Welcome to David Norris Central Data Service Gopher Site

(since the DFDN/ directory has no gophermap, it's simply listed)

The classes are on a Tuesday and Wednesday starting at 22:00 UTC,

which is 14:00 PST or 17:00 EST. New for 2023!

=> Another brand new Outschool class - Chemistry!

=> New Outschool classes to be based on eBooks..

=> DFDN Website

=> Teaching and Training Related Pages

=> Current Preply profile

=> DFDN Email (Beta)

=> My profile picture (a JPG file in the DFDN/ directory) | Gloria - who got this whole project started! | Shaki, who goes by the name of Sandy | And of course Ade | And of course, our logo!

You are not alone.

=> Britain' metrification fiasco | Scotland - What now for independance? | Will my ex-wife's debts affect me after I leave the UK? | If you retire in the UK, don't die from Dementia! | And another reason I have no wish to retire in the UK.... | Yet another reason I have no future here! Age descrimination! | ...And yet another example of the diabolical way this country is being run! | An example of how the cost of living is affecting the disabled

Another example of why starting a new family in the UK is out of th

question - as if government incompetance and the CMS aren't enough.

=> Our mortgage got so high we put off having a baby

PS: A young idiot refered to me as 'old guy Dave' in a group interv

last October. I asked if, I gave him a visit in office, he would sa

same to me in person - oh, and I worked in security...

=> DFDN Worldwide Network Radio Communications network (Approved users only):

=> New eBook publishing venture under development | eBook page on the website:

=> New eBook publishing venture on Amazon >>>

Update: I plan to include a letter to my local member of

parlienment (Jeremy Corbyn) after I leave the UK over conduct of

the CMS! Details to be announced.

=> Britain's Metrification Fiasco | Only the Yanks can be this naive!

=> Mankind Initialtive (Supports male victims of domestic abuse)

=> Christmas Statement 2023 now online! | Christmas Statement Archive

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

MY VISA IS IN TRANSIT FINALLY!!!

SHIPMENT STATUS: IN TRANSIT

Shipment Information

Origin:

Burkina Faso

Package:

BOXED

Status:

In Transit

Destination:

United Kingdom

Carrier:

USPS

Type of Shipment:

Air Freight

Product:

Visa Documents ( CONFIDENTIAL )

Expected Delivery Date:

2023-03-15

Departure Time:

11:00 am

Pick-up Date:

2023-02-22

Pick-up Time:

10:00 am

PLEASE COMPLY WITH THE SHIPPING PROCESS AND PROCEDURES TO

FACILITATE DELIVERY

Packages

Metric Weight : 0.02kg.Total Volume : 0.00012cu. m.Total

Actual Weight : 5.00kg.Shipment History

Note: Please check back for further updates as some

rescheduling is highly likely around the time of my relocation;

I will have to travel, quarentine and install fibreoptic internet

service; I will keep my students in the loop. I sure hope that

quarentine facility has Wi-Fi!!! This site will eventually

appear on a .bf domain, which I can only register when I arrive

in the country.

Students should continue to schedule classes until further

notice - I will update regarding travel details and the

contingency plan. This will aim to minimise disruption.

I will feel young again soon when I leave here!

=> (Don't believe me? See an explanation here:)

Please lord, may my visa arrive ASAP so I can vacate

this hell - before I lose my sanity?!

Sadly, much of the UK's electricity generation (not to mention

heating) comes from gas. For an explanation of the lack of storage

facillities (due to this incompetent government's lack of strategic

planning skill), see below. Note that environmental campaign groups

have said for decades now, 'well if you had listened to us, we

wouldn't be in this mess now, would we?

=> Why has the UK almost no gas storage? | Cost of living crisis - or cost of GOVERNMENT crisis??? | The unprecidented level of industrial action sweeping the UK as a result | Prepayment meters: It is about time a 'civilised' country banned this inhumane practice!!! | Update: Energy firms face action over prepayment meters!

=> Raspberry PI Monitor | You can get an idea of the traffic on the system here | Webserver Traffic Monitor

=> English (Specifically British) slang terms | I.T and Software related vocabulary | Logistics related vocabulary | Classification scheme for undergraduate coursework (UK) | Ten Things your domestic cleaner doesn't want you to know | Was Neville Chamberlain really a weak and terrible leader? | Time management - very important!

The following is not word wrapped - download to view:

=> A trip down memory lane: UK Scanning Directory 2009

=> Is gopher still relevant today? | The rise and fall of the Gopher Protocol | Overbite browser for Android version 25 | Overbite browser for Android version 26 | Why I am, have never been, and never will be, interested in the UK property market | ...And renting is no better!!!

Domestic abuse, father's alienation and how UK family law colludes,

aids and abets this vile behaviour: and why I plan to campagin

against it - I have my book entitled "when the nightmare came", an

accompanying video entitled "The UK Child Maintainance Service

exposed" and I also plan to write to the local member of

parlienment after leaving the UK...

