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"Here is your cross
Your nails, and your hill"

—Leonard Cohen (Here it is)

So by now I have a simple Ada package that encrypts / decrypts in Playfair and builds an encryption table given a "secret" keyword.

This is still very much beginner code, the suckage is high.

But I had LOADS of fun and learned a lot. The strong typing system is at times infuriating, and at times bordering on beautiful.

Reading lately so much about retrocomputing made me want to get back to some simple coding, like back in the times where figuring out a 30 line BASIC program was an achievement. So a week ago I downloaded a free Ada introduction book and started to "work" through it.

Yesterday morning I finished with it and set me a little challenge: Started to implement Playfair with only the wikipedia article as a base. Despite having guests for lunch AND dinner, at night at 1AM I had a basic POC together that encrypted the example message correctly.

Highlight the active window in irssi

I'm trying to reduce a bit the occurences of me writing in the wrong channel on irc. So I was looking at how to highlight the active window in irssi.

And indeed there is a solution: https://github.com/irssi/irssi/issues/244 ... adding something like sb_window_bg = "%k%6"; to the theme in the abstracts section will do the trick: The status bar of the "active" window will be cyan (%6) with black text (%k). Color codes can be found here: https://irssi.org/documentation/settings/#a_d (not a lot of choices).

To see the changes while irssi is running, you can use a quick /reload nameof.theme

The Saga of IPv6

Last week in one of the cafes where I frequently have my #coffice, the IPv4 didn't work. In fact it works, but the DHCP server in their little plastic CPE router doesn't work. Been like that for a long time, so I habitually set myself up with a fixed IP... and my script that does that didn't work. But then, IPv6 worked fine, so I was able to ssh -6 to my server. A couple of http servers worked also, but it was impressive how much of the web was not reachable.

And a few days later I came across this page: The transition to IPv6: Are we there yet? That was a very interesting read. All those various incentives to do and not do things, the dragging of feet, the attemtps, and the slow-moving-glacier changes.

Now I'm sitting in another cafe, and no IPv6 at all here, but at least their DHCP for IPv4 works.

Now that a lot of people write introduction posts on mastodon... I suddenly start to remember (and miss) my old SE/30. Souped up with 32MB RAM, a HD (that was around 500MB I think), and best of all an Ethernet card. It's at friends' place back in .ch, and I miss it just a little bit.

It's not that I did that much with it... back then it was kind of like "build the dream machine you wanted to have as a kid". Still, this was a cool machine.

The road to Mikri Vigla, trees on the side of the road

Cycling helps. Nature helps. Being out there and understanding it as a gift and being thankful for it helps.

My bike at Mikri Vigla, looking at the beachWild roadside flowers

Not much to write about lately, words feel empty compared to the brutality of the world out there. I'm dragging myself from day to day. At least I'll go for a bike ride this afternoon.

"For me, history is the record not only of how things change, but how people make things change, how they act individually and collectively to create a better world.”

—Tyler Stovall

This was the coldest winter that most people remember on Naxos. It finally should be over in a few days now. Funny how I remember plans last autumn of how this winter we'll go for picnics by the sea ... and now we're just saying: "Maybe we could turn the heating on just for a little bit? Maybe we could not think about the war for a little bit?"