pearlstreetcafe: Formatting tweaks

Reviewed-on: buzzert/smartbar#1

assets/css/gtkapplang.css

@@ -0,0 +1,60 @@
+#article-header {
+    background-color: #0d0d0d;
+    color: white;
+    text-align: center;
+    padding: 5pt 0 5pt 0;
+}
+
+#article-header > div {
+    display: inline-block;
+    vertical-align: middle;
+    margin: 5pt;
+}
+
+img#gtk-logo {
+    width: 50px;
+}
+
+#article-body {
+    columns: 2;
+    font: 8.75pt/1.40 Helvetica, sans-serif;
+    padding: 0.25in 0.5in 0 0.5in;
+}
+
+#article-body p {
+    text-indent: 2em;
+}
+
+#article-body p:first-child {
+    margin-top: 0;
+    text-indent: 0;
+}
+
+/*
+span.first-word {
+    font-size: xx-large;
+    font-weight: bold;
+    line-height: 0;
+}
+*/
+
+h1, h2, h3 {
+    margin: 2pt;
+    text-align: left;
+    font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;
+}
+
+h3 {
+    font-weight: normal;
+    font-style: italic;
+}
+
+.code {
+    font-family: monospace;
+}
+
+.endmark {
+    text-align: center;
+    margin-top: 1em;
+    color: #555;
+}

pages.yaml

@@ -2,5 +2,10 @@
 
 - cover.html
 - bouba.html
+- gtkapplang-1.html
+- gtkapplang-2.html
+- gtkapplang-3.html
+- gtkapplang-4.html
 - drivingmissmuni.html
+- pearlstreetcafe.html
 

pages/gtkapplang-1.html

@@ -0,0 +1,35 @@
+<link rel="stylesheet" href="assets/css/gtkapplang.css" />
+
+<div id="body" class="page-base">
+
+<div id="article-header">
+    <div>
+        <img id="gtk-logo" src="assets/img/logo-gtk.png" />
+    </div>
+    <div>
+        <h1>Linux GTK Apps</h1>
+        <h2>A Language Comparison</h2>
+        <h3>by P. Michael Cho</h3>  
+    </div>
+</div>
+
+<div id="article-body">
+
+<p><span class="first-word">A</span> famous hacker once said, "Linux is only free if your time has no value." Well, anyone who knows me knows that my time is about as worthless as a bag of salt. Thus, I really had nothing to lose when I decided to ditch the glitzy, glamorous commercial OS'es and go all-in on Linux this year.</p>
+
+<p>It's really not that bad in 2025. Maybe it really is the <em>Year of the Linux Desktop.</em> A lot of stuff just works out of the box. You don't have to waste a whole weekend getting sound to work in YouTube videos. X11 isn't really a thing anymore, so fiddling with ancient hieroglyphic <strong>Xorg config files</strong> is no longer required just to get your anime girlfriend wallpaper desktop to show up on the screen.</p>
+
+<p>Emboldened with a new sense of optimism for the Linux desktop, I decided to try writing a few <strong>native apps</strong> to see what the developer ecosystem is like. <strong>GTK,</strong> formerly known as the <strong>GIMP ToolKit,</strong> appears to be the de-facto widget toolkit for creating native GUI apps on Linux, so I decided to learn and explore how to develop apps using this toolkit.</p>
+
+<p>The first problem I encountered was a severe sense of language paralysis. There are many, many choices of programming languages when developing GTK apps, which isn't necessarily a good thing. Apple doesn't always do everything right, but upholding Swift as the one true language for developing macOS and iOS apps reduces a lot of fragmentation for developers. A walled garden keeps the snakes out! Nevertheless, I decided to try and write a few small apps in a variety of different languages to see which one feels the best.</p>
+
+<h4>C (Rating: B-)</h4>
+
+<p>The first language I decided to try is an oldie-but-goodie. Just plain ol' C. Linux guys really like C, and really hate pretty much every other language, and the GTK toolkit itself is implemented in C, so it seemed like a good first choice.</p>
+
+<p>One cool thing about GTK is that it is based on runtime library called <strong>GLib,</strong> which implements a bunch of object-oriented design patterns in C. It defines an object model, lifetime semantics, and a bunch of commonly used data structures that you can use in your app. Object-oriented programming is definitely out of style nowadays but I still think it is a solid paradigm for developing user interfaces. It makes sense conceptually for all widgets to inherit from a base class that defines things like screen geometry and parent-child relationships.</p>
+
+<p>My first couple of hours with C were glorious. The code was just falling out of my hands. The language is so simple, it's nearly impossible to waste any time on design.</p>
+
+</div>
+</div>

