Blue sky thinking

Like anyone who has been going to the same boozer for 14 years only to find it’s suddenly turned into a Nazi bar, I am disappointed to be leaving Twitter in favour of BlueSky – though it is a significantly better neighbourhood and does have much less sticky carpets.

bsky.app also has the advantage of allowing anyone to peruse the comestibles and even search without signing up for an account. Imagine that! A public social media platform where the public are welcome?!

This means that if you were so inclined you could gawp at whatever I’m fiddling with here on bsky.app

It seems that even image linking works…

Stuff

Not just me then? IMHO twitter died at the point it became X, and just got progressively worse as time has gone on. It’s become a toxic and aggressive environment! If it’s arguing and fighting I’m after I can get my fill of that right here.
I’m finding BlueSky a much nicer place to hang out, although having been on Twitter since 2009 I’d built up fair number of people to follow and who were following me – starting off from scratch again does seem like a slow start. I believe there are ‘starter packs’ on BlueSky that give suggestions of who to follow, perhaps a RISC OS/Acorn list would be useful.

Looking at the pictures, I wonder when NEMO OS will be released.

Where skys are blue:

I’ve just discovered that Dell have a whole GUI design guide for some reason:

and the DELL reference has:

A unified design language to support Dell’s digital universe. Ensuring design is accessible, inclusive, and useful.

Looks like another instance of encouraging web pages where the sub-head elements float delicately halfway between what they might refer to and what they actually refer to.

Thinks:

OBVIOUSLY now the source is open, someone can update the RO2-era code to use the RO3-era API. Eh? Anyone? Hello? Is this mic on? I thought “open source” made everything better?!

I’m not 100% certain, but I think the idea is that people submit any fixes.
I could be wrong, it has been known.

I’m not 100% certain, but I think the idea is that people submit any fixes.

Why would someone submit fixes for a fork that they don’t use?

Why would someone submit fixes for a fork that they don’t use?

1, Because it’s a bit churlish to talk about how much something is still broken (or never got fixed in RO5) when there’s a fairly easy way to have that broken stuff fixed if, you know, you have a fix…

And:

2, Under the hood, the two aren’t really all that different. There’s a pretty good chance that a bug that got squished over there is still crawling around in the current code.
<looks at Paint>
<looks at MessageTrans>

More bluesky made me think:

Took me an embarrassing amount of time to get dynamic update of windows working

What it made me think is “Given that the code exists in the OS already, why doesn’t the Filer offer an F5 refresh option? in the menus”

“Given that the code exists in the OS already, why doesn’t the Filer offer an F5 refresh option? in the menus”

Am I missing something? There is a refresh option in the menus. It isn’t tied to F5, but that’s probably a minor twiddle to link the keypress to the function…

I’m not 100% certain, but I think the idea is that people submit any fixes.

Why would someone submit fixes for a fork that they don’t use?

Thanks Stuart!

And for the 1,000,000 time, Open Source is not a “you ask” and “others do” thing (as it seems often to be implied on this forum). Open Source is “you need” and “you do, and share your changes back” thing. If people here can’t do, that is not a fault of Open Source.

Like anyone who has been going to the same boozer for 14 years only to find it’s suddenly turned into a Nazi bar, I am disappointed to be leaving Twitter in favour of BlueSky – though it is a significantly better neighbourhood and does have much less sticky carpets.

I still need to try BlueSky. As a side note, as an uber geek, I am totally enjoying Mastodon, a managed to get only tech and science stuff on it, and couldn’t be happyer now :)

Open Source is “you need” and “you do, and share your changes back” thing. If people here can’t do, that is not a fault of Open Source.

That was rather my point.

I didn’t ask, nor to my knowledge has anyone else, but if someone had the need and has fixed stuff utilising the open source resource but hasn’t fed that back…

Am I missing something? There is a refresh option in the menus. It isn’t tied to F5, but that’s probably a minor twiddle to link the keypress to the function…

It is. It isn’t difficult.¹ If you search, the miniscule change is posted on these forums.

¹ I say that with absolute certainty.

That was rather my point.

Sorry, I thought you were being sarcastic with the definition of Open SOurce, my bad.

I didn’t ask, nor to my knowledge has anyone else, but if someone had the need and has fixed stuff utilising the open source resource but hasn’t fed that back…

Dear Steve, wait. It sounds like you haven’t been reading the various “RISC OS needs X or Y” kind of posts, the lenghty discussions on 64-bit, with people asking for features (even proposing hacks and changes), others wanting it to be rewritten in C, I personally have lost count of the requests.

As for the “hasn’t fed that back”, That is based on the Open Source license. Apache 2.0 is a permissive one, so the message from ROOL and RISC OS source is: do whatever you wish with it and in your own terms, just respect the names of the original authors and do not mention “us” (as ROOL) if you publish your work as part of the project, basically.

