New Software, hot off the press
       2019-06-29 2pm
       
       I have not had much time to code at home with the new baby, which
       is as it should be. However, I have pecked together a few things
       while the wife and baby have been asleep (such as right now).
       
       Both were worked on as little side projects. Since I have been 
       sleepy I ahve not wanted to work on Bombadillo (dont want to
       mess anything up out of carelessness).
       
       The first if 'gfu', or Gophermap Format Utility. At the moment it
       does what many servers will already do for you: it will take a
       file as input and convert any lines that are not valid gopher
       links into item type "i" links. There is a flag "-d" to reverse
       this process. This should make it easier for users on Colorfield
       Space to maintain their gopher hole while using chalk, the text
       editor in use here. I believe gophernicus will already do this
       for you, though I am not sure all the syntax. So if using a local
       program to do this feels comfortable: go for it! I will also be
       adding the ability to add a header or footer from a filepath to
       a gophermap. Again, largely a thing that a server can do for you
       but may be nice to be able to maintain yourself. I like static
       files rather than dynamic generation on the fly when possible.
       
       The second bit of software I have forked on is a port of the 
       Python3 mailcap library to Golang. Apparently Golang does not
       have an easy way of working with mailcap files and the Python
       code was in the ballpark of clear so I thought I would port it.
       The reason for the interest in working with mailcap files is to
       support the 
 (DIR) gemini protocol
       a number of people in the gopher community are working on
       (solderpunk is the organizer; definitely get involved!). Since
       its request response model uses mime types I would like to be
       able to code a client in golang and be able to have files that
       will not be served natively by the client (images, sound, video)
       be opened by an appropriate piece of software on a user's system.
       I have made good progress with the port. I have it in a working
       state to be able to take an action (view, edit, etc) based on
       a mimetype and file or filepath and have the correct program
       open it (or at least an applicable program). The code is NOT
       the cleanest I ahve ever written, it is downright sloppy in
       some places but I partially blame the Python lib for that as I
       took very few liberties while porting. I plan to go back through
       and try to make it cleaner and more idiomatically go-like. It
       was a big pain to figure out how to get golang to run a terminal
       program. the os/exec package at first seems like the one to do
       so... but alas, it would not. Eventually I landed on syscall
       and everything got better from there.
       
       I'll post a link to the port soon, as well as some thoughts on
       the gemini project. In the meantime, you can grab
 (HTM) gfu
       on tildegit.