity, garbage col­lec­tion, UTF-8, net­worked de­pen­dency man­age­ment, and high-level li­braries, and good tools sur­round­ing. For more than a sen­tence, see his most re­cent overview on where Go fills a niche.
• “Di­jk­stra said that com­put­ing was about con­trol­ling com­plex­ity. And we have failed mis­er­ably.”
  — Joe Arm­strong, The Mess We're In, 43 min­utes and 40 sec­onds
• Posy con­sis­tently pro­duces ar­tis­ti­cally and in­for­ma­tion­ally cap­ti­vat­ing audio-visual spec­ta­cles.
• Sim­plyTrans­late is Google Trans­late with an in­ter­face that feels good to use.
• 2 Ton Dig­i­tal has pro­duced a video show­cas­ing the ben­e­fits that may be gained from ef­fort­ful assem­bly pro­gram­ming in a world full of high-level lan­guages.
• dict.org fea­tures an ag­gre­ga­tion of sev­eral free dic­tionar­ies, that which is very re­spon­sive and with­out any ad­ver­tise­ments. I have writ­ten a script to search for a word via ei­ther st­din or a com­mand line ar­gu­ment, us­ing the ded­i­cated DICT pro­to­col.
• So­maFM fea­tures in­ter­net ra­dio with­out ad­ver­tise­ments. Illi­nois Street Lounge is my go-to.
• ngmi.work has a real sense of style.
• 2bit.neoc­i­ties.org takes an artis­tic lim­i­ta­tion to its lim­its.
• Read­ing The Ele­ments of Ty­po­graphic Style by Robert Bringhurst has pro­vided me with a whole­some in­tro­duc­tion to good ty­pog­ra­phy.
• Brief An­swers to the Big Ques­tions by Stephen Hawk­ing is a won­der­ful method of get­ting the mind to won­der­ing.
• Un­cy­clo­pe­dia is an en­cy­clo­pe­dia with a sense of hu­mor.
• De­vuan is De­bian with­out sys­temd.
• copy.sh/v86 is a full PC hard­ware em­u­la­tor that runs in web browsers that sup­port Web Assem­bly.
• veir.neoc­i­ties.org fea­tures won­der­fully elab­o­rate works of graph­i­cal art.
• fqa.9front.org is the only doc­u­men­ta­tion I've en­coun­tered with a good sense of hu­mor. Thanks, sl.
• tilde.in­sti­tute pro­vides free ac­counts to a network-connected OpenBSD in­stal­la­tion. Along with this, git and ded­i­cated sub-domain ca­pa­ble of serv­ing HTML and run­ning CGI is pro­vided.
• The progress of an in-devel­op­ment role-playing game with ex­cel­lent mu­sic may be found at mu­ru­mart.neocites.org.
• “It's a lit­tle ridicu­lous to have to trick my­self into be­liev­ing in my own work, and even more ridicu­lous that I can be tricked so sim­ply, like a child en­rap­tured at a magic act. But cre­ative out­put of any kind de­pends upon a steady stream of tiny self-delusions – guardrails to keep your­self from veer­ing into a pit of self-doubt and de­spair.”
  — R. E. Haw­ley, Write It in Gara­mond
• “If you aren't sure which way to do some­thing, do it both ways and see which works bet­ter.”
  — John Car­mack, 2002 jan­uary 2 slash­dot.org post
• “DON'T TRY”
  — Charles Bukowski, his grave
• “Matisse does a draw­ing, then he re­copies it. He re­copies it five times, ten times, each time with cleaner lines. He is per­suaded that the last one, the most spare, is the best, the purest, the defini­tive one; and yet, it's usu­ally the first. When it comes to draw­ing, noth­ing is bet­ter than the first sketch.”
  — Pablo Pi­casso, trans­lated by Brassaï, Con­ver­sa­tions with Pi­cas­so, page 66
  Se­cond sys­tem syn­drome ap­plies to more than com­put­ing alone.
