[gopher] De-lurking...

[Cameron Kaiser]

> I like to see the whole picture, including what transpires behind the
> scenes; therefore, I have always been aware of these systems, and have
> a particular soft spot for AIX, which I run at home.

What do you run it on? I'm currently using a heavily modified AIX 4 running
on an Apple Network Server, although I've got my pennies saved for a POWER7.
When that comes out, I'll be merging the ANS and the 7300 back into one
system and gopher.floodgap.com will be a lot faster.

> I've enjoyed the ride, gang.  I was with you when the news hit that
> Firefox would lose Gopher support.  This was a tremendous blow---the
> great majority of users will not install a plug-in merely to browse a
> handful of sites catering mainly to hobbyists.  It's the
> work-to-reward ratio, I guess.  If something comes with the kitchen
> sink, users will be drawn to experiment with it; however, if the
> kitchen sink is detached, only a few people will make an effort to
> attach it.

I'm still hoping, and I verified that the patch did not bitrot with
bug 572000, that Mozilla will adopt that patch so that at least the
curious will have some lead-in. But unfortunately such a move was
inevitable, no matter how ill advised. I'm glad that we still managed
to hold the fort for several years or Gopher might have left with Firefox
2.

> That said, I am not a great fan of Firefox, Overbite or no Overbite,
> when it comes to browsing Gopherspace.  I can honestly say that my
> favourite Gopher, which is guaranteed to be found on every UNIX
> installation, is Lynx (renders pages in 5 seconds or less).  Yes,
> that's right, Lynx, which is older than me (no big surprise there, I
> use TECO as my primary editor) is the Gopher client that I can depend
> on 100%.  If I'm using one of the more modern Linux distros, I will
> usually download and install GopherVR.  At this point, I have got to
> thank Dr Kaiser for maintaining this excellent piece of work, and I
> hope he gets any bugs worked out to really make this software shine.
> Thanks, Doc, I'm behind you all the way.  More thanks to Dr Kaiser for
> TTYtter, which is the only way I ever twitter aside from my
> CrackBerry, and for Overbite Android.

Hey, thanks! Look for TTYtter 1.2 to start entering the public beta after
the OAuth transition concludes (I'm holding 1.1 in active status to bang
out fixes quickly as more people are forced into it).

The biggest change to be made to GopherVR 0.5 will be fixing the way it
handles i itemtype. It may simply be just to turn it off (and display it
only in the menu). I also need to add SOCKS proxy support to libgopher.

-- 
------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
  Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com
-- "I'd love to go out with you, but I've dedicated my life to linguini." -----