7th September

Over the weekend I wrote some code, specifically in C++ under Haiku. I was a
big fan of BeOS back in the day, and have followed Haiku ever since it's 
inception as OpenBeOS. I've dabbled with code on it once or twice over the
years (much as I did with BeOS) and every time I've been reminded of just how
nice the BeAPI was (and still is under Haiku).

Everything is named as you'd expect, and you get get a fair way just with
intuition, though naturally the docs help too. There's not much content out
there for programming under Haiku though, if I make much more progress perhaps
I'll see if I can help rectify that myself, but for now I'll just see if this
little experiement goes anywhere. The simple idea is a native Gopher client.
Sure there's some already available, but more is never bad, and it's a nice,
well-defined scope that I find is invaluable when it comes to get a hobby 
project into something resembling a finished state.

If you're a developer who's never looked at the BeAPI, maybe just have a read
for kicks. You know you're in for a good time when a system API includes these
nuggets:

int32 is_computer_on()
Returns 1 if the computer is on. If the computer isn't on, the value returned
by this function is undefined.

double is_computer_on_fire();
Returns the temperature of the motherboard if the computer is currently on
fire. Smoldering doesn't count. If the computer isn't on fire, the function
returns some other value.