pages/gtkapplang-2.html

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+<link rel="stylesheet" href="assets/css/gtkapplang.css" />
+
+<div id="body" class="page-base">
+<div id="article-body">
+
+<p>Unfortunately this honeymoon phase quickly came to an end. Writing in C requires a <strong>lot</strong> of boilerplate code, and significant use of <strong>macros,</strong> against which I am generally ideologically opposed. For every "class" type that you define in your app, you have to implement several functions: one that initializes the class itself with the runtime, another for handling dynamic setting of properties, another to handle getting those properties, one for initializing instances of that class, and one for destroying or "finalizing" instances of that class. Confusingly there are two different functions for destroying objects, one called <strong>finalize</strong> and another called <strong>dispose,</strong> and I guess this was done to eliminate cycles in the reference counting mechanism implemented by GObject. Big yuck.</p>
+
+<p>I eventually did finish the app I was writing in pure C, but it was a shitload of code. There are probably a couple of memory leaks too. One great thing about writing in C is that compiling the code is basically instantaneous. I actually started to feel angry and upset thinking about how much time we waste compiling code in newer languages. Do people know that complex C programs take only a few seconds to compile? Debugging was excellent too. GDB just works and I can see everything. Overall a pretty good experience I would say.</p>
+
+<h4>C++ (Rating: C-)</h4>
+
+<p>Linux guys are going to hate me for even mentioning C++, but I of course had to give it a try. Despite its numerous flaws, it's still the best bang for your buck when it comes to offering reasonably good object-oriented features with very fast performance.</p>
+
+<p>For using GLib and GTK in C++ I decided to use the <strong>gtkmm</strong> library, which implements a variety of C++ bindings for all of the classes in the toolkit. Along with that I also used <strong>glibmm</strong> and <strong>giomm</strong> which are required to use the GLib and GIO dependencies in C++ code.</p>
+
+<p>I was immediately disappointed to learn that a ton of boilerplate was still required just for defining some basic data types with properties. Properties are an important abstraction in GObject that let you bind data to various widgets, so this isn't something that can be easily avoided. Basically for each data member in your class, you need <strong>three accessor functions</strong>: two that 'get' and 'set' the data itself, and a third that returns a reference to the <span class="code">Glib::Property</span> object representing that member.</p>
+
+<p>Another disappointment was the documentation for gtkmm and glibmm. Just atrocious. Looks like autogenerated Doxygen slop. Come on guys, it's not 2008 anymore.</p>
+
+<p>One positive thing I will say about using C++ is that memory management is a lot more tolerable than C. Using the <span class="code">Glib::RefPtr</span> smart pointer class instead of manually managing GObject lifecycles is a blessing.</p>
+
+<p>I did end up finishing this project as well and the end result was satisfactory. Overall I didn't really have a lot of fun writing C++, but then again, who does.</p>
+
+</div>
+</div>