• “The pri­mary is­sue with racism is that it Stops. Peo­ple. From. Think­ing. … peo­ple turn off their brains, when they choose to be racist … it's some­thing that a lot of us are guity of at some point in our lives or an­other. Any­body who's ever laughed at a racist joke is guity of it. I can't say I'm not guity of hav­ing turned off my brain at points in my life, and I can't say that I haven't made a silly snicker at a racist joke, whether it's about my race or some­body else's at some point in life, and most peo­ple watch­ing this video that are hon­est with them­selves prob­a­bly … you prob­a­bly didn't go through twenty, or forty, or sixty years alive and never hear a racist joke and laugh, or snicker at one point. … The racist is go­ing to look at the three peo­ple that do fit the stereo­type and say, ‘see, I'm right!’ And that's where this is re­ally f***ing stupid and re­ally f***ing dumb. … The is­sue here is that peo­ple de­cide to just turn off their brain. And here's the real shame­ful s*** when it comes to turn­ing off your brain. Here's the part that re­ally f***in' sucks, is that you start to pro­ject that out into the world, is that you be­lieve your­self. So now you're be­liev­ing your own bull­s***; and by the way, one of the most dan­ger­ous things you can do in the world is to Believe. Your Own. Bull­s***. The most dan­ger­ous s*** that you can do is be­lieve the crap that comes out of your mouth is cor­rect. You should say the stuff that you say, but then I want you to think about it. I want you to think, re­ally hard, about whether what you ac­tu­ally said, is true. Be­fore you just be­lieve it just be­cause you said it. You're gonna say a lot of stuff that's not true.”
  Louis Ross­man, A word on racis­m(and why it's bull­s***)
  When one stops be­liev­ing their own BS, one can stop be­liev­ing any­one else's too.
• “Suc­cess is dan­ger­ous. One be­gins to copy one­self and to copy one­self is more dan­ger­ous than to copy others.”
  — Ac­cord­ing to wik­iquote.org, stated by Pablo Pi­casso in "The Artist, Vol. 93 (1978) p. 5"
• “I can't come back, I don't know how it works … Good­bye, folks!”
  —Oz in The Wizard of Oz 1939 film, 1 hour 35 min­utes 16 sec­onds
• Alice: “Oh no no no … thank you, but–but I just wanted to ask you which way I ought to go.”
  Cheshire Cat: “Well, that de­pends, on where, you want to get to…?”
  Alice: “Well, it re­ally doesn't mat­ter. As long as I c—”
  Cheshire Cat: “Then, it re­ally doesn't mat­ter, which way, you go!”
  — Alice in Won­der­land 1951 film, 39 min­utes 41 sec­onds
• “At the same time that Thomp­son and Ritchie were on their black­board, sketch­ing out a file sys­tem, I was sketch­ing out how to do data pro­cess­ing on this black­board by con­nect­ing to­gether cas­cades of pro­cesses and look­ing for a kind of pre­fix no­ta­tion lan­guage for con­nect­ing pro­cesses to­gether, and fail­ing be­cause it's very easy to say "cat into grep into …", or "who into cat into grep", and so on; it's very easy to say that, and it was clear from the start that that was some­thing you'd like to say. But there are all these side pa­ram­e­ters that these com­mands have; they don't just have in­put and out­put ar­gu­ments, but they have the op­tions, and syn­tac­ti­cally it was not clear how to stick the op­tions into this chain of things writ­ten in pre­fix no­ta­tion, cat of grep of who [i.e. cat(­grep(who …))]. Syn­tac­tic blin­ders: didn't see how to do it. So I had these very pretty pro­grams writ­ten on the black­board in a lan­guage that wasn't strong enough to cope with re­al­ity. So we didn't ac­tu­ally do it. And over a pe­riod from 1970 to 1972, I'd from time to time say, "How about mak­ing some­thing like this?", and I'd put up an­other pro­posal, an­other pro­posal, an­other pro­posal. And one day I came up with a syn­tax for the shell that went along with the pip­ing, and Ken said, "I'm go­ing to do it!" He was tired of hear­ing all this stuff, and that was – you've read about it sev­eral times, I'm sure – that was ab­so­lutely a fab­u­lous day the next day. He said, "I'm go­ing to do it." He didn't do ex­actly what I had pro­posed for the pipe sys­tem call; he in­vented a slightly bet­ter one that fi­nally got changed once more to what we have to­day. He did use my clumsy syn­tax. He put pipes into Unix, he put this no­ta­tion [Here McIl­roy pointed to the board, where he had writ­ten f >g> c] into shell, all in one night. The next morn­ing, we had this—peo­ple came in, and we had—oh, and he also changed a lot of—most of the pro­grams up to that time couldn't take stan­dard in­put, be­cause there wasn't the real need. So they all had file ar­gu­ments; grep had a file ar­gu­ment, and cat had a file ar­gu­ment, and Thomp­son saw that that wasn't go­ing to fit with this scheme of things and he went in and changed all those pro­grams in the same night. I don't know how … And the next morn­ing we had this orgy of one-liners.”