=> Why UK Family Law is an Abusers' Charter | My son was killed by his girlfriend - a horror story | Domestic abuse stories list (PDF) for download | Attacked with hammers, boiling water and lit cigarettes

=> An excellent tool to format text for Gopher pages

(Use options: 'Retain existing paragraphs' and 'Keep blanks'.

Line length needs to be 67 charactors as per the standard.

Amid the laughing stock of the UK's goverment fiasco...

=> Why I am desperate to leave the shambolic UK...

=> An example of why medical treatment in developing countries lags behind

=> 70:70/9/DFDN/Glossary.pdf Glossary of Medical Tarms for English Language Students

=> Jokes from the Chamber of horrors

These are jokes about those whose parents would get a visit before

they were conceived, and given contraceptive advice - if only I

owned a time machine..

Blagues de la Chambre des horreurs:

Ce sont des blagues sur ceux dont les parents recevraient une

visite avant leur conception et recevraient des conseils sur la

contraception - si seulement je possédais une machine à voyager

dans le temps.

Анекдоти з кімнати жахів:

Це жарти про тих, чиї батьки відвідали б ще до того, як вони були 
зачаті, і дали б поради щодо контрацепції - якби у мене була

машина часу.

Connection and security issues for users:

=> Connection of I.T Based Systems to the DFDN | So, you need to run a secure Unix system, do you? | Ports blocked at the DFDN gateway | Friendly Probing on the DFDN - Please Read | Security issues for users - and two tales of woe | Living Dangerously - the importance of regular Backups! | Guidance for connecting a device to the DFDN

=> Five ages of the Universe (will blow your mind!) | Timeline of our future - simplified but thought provoking | How life will become extinct - most likely scenarios | A brief story of Earth's inception | How humanity might outlive the Earth

=> How did owning a home in the UK become unaffordable?

=> Thirty common business phrases used in the office

=> English Idoms - an explanation for TEFL/EFL Students

=> I will be asked in lessons (sigh), so I say my piece only once... | Making your own Alcohol - an introduction for beginners | See also my own article on home winemaking | Also available in Micro$oft reader format | Monitoring cordless phones in the USA - those were the days

=> Circuits Analysis Course (PDF) | Circuits Analysis Course (ODP) | Circuits Analysis Course (XPS) | Circuits Analysis Course (OXPS)

Some early radio scanner sheets by Nigel Ballard - from 1990, but

informative nonetheless:

=> AOR AR3000 Test | Scanner hints | More scanner hints | My scanning triumphs and disasters | Best of the early scanning sheets

Again very informative: early copy protection - still as relevant

today as it was back then!

The following are good reading practice....

=> Copy Protection: a history and outlook | UK Parlienment debate - Pirate Radio Stations | Digital Radio's Demise | Rumainian Refugees (1989) | Electricity Supply (December 1990)

Doom was the (more or less) groundbreaking action shooter game,

although Wolfenstein 3D was almost as advanced. Here is the

origional Doom FAQ from 1993. Another trip down memory lane.

=> Origional Doom FAQ

This gopher site is being tested as a website alternative as many

people in Africa pay for data by the megabyte. It has very low

overheads and will use less data. For your information, gopher was

a forerunner of the world wide web and, although largely plaintext,

it uses less data and only fetches the files requested by the user.

Besides, it has a nice aspect sadly lacking on the web! As Tim

Gihring, one of the origional developers of the gopher protocol at

the university of Minnesota puts it:

“It’s actually rather nice to have a small ecosystem because no

one’s running annoying ads in Gopherspace or trying to track your

browsing habits,” he says. “The protocol makes the former hard and

the latter almost impossible.”

As the Web has become synonymous with the internet, and we conduct

more of our lives online, we’ve learned to abide the misinformation

solicitations, and scams that thrive in its chaos — though it has

changed us and society in ways we are only beginning to understand.

If Gopher had won out, who knows how things would be different.

The only downside is that, like all protocols of its time, it does

not encrypt data over the network, so it is not suitable for

business transactions! All traffic is plaintext.

Another protocol under evaluation is gemini; a very new protocol

which operates on port 1965 TCP and transport layer security is an

integral part of the standard. As Project Gemini FAQ states:

"Gemini is a new application-level internet protocol for the

distribution of arbitrary files, with some special consideration

for serving a lightweight hypertext format which facilitates linkin

between files. You may think of Gemini as "the web, stripped right

back to its essence" or as "Gopher, souped up and modernised just a

little", depending upon your perspective (the latter view is probab

more accurate). Gemini may be of interest to people who are...