pages/gtkapplang-3.html

@@ -0,0 +1,29 @@
+<link rel="stylesheet" href="assets/css/gtkapplang.css" />
+
+<div id="body" class="page-base">
+<div id="article-body">
+
+<h4>Rust (Rating: C+)</h4>
+
+<p>Of course I cannot go without mentioning the fad language of the decade: <strong>Rust.</strong> I was actually pretty excited to try using Rust to write a GTK app. The users and designers of the language alike are very opinionated, Rust programs are usually very high quality, and I generally like the overall design of the language and the standard library.</p>
+
+<p>I decided to use the <strong>gtkrs</strong> crate for my Rust app, which was trivial to setup using Rust's excellent build system. From what I can tell, a majority of the code in gtkrs is automatically generated, so there isn't a lot of manual wrapping done, which is quite nice.</p>
+
+<p>First impressions were very positive. Just like with C++, memory management was straightforward and conventional. I didn't waste a lot of time allocating objects and passing them around the library. The designers of gtkrs did a really good job in creating the bindings while also making them memory safe, which is very much concordant with the Rust philosophy.</p>
+
+<p>Significantly less boilerplate was required with Rust as well, thanks to macros provided by the <span class="code">glib</span> crate like <span class="code">property</span> and <span class="code">object_subclass</span>. Getter and setter functions are optional and mostly for convenience.</p>
+
+<p>So why did I give Rust a <strong>C+</strong> rating? The main reason is because Rust is not an object-oriented language. It feels really unnatural to shoehorn object-oriented design patterns into Rust when it was clearly designed not to support that. Of course, it <em>kinda works,</em> and you can finish your app with some pretty nice code to maintain, but it feels sort of like writing classical poetry in LaTeX.</p>
+
+<p>I finished writing my app in Rust and felt pretty good about it, but to be honest I did have to rewrite large parts of it multiple times. It took me a few tries to figure out how to make the compiler happy while still keeping things "Rusty" if you'll pardon the phrase.</p>
+
+<h4>Vala (Rating: B)</h4>
+
+<p>The last language I tried was one I've never heard of before, and probably you haven't either. <strong>Vala</strong> is an object-oriented language that is built by the GNOME team and sits on top of the GLib runtime. It has the standard set of nice-to-have features in modern languages such as async/await, generics, and type inference. It also has a few features that are specifically designed to interact nicely with the GObject runtime, such as signals and properties.</p>
+
+<p>Another cool thing about Vala is that all of your code gets cross-compiled to decently human-readable C code. So there isn't a lot of worry about cross-platform support, debuggability, or performance, at least compared to C.</p>
+
+<p>Vala has by far the least amount of boilerplate of all the languages I tried. Because it natively supports properties, your data classes and widget subclasses are extremely minimal and easy to understand.</p>
+
+</div>
+</div>

pages/gtkapplang-4.html

@@ -0,0 +1,17 @@
+<link rel="stylesheet" href="assets/css/gtkapplang.css" />
+
+<div id="body" class="page-base">
+<div id="article-body">
+
+<p>Documentation for Vala and its libraries is pretty good too. All of it is hosted at the <strong>Valadoc</strong> website which is really easy to search and has a nice layout. I can tell that quite a lot of it is autogenerated from the C documentation, so sometimes it's a bit awkward to read the parts written in prose, but overall not bad.</p>
+
+<p>It's quite easy to create Vala bindings to C libraries, especially if those C libraries are also implemented using the GLib runtime and use GObjects. You create these little files called <strong>VAPI</strong> files and the compiler does most of the work for you. By far one of the easiest FFI's I've ever used.</p>
+
+<p>I think the only thing I really don't like about Vala is that the language itself doesn't really <em>spark joy.</em> For language connoisseurs like myself, it just feels kind of <em>meh.</em> From what I can tell that was actually one of the goals of the language. The designers didn't really set out to push the boundaries of programming language theory with Vala, and instead just wanted a simple language that makes it easier to write apps. I respect that.</p>
+
+<p>Another weird and perhaps surprising disappointment is that every LLM I tried is very poor at generating Vala code. There is actually quite a lot of Vala code out on the Internet, and so statistically speaking it seems likely that it would be part of some training data. My theory is that because a lot of these Linux guys still have a beef with Microsoft, they refuse to upload a lot of code to Github which is the primary website from where code gets scraped. If someone trains an LLM with all the code on these little Gitlab instances, I'm excited to try it.</p>
+
+<p>Overall I found Vala very pleasant to use. I think if the community hivemind were to select a language as its primary language for GTK development, it would be Vala. Just make sure to brush up on your hands-on-the-keyboard coding skills, since you won't be able to <em>vibe-code</em> your way out of some problems with Vala. <span class="endmark">■</span></p>
+
+</div>
+</div>