  Doug McIl­roy, The Unix Oral His­tory Pro­ject
• “In­tel­li­gence is pos­i­tively cor­re­lated with be­ing nice to others.”
  — Sal­va­tore San­fil­ippo, a per­sonal site of his
• “I think mod­ern art's al­most to­tal pre-occup­a­tion with sub­jec­tivism has led to an­ar­chy and steril­ity in the arts. The no­tion that re­al­ity ex­ists only in the artist's mind, and that the thing which sim­pler souls had for so long be­lieved to be re­al­ity is only an il­lu­sion, was ini­tially an in­vig­o­rat­ing force, but it even­tu­ally led to a lot of highly orig­i­nal, very per­sonal and ex­tremely un­in­ter­est­ing work. In Cocteau's film Orpheé, the poet asks what he should do. 'As­ton­ish me,' he is told. Very lit­tle of mod­ern art does that – cer­tainly not in the sense that a great work of art can make you won­der how its cre­ation was ac­com­plished by a mere mor­tal.”
  — Stan­ley Kubrick, 1980 in­ter­view with Michel Ci­ment re­gard­ing A Clock­work Orange
• “At first glance opera would seem to make im­pos­si­ble de­mands on the credulity of the spec­ta­tor. It pre­sents us with hu­man be­ings caught up in dra­matic si­t­u­a­tions, who sing to each other in­stead of speak­ing. The rea­son­able ques­tion is (and it was asked most point­edly through­out the his­tory of opera by lit­er­ary men): how can an art form based on so un­nat­u­ral a pro­ceed­ing be con­vinc­ing? The ques­tion ig­nores what must al­ways re­main the fun­da­men­tal aspi­ra­tion of art: not to copy na­ture but to heighten our aware­ness of it. True enough, peo­ple in real life do not sing to each other. Nei­ther do they con­verse in blank verse, as Shake­speare's char­ac­ters do; nor live in rooms of which one wall is con­ve­niently miss­ing so that the au­di­ence may look in. All the arts em­ploy con­ven­tions that are ac­cepted both by the artist and his au­di­ence. The con­ven­tions of opera are more in ev­i­dence than those in po­etry, paint­ing, drama, or film, but they are not dif­fer­ent in kind. Once we have ac­cepted the fact that the car­pet can fly, how sim­ple to be­lieve that it is also ca­pable of car­ry­ing the prince's lug­gage.”
  — Joseph Mach­lis, The En­joy­ment of Mu­sic Fourth Edi­tion, pages 160 through 161
• “In any­thing at all, per­fec­tion is fi­nally at­tained not when there is no longer any­thing to add, but when there is no longer any­thing to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its naked­ness.”
  — An­toine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, page 46
• “At all costs I wanted to avoid what­ever is shape­less, ir­reg­u­lar, ac­ci­den­tal; even in sub­ject mat­ter, I wanted to con­fine my­self within a given frame; I have tried for a con­crete, fi­nite pres­ence. A true rev­e­la­tion, it seems to be, will only emerge from stub­born con­cen­tra­tion on a sin­gle prob­lem. I have noth­ing in com­mon with ex­per­i­men­tal­ists, ad­ven­tur­ers, with those who travel in strange re­gions. The surest, and the quick­est, way for us to arouse the sense of won­der is to stare, unafraid, at a sin­gle ob­ject. Sud­denly – mirac­u­lously – it will look like some­thing we have never seen be­fore.”
  — Ce­sare Pavese, trans­lated by Wil­liam Ar­row­smith; D.S. Carne-Ross, Dia­logues with Leucó, Fore­word
• “Why did not any of the chil­dren in the first group think of this faster method of go­ing across the room? It is sim­ple. They looked at what they were given to use for ma­te­ri­als and, they are like all of us, they wanted to use ev­ery­thing. But they did not need ev­ery­thing. They could do bet­ter with less, in a dif­fer­ent way.”