Opposed to the web's ubiquitous tracking of users

Tired of nagging pop-ups, obnoxious adverts, autoplaying videos and

other misfeatures of the modern web

Interested in low-power computing and/or low-speed networks, either

by choice or necessity

Gemini is intended to be simple, but not necessarily as simple as

possible. Instead, the design strives to maximise its "power to wei

ratio", while keeping its weight within acceptable limits. Gemini i

also intended to be very privacy conscious, to be difficult to exte

in the future (so that it will stay simple and privacy conscious)

and to be compatible with a "do it yourself" computing ethos.

If you have a gemini browser instaled, here is the link:

=> (Gemini link; see below for client list)

=> For Gemini software, see here.

Now I intend to test gemini protocol also in addition to the

HTTP server and gopher. It is not a replacement for either, but

will be suplementry to both. The web is most frequently used,

gopher offers simpicity and as previously descriped VERY low

overheads, but has no capability of transport layer security and

is not flexibie by todays standards. Incidentally, gopher is

making a slight resurgence but most browsers cannot support it

without extra plugins, if indeed they are available.

Gemini on the other hand is only about 4 years old at time of

writing and it looks set to have a bright future, albeit little

known in 2022. I intend to experiment with it once I have found

a server which will execute on the OS I have - Agate has been

tried but so far, it compiles but will not xecute on my

operating system it would seem even though it will compile.

So far I am using Lagrange client on Windows 11 and Deedum on

my Android device; other clients are available for both Apple

& Android devices too and there are clients available for Linux,

Unix and Macintosh also - I have not tried these however.

Incidently, HTTP operates on port 80, HTTPS on port 443, gopher

on port 70 and genini on port 1965. All use TCP please note.

Returning to gopher, Take a look at how to structure your own

gopher pages.

The tab separates the display string and the selector (path). If

you don't use a full path, then it is relative to this one.

The item type tells the gopher client what that menu item is. It is

always the first character in a line with tabs. These item types

here were 1 (a menu), 0 (a text file), g (a GIF image) and 9 (a

generic downloadable binary).

Other item types include I = generic image or JPEG.

Item types

In a Gopher menu's source code, a one-character code indicates

what kind of content the client should expect. This code may

either be a digit or a letter of the alphabet; letters are

case-sensitive. The technical specification for Gopher, RFC 1436,

defines 14 item types. The later gopher+ specification defined an

additional 3 types.[23] A one-character code indicates what kind

of content the client should expect. Item type 3 is an error code

for exception handling. Gopher client authors improvised item

types h (HTML), i (informational message), and s (sound file)

after the publication of RFC 1436. Browsers like Netscape

Navigator and early versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer would

prepend the item type code to the selector as described in

RFC 4266, so that the type of the gopher item could be determined

by the url itself. Most gopher browsers still available, use these

prefixes in their urls.

Canonical types

0 Text file

1 Gopher submenu

2 CCSO Nameserver

3 Error code returned by a Gopher server to indicate failure

4 BinHex-encoded file (primarily for Macintosh computers)

5 DOS file

6 uuencoded file

7 Gopher full-text search

8 Telnet

9 Binary file

Mirror or alternate server (for load balancing or in case

of primary server downtime)

g GIF file

I Image file

T Telnet 3270

gopher+ types

; Movie file

< Sound file

Non-canonical types

d Doc. Seen used alongside PDF's and .DOC's

h HTML file

i Informational message, widely used.

=> image file "(especially the png format)"

document rtf file "rich text Format")

/ document rtf file "rich text Format")	server	70

=> Sound file (especially the WAV format)

document pdf file "Portable Document Format")

/ document pdf file "Portable Document Format")	server	70

X document xml file "eXtensive Markup Language" )

<- 67 chars ------------------------------------------------------>

If you just use a display string and a selector, then your host nam

and port are filled in. If you add a host and port, then it becomes

an external link like these:

Add a search engine link! This is external. Item type 7 means a

server you can send a request to.

=> Search Veronica-2

Add links to other gopherspaces! Use item type 1 for a gopher menu

otherwise.

=> gopher.floodgap.com | gopher.quux.org

Add links to web pages! Use item type h and a URL: (a "hURL").

Don't use a host and port; that's part of the URL already.

=> A web link to www.floodgap.com

<- 67 chars ------------------------------------------------------>

=> DFDN: Link to the entire contents of DFDN/

<- 67 chars ------------------------------------------------------>

Send comments and suggestions on this tutorial to

davidn@dfdn.org.bf - once I arrive in Burkina Faso I intend to

requires you to have a physical presense in the country - which I

soon will god willing!

=> Darwin Streaming Server (For a later project)

=> Search Veronica-2

Proxy Information

Original URL: gemini://dfdn.info/dfdn/site-content.gmi
Status Code: Success (20)
Meta: text/gemini;lang=en-US
Capsule Response Time: 1892.941858 milliseconds
Gemini-to-HTML Time: 22.69488 milliseconds

This content has been proxied by September (3851b).