pages/pearlstreetcafe.html

@@ -0,0 +1,85 @@
+<style>
+
+@font-face {
+    font-family: "Chalk";
+    src: url("assets/font/Chalk-Regular.ttf");
+}
+
+div#body {
+    columns: 3;
+    font: 8.4pt 'Times New Roman', serif;
+    padding: 0.5in;
+    background-image: url("assets/img/coffee-shop.jpg");
+    background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5);
+    background-blend-mode: overlay;
+    background-repeat: no-repeat;
+    background-size: cover;
+    background-position-x: -250px;
+}
+
+.drop-cap::first-letter {
+    float: left;
+    font-size: 4em;
+    line-height: 0.8;
+    padding-right: 8px;
+    padding-top: 0px;
+    font-weight: bold;
+    font-family: Georgia, serif;
+}
+
+.drop-cap {
+    text-indent: 0 !important;
+}
+
+h1, h2 {
+    color: white;
+}
+
+h1 {
+    font-family: Chalk, Helvetica, sans-serif;
+    font-size: xx-large;
+    margin-bottom: 0;
+}
+
+h2 {
+    font-size: small;
+    font-style: italic;
+    font-weight: normal;
+    color: lightgray;
+}
+
+#body p {
+    color: white;
+    text-indent: 2em;
+    text-align: justify;
+    text-justify: inter-word;
+    hyphens: auto;
+    overflow-wrap: break-word;
+}
+
+</style>
+
+<div id="body" class="page-base">
+
+<h1>Pearl Street Cafe</h1>
+<h2>Short Story by <strong>Bram Noidz</strong></h2>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">Trevor woke up at the usual time, naturally, without an alarm clock. A lot of podcasts are discussing the topic of mental health, and apparently waking up with an alarm is bad for anxiety. It took a couple of weeks but Trevor finally tuned his circadian rhythms to obey his schedule, rather than the other way around. He flops out of bed.</p>
+
+<p>The brain fog was especially thick this morning. Trevor went through the process of malaise attribution. Perhaps it was because of the six o'clock coffee the evening before? Or could it be work-induced stress? He had just recovered from a bout of illness due to the latest strain of respiratory viruses circulating around. Maybe that was it. Nothing the cold plunge can't thaw. Trevor prepared the ice bath while contemplating whether the social stigma around caffeine addiction is morally justified.</p>
+
+<p>With the morning routine out of the way, it's time to grind. Work must follow every morning routine, otherwise there is no point to the routine in the first place.</p>
+
+<p>Trevor grabbed his 15-inch MacBook Pro from the nightstand and stuffed it into his messenger bag. He boarded his self-driving SUV and hitched a ride by himself to the local coffee shop. Pearl Street has about three or four coffee shops that are worth the time spent indoors, and several others that are not. Only two of them have WiFi that is reliable enough for Laptop Work. And out of those two, only one of them actually has coffee that tastes beanworthy. <em>Navigation complete.</em></p>
+
+<p>The barista got to work on Trevor's double shot, low foam latté. He takes a seat in the corner of the café where the best reception is available. It always takes a few minutes after opening up the laptop before Trevor remembers what his job actually is. Something with numbers. <em>A transponster?</em> Colleagues whom he's never actually met had sent messages during his cold plunge and while he was sleeping soundly, and reading them allows the work gets context switched back into local memory. Sometimes he wonders if <em>Ms. Trish</em> and <em>Mr. Herb</em> are actually North Korean remote workers, scamming fiat to fund the regime. He realizes that he doesn't care.</p>
+
+<p>Two hours fly by in an instant. Almost time for lunch. Usually it is only the Numbers and lunch that occupy Trevor's mind at this time of the day. But this time he was feeling pensive for some reason. Mom once asked Trevor what he actually did at his job. She worked in a grocery store with her hands so she wanted to know the concrete details about what he did during the day that let him put food on the table. Ultimately it just came down to typing and clicking on a computer. That's it? Someone's paying for it so it must be worth something.</p>
+
+<p>Trevor was halfway through eating his <em>Spam Sandwich</em> when everything came crashing down like a house of cards. Production was not even remotely the point of his job. A modern economy functions much like an electronic circuit, where electrons move from one point of high electric potential towards another point with lower electric potential. Without this difference in potential between two points, the circuit is inert and useless. If Trevor wasn't welding steel beams or fixing toilets, then he must be located in the opposite polarity. <em>An electron sink. A ground prong. A consumer.</em></p>
+
+<p>So what, then, is the point of doing the Numbers? Sending messages to <em>Ms. Trish</em> and <em>Mr. Herb</em>? It's to justify Trevor's consumption. Consumption without work, no matter how fake the work is, is not sustainable after millions of years of cultural evolution that put selective pressure on becoming a productive member of society. Trevor's job is not the Numbers. It's the Spam Sandwich.</p>
+
+<p>Terror turns into loathing, and loathing turns into acceptance. Tyler Durden took a different path halfway through this revelation, but Trevor's feels more peaceful and more righteous. Wonder what's on TV tonight. <span class="endmark">■</span></p>
+
+</div>

templates/base.gohtml

@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
 <!doctype html>
-<html>
+<html lang="en">
   <head>
     <meta charset="utf-8" />
     <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />

templates/index.gohtml

@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
 <!doctype html>
-<html>
+<html lang="en">
   <head>
     <meta charset="utf-8" />
     <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />