@ewhac

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61 Following
1.2K Posts

Software engineer of a Certain Age, particularly with low-level and embedded systems, and device drivers. Closet extrovert.

(It's pronounced " 'eɪ.wæk ".)

All opinions expressed are solely my own, on my own behalf, and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

Home Pagehttps://ewhac.org/
YouTube Channelhttps://www.youtube.com/c/ewhac
GitHubhttps://github.com/ewhac
ewhac3h ago

...Every so often, I remember I wrote this:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160128183957/http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2007/3/28/132751/380

Homeland Security Classifies TRON as "Sensitive" || kuro5hin.org

ewhac1d ago

While my views aren't as vehement as the poster's -- probably owing to the fact I have yet to touch this stuff in any way -- it does amaze me that so many organizations headed up by smart people (or so we are told -- very loudly and often) are trying to sello-tape this crap into absolutely everything, despite the ease with which one can find or create examples of it getting things absolutely wrong.

They're a cute hack. A parlor trick. I don't see it ever going much past that.

ewhac2d ago

Was just re-watching an old Doctor Who serial on YooToob (uploaded by the BBC): "Nightmare of Eden." In the first episode, Romana is fiddling with the CET machine, looking at the places Tryst has visited. And on one of them, I went, "Heeeyyy, that looks familiar..."

So I dug through episodes of Space:1999 (also on YooToob), looking for "Guardian of Piri." And there it was, in the episode's last scene.

...A bit odd, though -- Space:1999 was an ITV production.

ewhac2d ago
James Endres Howell4d ago

"Setting aside the moral arguments—"

You mean the power and water.

"Setting aside the power and water, and—"

Don't forget the industrial-scale plagiarism. The brazen theft.

"Setting aside the copyright fuckery, the power and water, and—"

Don't forget the maniacal, suicidal inflation of the bubble. Arguably the greatest single mis-allocation of resources in history, aside from war.

"Setting aside the financial madness, the copyright fuckery, the power and water, and—"

Don't forget the willful destruction of creative livelihoods, the willful destruction of education itself.

"Setting aside the destruction of art, writing, and schools, the financial madness, the copyright fuckery, the power and water, and—"

Don't forget the purposeful degradation of human cognitive capacity. The planned and designed addictive dependency.

"Setting aside the cognitive degradation, the destruction of schools, the financial madness, the copyright fuckery, the power and water, and—"

Don't forget the ghoulish ethical camouflage used to obscure, indeed to erase, the responsibility for decisions in budget austerity, insurance claims, regulatory oversight, medical decisions, court filings, and even real-time combat.

"Setting aside the monstrous mechanisms of official irresponsibility, the cognitive degradation, the schools, the financial madness, the copyright fuckery, the power and water—"

Are you going to say it doesn't work?

"IT DOES NOT FUCKING WORK"

#ai

ewhac4d ago

Dear #LazyWeb: Is there a central, comprehensive list of all the extensions to Terminfo that are currently floating around?

Today, I learned about the `Smulx` capability, which lets you underline text in a variety of styles. This capability is not an official part of Terminfo (i.e. it doesn't appear in the terminfo(5) man page), but apparently is something that first showed up in Kitty, and is now spreading. See also VTE, alacritty, etc.

Surely, someone's keeping a list...?

Show threadewhac4d ago

6/6: So I'm sitting there, wondering what alternatives might be available, when it occurred to me: Why is Pandoc's only terminal writer for ANSI? Why isn't there an `ncurses` writer, which would support whatever TERM is set to? So I thought, "Maybe I could write this myself." And the user could set mappings from Pandoc styles to ncurses attributes...

...Pandoc, and all of its readers/writers, are written in Haskell.

Yes, there is a Lua interface -- it's unclear whether that's enough.

Show threadewhac4d ago
5/N: Yet Another Problem: Skylighting has no obvious way of controlling the mapping from Pandoc styles to ANSI escape codes. So if it thinks italic text should be rendered in a different color, it appears in that color, even if your terminal and font both support displaying actual italicized text.
Show threadewhac4d ago

4/N: In the case of Markdown, there's a rather nice tool called Pandoc which can translate between a huge number of text document formats. One of the supported input formats is Markdown. And one of the output formats is ANSI -- the most popular codes for controlling text appearance on a terminal.

Problem: The default ANSI output styling from Pandoc is kinda crap.

Another Problem: The ANSI output is handled by an external library called Skylighting.

Show threadewhac4d ago

3/N: Mutt can render plain text, and it can also render "enriched" text -- an obscure standard no one uses, because it suffers from similar readability issues as HTML. But it doesn't do anything with Markdown, just displaying the source code.

Well, no problem, Mutt can push the email body through an external filter program. This is how HTML-formatted email is made readable in Mutt, by piping it through `w3m` or `elinks` or `lynx`.

Show threadewhac4d ago
2/N: Now it also happens that I'm a fan of Markdown, a very lightweight document markup syntax that lets you apply some modest styling to your writing without making your source document unreadable. As an example, if you wanted to emphasize some text in HTML, you'd have to do it <STRONG>like this,</STRONG>, but in Markdown it's done **like this.** In other words, Markdown adds syntactical meaning to the kinds of emphasis markers we'd likely add to plain text files.