So, honestly (and not being my usual self play with sarcasm here), IMHO, everything is going according to plans!

Gavin observed

I’m finding BlueSky a much nicer place to hang out

Indeed. Well over 14M users, and gaining critical mass right now with many journalists and MPs joining.

Paulo added

I am totally enjoying Mastodon

I’m there too, but the lack of text search is too restrictive. BlueSky’s “Feeds” are also very useful, and we should create a RISC OS one once there’s more than five of us (are there ever more than five of us?). Anyway, that’s enough about platforms.

Paul joked

Looking at the pictures, I wonder when

“NEMOS” is Gavin’s joke and I wish I had thought of it first.

BTW HDR sprites are a first.

Steve suggested

if someone had the need and has fixed stuff utilising the open source resource but hasn’t fed that back…

I have never used any of ROOL’s sources, tools or documentation. When fixing OS stuff I always start from the binary I have, which started as RO4.39 plus the “UCS” FM. I’m not interested in running RO on actual silicon – I use RO as an environment integrated into a proper OS.

Start from a binary

Disassemble

Improve

Rick ruminated

it’s a bit churlish to talk about how much something is still broken (or never got fixed in RO5) when there’s a fairly easy way to have that broken stuff fixed if, you know, you have a fix…

As others have intimated, I don’t use RO5, its sources or documentation. I have repeatedly documented bugs and problems here entirely altruistically (it’s not going to affect me whether it’s fixed or not for you) to no effect. Indeed it’s been made clear that my contributions aren’t welcome here, and I’ve lost no sleep over that.

Hence I talk about RO stuff elsewhere, on the whole. Just thought I’d mention that the “elsewhere” has shifted recently.

I always start from the binary I have

Oh, wow. That’s just masochism.

I use RO as an environment integrated into a proper OS.

Ouch.
But fair…

Just thought I’d mention that the “elsewhere” has shifted recently.

Well, sadly the little blue bird died. And now the guy that killed it might be in charge of way more of one of the most important countries than is good or wise.

But thanks for moving to Bluesky. It’s a pain to have to find a working Nitter in order to read something that got stuck on Twitter (no, I’m not going to call it flippin’ ecks, ecks is a letter).
Yes, AI is a threat. Yes, bots are a threat. But trust me, you want an AI trained on Twitter about as much as you want one trained on Reddit…which is only good if you want to see if your artificial wotsit is capable of self-termination or asking AITA?

I don’t think it’s anything to do with bots or AI or lazy Daily Mail journalists regurgitating stuff seen on Twitter, it’s more “It’s my toy and I’m not sharing”.

That’s just masochism.

Everyone needs a hobby.

Actually it isn’t – it takes rigorous discipline to read sources filled with comments, discussion, symbols, function names, preambles, explanations, and sometimes ascii diagrams… and ignore all of that in favour of the actual code.

The stuff that made it easier to write makes it harder to truly understand. That is, it’s easy to understand the comments and the symbols. It’s easy to believe the indentation and the grouping. It’s easy to believe the author’s claims. It’s harder to look past all that to what the code actually does, or in some cases, simply never gets asked to do.

When you work from the binary there are no comfortable lies, and this is why you may look at (say) the Toolbox source and think all is well, but I can look at the Toolbox module from RO5.28 and see that 4.2% of it is dead code.

If you have a penchant for understanding binaries, stop wasting your time with RISC OS stuff – you could be making good money in the security industry reverse engineering malware!

BY THE WAY

For those of you who don’t want to sign up for Yet Another Social Media Platform, but still want to know when someone on BlueSky posts something, every BlueSky account has its own RSS feed – so mine is this RSS

Just find the profile (account) you’re interested in following, copy the URL and add /rss on the end. And I commend it to the House.

If you have a penchant for understanding binaries, stop wasting your time with RISC OS stuff – you could be making good money in the security industry reverse engineering malware!

Very true! Thankfully I jumped on that wagon in the golden age of it and managed to get a very good life out of that. But now things aren’t as good as they used to be though. Cybersecurity isn’t a fun job at the moment.

BTW, because BlueSky is an open system, there are tons of extensions, 3rd party apps and so forth.

This one, skywriter.blue, presents BlueSky threads as a single page. eg here’s something on the System Heap

Beer!

https://files.mastodon.online/cache/media_attachments/files/113/548/559/116/296/736/original/0857722cde1b581a.jpg

Beer!

<sprays tea across the room>

Worth it. 👍

“Hell is other people” is from a play called (ironically and inaccurately) “No e𝕏it”.

And I’m not even being Sartrecal.