  — Fred­erik Pohl, The Gold at the Star­bow's End, page 29
• “At­ten­tion is the reader's gift to you. That gift is pre­cious. And fi­nite.” … “Once a reader re­vokes the gift of at­ten­tion, you don't have a reader any­more. Then you be­come a writer only in the nar­row­est sense of the word. Yes, you put words on some pages. But if your reader has dis­ap­peared, what was the point? How is your writ­ing more valu­able than a ran­dom string of char­ac­ters? Like the prover­bial tree falling in the woods, no one's there to no­tice the dif­fer­ence. Un­for­tu­nately, many pro­fes­sional writ­ers adopt a high-risk model of reader at­ten­tion. In­stead of treat­ing reader at­ten­tion as a pre­cious com­mod­ity, they treat it as an un­lim­ited re­source. "I'll take as much at­ten­tion as I need, and if I want more, I'll take that too." Writ­ing as if you have un­lim­ited reader at­ten­tion is pre­sump­tu­ous, be­cause read­ers are not do­ing you a per­sonal fa­vor.” … “I'll even go one bet­ter: I be­lieve that most read­ers are look­ing for rea­sons to stop read­ing. Not be­cause they're ma­li­cious or aloof. They're just be­ing ra­tional. Read­ers have other de­mands on their time. Why would they pay more at­ten­tion than they must? Read­ers are al­ways look­ing for the exit.”
  — Matthew But­t­er­ick, Prac­ti­cal Ty­pog­ra­phy, why does ty­pog­ra­phy mat­ter?
• “The in­put prob­lem is tech­ni­cally the least in­ter­est­ing but per­haps emo­tion­ally the most im­por­tant of the prob­lems of con­vert­ing a sys­tem to an in­ter­na­tional char­ac­ter set.”
  — Rob Pike; Ken Thomp­son, Hello World or Καλημέρα κόσμϵ or こんにちは 世界
• “The func­tion of a kern­ing table is to achieve what per­fect side­bear­ings can­not. A thor­ough check of the kern­ing table there­fore in­volves check­ing all fea­si­ble per­mu­ta­tions of char­ac­ters: 1213141516 … qwqe­qrqtqyquqiqo­qpq … (a(s(d(f(g(h(j(k(l … )a)s)d)f)g … -1-2-3-4-5 … TqTwTeTrTtTyTuTiToTp … and so on. This will take sev­eral hours for a stan­dard ISO font. For a full pan-European font, it will take sev­eral days.”
  — Robert Bringhurst, The Ele­ments of Ty­po­graphic Style Ver­sion 3.0, page 203
• “Data struc­tures in com­puter science needn't be ho­mo­ge­neous, and al­go­rithms can in­volve many dif­fer­ent kinds of steps. Some­times that is a weak­ness of com­puter sci­en­tists, be­cause we don't try as hard as we should to find uni­for­mity; but some­times it is a strength be­cause we can deal flu­ently with con­cepts that are in­her­ently non-uniform.”
  — Don­ald Knuth, Al­go­rith­mic Think­ing and Math­e­mat­i­cal Think­ing, PDF page 13
• “UTF-8 was de­signed, in front of my eyes, on a place­mat in a New Jersey diner one night in Septem­ber or so 1992.”
  — Rob Pike, UTF-8 His­to­ry
• “Now I have come to the cross­roads in my life. I al­ways knew what the right path was. Without ex­cep­tion, I knew. But I never took it. You know why? It was too. Damned. Hard.”
  — The Colonel, ex­cep­tion­ally played by Al Pa­cino, 1992 film Scent of a Wo­man, The De­ci­sion
• “I can make my­self happy, then I should be able to do the same for some­body else.”
  — Slick Rick in 2010 febru­ary 7 in­ter­view with In­som­niac Magazine
• “I'm tired of us­ing vi.”
  — Bill Joy, 1984 au­gust in­ter­view with Unix Re­view magazine
• “I'm pretty sure the con­cept of a hid­den file was an un­in­tended con­se­quence. It was cer­tainly a mis­take. How many bugs and wasted CPU cy­cles and in­stances of hu­man frus­tra­tion (not to men­tion bad de­sign) have re­sulted from that one small short­cut about 40 years ago? Keep that in mind next time you want to cut a corner in your code.”
