Today marks another trip around the sun for me. I'm mostly OK with that.
This last year has been pretty shitty, not gonna lie. On a personal level, there were health crises galore for me and my family, spectacularly destructive interpersonal conflicts, and enough "little annoyances" to make most every week a slog.
I'm still here, which I'm told counts for something.
I'd probably feel better about that if I'd slept better.
It took me hours to get to sleep, and I kept waking up. Once again, it was the weather that got me. Too hot to use the blanket, too cold to not use it. Alternately shivering and sweating is not a recipe for good sleep. I finally got up at around 1:30, with the idea of taking a glorious nap later today.
On a positive note, I plan to spend today drinking coffee, writing code, and mucking about with sysadmin stuff. Dwarf Fortress might be involved, as well.
One of the things that's been on my list is getting a self-hosted email server up and running. That's harder than it sounds in this, the Year of Our Void 2025. Reliable email delivery outside the hallowed halls of Google has been a clusterfuck for something like a decade. And in order to Make It Go, one has to resort to a cargo cult-esque series of software packages and word-of-mouth hacks and tweaks.
"Oh? But I get email through my own domain and it works fine," you say?
I assure you that one or more of the following are true...
It does not, in fact, work fine, and you are losing mail.
You're really using Google---or some other Big Tech Company blessed by Google---on the back end.
Your hosting company invests countless hours keeping the email hamsters alive on your behalf.
Many, many people I personally know run their own mail servers, some hosted on-premises, some hosted in a Big Tech cloud like AWS, others hosted on smaller ISPs. And every single one of these people, without exception, deeply regrets their life choices.
What's more, when asked about how they manage to make their email work, the conversation is always like this...
Still, what better way to spend a birthday than descending into a Stygian pit of despair?
Flowing
It's April Fool's Day, also known as "People With Terrible Sense's of Humor Try and Fail to Be Funny on the Internet Day."
I was awake for less than fifteen minutes this morning before seeing someone fall for some bullshit. So, you know, it's a good day to consider just logging off.
Yesterday was an extremely productive day, so I'm pretty happy all things considered. And by "all things considered," I mean I really hate GUI programming.
The first environment I learned how to build GUIs in was HyperCard, an application and development tool developed by Apple for the Mac. (The first version was apparently written for the Apple IIGS. Who knew?)
HyperCard applications were basically dead-simple databases combined with editable, visual layouts and tied together with an automation language called HyperTalk---the ancestor of AppleScript.
You could make a lot of really cool things with HyperCard. The original version of the game Myst was built with it! And making interfaces was easy.
Want a button? You just drew it on the screen as if you were using a Paint program. Wanted it to do something? You just double-clicked it and wrote your code. Things just worked intuitively, for the most part, and there was very little boiler-plate code to write before you got to code the good bits.
After HyperCard, the next desktop GUI framework I used was Xlib, under FreeBSD. This was kind of like jumping out of the kiddie pool straight into the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Even a simple "Hello World" application involved about a hundred lines of boiler-plate code, filled with inscrutable symbols like XGCValues and XStringListToTextProperty().
There were widget toolkits and various other libraries to make things "easier," but they all had their idiosyncrasies and they all tended to make your program bloat like crazy. As such, I mostly avoided them in favor of raw Xlib and careful commenting.
Fast forward a couple of years later, and the company I worked for mostly switched from UNIX-based systems to Windows. As part of that migration, I found myself with a full membership to whatever Microsoft called "DevNet" back then (maybe it was just "DevNet"?) which came with the entire Visual Studio development stack.
That was when I got my first taste of the Windows API. Co-incidentally, that was the first time I ever thought seriously about killing myself.
Every single call to the API that did anything even remotely interesting seemed to take no less than eight parameters, half of which were always NULL for reasons unknown to everyone including God. Hungarian notation abounded, turning function names into line noise that only vaguely hinted at their purpose if you squinted just right.
It was truly a monstrosity, and I'm honestly amazed that anyone has ever been able to do serious work with it.
Over the intervening years I've used a number of other GUI APIs, toolkits, and frameworks. None of them as clean and easy to use as HyperCard, but also none of them as inscrutable and infuriating as Windows.
In my opinion, the least bad of the modern, going-concern toolkits is GTK. I know that's a weird opinion to have, and if I used Apple products in my daily life, I'd probably have a different opinion. (I think Objective-C is a pretty decent language, and I remember XCode taking away a lot of the pain of creating an interface.)
Still, I find GTK incredibly frustrating to use. Maybe that's because I never got my head fully around GtkBuilder. Maybe it's because I use Emacs and your modern IDEs confuse and frighten me. Maybe it's because I spent too many years writing HTML where you basically get a UI for free.
I don't know. The point is that there's a reason most of the code I write either sits on a server, or has a command line interface, or has a GUI which consists of "just give me a window and let me arbitrarily draw on it."
Java was actually pretty good at the latter. I wrote a bunch of games in Java back in the day, and I think all I had to do was sub-class a JPanel and I was good to go.
Whatever. Today's mission is to continue trying to remember how to make GTK go.
In other news, it has been two days since I played "Dwarf Fortress."