Looking towards 2026

Note: this post is probably not interesting to no one except me.

This website

At this point, I haven't been writing much here. But I plan to do a cleanup at some point. This is still going to be a place where I archive my junk.

But, I think I am going to move it off my VPS into my domain host, which is https://www.domeneshop.no and use my VPS for other things.

Process Micro

I am extending my joke further with Process Micro.

Basically, it was a joke to make a fictional company that was founded in the 70s, but now is bankrupt.

Process Micro is my vehicle to have my own and maybe other people's software projects where the software itself is obscure, highly-specific and mostly throwaway on computing environments that are "completely useless" (DOS, old Windows, Classic Mac OS) or really niche (Haiku).

So far, I wrote one program that is under the Process Micro moniker: https://gitlab.com/bolsen/PMCL.git. It is a putrid and tedious command language, which is perfect!

The thought I have now is to port that to the classic platforms, particularly Classic Mac OS and also on Haiku. I will also make a comparable Lazarus Pascal version. The idea is to wrap a GUI around it with a system to "monitor things.""

1. Lazarus/Pascal: This is still my hobby here; I want to make that eventually the "premier" version, since it is the most modern (i.e. with all the database supports I want to do)
2. Lazarus/Pascal, but on Haiku: This is also technically possible, but I want to see what I can do with the Be API (which means C++)
3. Classic Mac: This is nostalgic. I wanted to learn this stuff as a teenager, but it went over my head. Inside Macintosh is pure Pascal, even if C was used mostly in the 90s. It's possible probably to use both! But Macintosh programming was obscured by poor documentation (their code examples I read in Pascal don't have uses clauses! WTF?!? You have to guess the unit names!)
4. Programming in FreeVision (which is a TurboVision clone). These are to make those classic DOS UIs, like the old Turbo Pascal one. It's very modern though, with Unicode support, etc. There is also a modern C++ clone called tvision.

Retro computing (or: techno-optimistic computing)

The Process Micro thing/joke did make me interested again in this whole theme of single-user computing, ala 90s. This is was a time that I was optimistic about technology, but we saw the ambition for the past 25+ years revert to exploitation, monopolies and a surveillance capitalism. Linux and friends is a refuge and using KDE Plasma and the KDE desktop is literally the modern equivalent to that late 90s/early 2000s mindset around computing.

I particularly say this with urgency because part of my own health issue is related to a build up of stress as a culmination of a lot of things, particularly with work. One of the sources of frustration in 2025 is having to use Windows 10 daily and starting with Windows 11. I was never a Windows user until my current job. I am using corpo-Windows, which is a particularly trying experience. I got this massively specced out computer, but the thing dragged anyway, probably because of lots of network I/O contacting the mothership for every command I ran. I will probably deal with this until I retire, but at least I get some reprieve by being able to move a bit of work off of Windows where I can and into something that will not give me headaches ... i.e. KDE.

For new Mac stuff - except for some basic stuff, I just don't touch it. But, if I had to have a choice between two proprietary platforms at work, it would be a Mac (then just put a VM on it, which I did in the past.)

However, ideally, I would nominate Haiku to fill that role if they were to ever get a lot of funding to solve a lot of issues. But it can be ran in QEMU/etc. as well as on my spare laptop with no issue. It just doesn't implement things, like sleep states and there is work needed with browsers, but it is functional. I haven't tried it yet, but I installed Lazarus on my Haiku VM and it seemed at least to me a calmer simplicity with it already.

processmicro.org

My co-worker and I talked about making a Process Micro organization here in Norway, which I now seriously consider. It would be like an Apache Software Foundation but without the seriousness or depth of that. It would just be to have a name around member's dumb projects and weird hacks. If anything, we can get funding (like for art projects) and possibly sponsor conferences. There is an organization also here in Bergen, Norway that sponsors digital-art festivals called https://piksel.no/. (Outside their storefront is a screen of a C++ program running in an infinite loop trying to read an unallocated pointer, so it keeps printing NULL, or on stdio, 0 :-) )

I purchased the .org today and will use that domain for the new organization, to collect projects, documentation, etc. (Also my .no address can be used.)

Maybe in Norwegian, it will be called "Foreningen Process Micro" (The Association: Process Micro :D)

In the meantime, I put up a GitHub organization : https://github.com/processmicro. I am not a big fan of GitHub, but this is for advertising mostly. Maybe I will use Forgejo on a Process Micro domain when that time comes.

Future Posts

These are just some random ideas now. I am bad at committing to things though:

1. How to setup Haiku for basic use and development: there are things that would help beyond the basic install, like installing QuickLaunch and setting the shortcut, downloading an IDE(s), fixing an issue with time sync when in QEMU,
2. Rewriting PMCL: from garbage code to something portable :-D
3. Maybe going through Inside Macintosh a bit. The Overview volume contains a real application called "Venn Diagrammer", which is written in MacPascal. It can be a good example also to convert to Lazarus/Object Free Pascal, removing the Mac-isms and replace them with Delphi-isms.

Link drop

1. Inside Macintosh: https://preterhuman.net/macstuff/. There is also a CDR of Inside Macintosh using Apple's seemingly proprietary program DocViewer, but plain HTML is easier to deal with.
2. OS 9 Docs: https://ioi-xd.net/os9docs/. This is probably going to be a lifesaver since I can't get proper docs yet in OS 9 land. This is in C, but I presume mapping to Pascal is easy enough. The same author produced this: https://github.com/os9docs/thinkpdfs. I might have to look into Think C/Pascal also, but for OS 9, it might not be so useful.
3. Programming tutorial for Haiku: https://www.haiku-os.org/development/learningtoprogramwithhaiku.
4. https://wiki.freepascal.org/Free_Vision