  — Rob Pike, 2012 febru­ary 8 plus.google.com post
• “Bor­ing damned peo­ple. All over the earth. Pro­pogat­ing more bor­ing damned peo­ple. What a hor­ror show. The earth swarmed with them.”
  — Charles Bukowski, Pulp, page 181
• “Ar­gu­ing that you don't care about the right to pri­vacy be­cause you have noth­ing to hide is no dif­fer­ent than say­ing you don't care about free speech be­cause you have noth­ing to say.”
  — Ed­ward Snow­den, 2015 may 21 red­dit com­ment
• “"Of course I can­not un­der­stand it," he said. "If your heads were stuffed with straw, like mine, you would prob­a­bly all live in the beau­ti­ful places, and then Kansas would have no peo­ple at all. It is for­tu­nate for Kansas that you have brains."”
  — Scare­crow in Ly­man Frank Baum's The Won­der­ful Wizard of Oz, Chap­ter IV
• “"I was hired to work on MULTICS. … Bell Labs quit the pro­ject when it de­cided that it wasn't gonna sat­isfy their needs, and then, I was al­most like out of a job. And no real thing to do so I just did what I wanted to do from then on. Games and op­er­at­ing sys­tems … I did some po­si­tional as­tron­omy, some au­dio … ab­so­lutely any­thing that I wanted to do. … That got us into the PDP-7, into re­ally run­ning it. Then on the PDP-7 we wrote the first ver­sion of Unix. … We bought a PDP-11, to … the ex­cuse was text pro­cess­ing, but the real rea­son, was, to, you know, to play more, to play.”
  — Ken Thomp­son, Oral His­tory of Ken Thomp­son
• “And re­mem­ber, my sen­ti­men­tal friend…that a heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others.”
  — Oz in The Wizard of Oz 1939 film, 1 hour 31 min­utes 58 sec­onds
• “Free soft­ware that peo­ple value adds wealth to the world.”
  — John Car­mack, 2009 febru­rary in­ter­view with Brad Cook
• “Even from the out­side, a truly beau­ti­ful book can­not be a nov­elty. It must set­tle for mere per­fec­tion in­stead.”
  Jan Tschi­chold, The Form of the Book, PDF page 27
• “It took about two hours in all – 10 min­utes to do the sketch and the rest to ren­der it. On my Mac, I could have done the whole thing in a cou­ple of min­utes – and with no mis­takes. But it would have been much less sat­is­fy­ing when I was fin­ished. And I'd be tempted to fid­dle with it end­lessly. … The dig­i­tal world has its place. You can do amaz­ing things in it (like pub­lish­ing a blog post). But don't spend all your time there. It's not the real world.”
  — Mark Si­mon­son, 1979
• “Stan­dards, even though they are sup­posed to be stan­dard, are sub­ject to change.”
  — Charles Bigelow; Kris Holmes, The de­sign of a Uni­code font, PDF page 13
• “If some­body said what ad­vice would I give to a… a young per­son – they al­ways ask that funny kind of a ques­tion. And… and I think one of the things that… is… that I would… that would sort of come first to me is this idea of, don't just be­lieve that be­cause some­thing is trendy, that it's good. I'd prob­a­bly go the other ex­treme where if… if something… if I find too many peo­ple adopt­ing a cer­tain idea I'd prob­a­bly think it's wrong or if, you know, if… if my work had be­come too pop­u­lar I prob­a­bly would think I had to change. This is, of course, ridicu­lous but… but I see the… I see the… the other side of it too… too often where peo­ple will… will do some­thing against their own gut in­stincts be­cause they think the com­mu­nity wants them to do it that way, so peo­ple will… will work on a certain… a cer­tain sub­ject even though they aren't ter­ri­bly in­ter­ested in it be­cause they think that they'll get more pres­tige by work­ing on it. I think you get more pres­tige by do­ing good science than by do­ing pop­u­lar science because… be­cause if… if you go with… with what you re­ally think is… is im­por­tant then it's a higher chance that it re­ally is im­por­tant in the long run and it's the long run which… which has the most ben­e­fit to the world.”
  — Don­ald Knuth, a sec­tion of an in­ter­view fea­tur­ing his ad­vice to young peo­ple
• “The time has come!”
  — Wal­rus in Alice in Won­der­land 1951 film, 19 min­utes 54 sec­onds