Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/06/05/spam-spam-sausage-eggs/
Some output from the daily cron job:
Total Number Folder
----- ------ ------
664829 90 .spam/
3765099 411 /dev/null
83557 27 /home/djh/Maildir/
41492 16 /usr/sbin/sendmail -oi dannyman@gmail.com
The first is likely spam, which goes in a “quarantine” folder that I review every few days, catching the occasional “false positive.” The second is definately spam, and /dev/null is a special place on a Unix system that is akin to a black hole or a “circular file.” The next line are messages that are not spam — twenty seven legitimate messages, and sixteen of those are actually addressed to me, and are thus forwarded to the archive of my GMail account.
That’s right kids, around five megabytes of spam per day. Five million “bytes” is five million western characters, or letters, that a computer scans for me automatically to shitcan. I’m not sure whether to be depressed at the spam or marvel that the filters process it so well. The latter is surely the greater achievement!
/danny
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/05/05/props-to-freebsd-and-its-usb-support/
I spied a pretty Microsoft mouse laying near my desk. It has laser beams. Cool. I swapped it in to my workstation. I was apprehensive at first, because the existing mouse is PS/2, and this new mouse is USB … oh man, this could be a pain in the ass. I even avoided unplugging the PS/2 mouse. Back in 1997 when PS/2 mice were new, I recall a coworker at NCSA being reluctant to reboot FreeBSD so that it would see the PS/2 mouse, which was in those days only probed at boot.
Well, wouldn’t you know, but the new mouse worked right out of the box, so to speak. The USB architecture detects the mouse, then runs the appropriate daemon and hooks it up to /dev/sysmouse, which X is looking at. Everything was great, except the wheel didn’t take. I dropped by the awesome and handy Mouse Wheel Support for X in FreeBSD, edited my usbd.conf, restarted the moused, and everything was groovy.
Yeah, Windows handles mice better, but I’m impressed that FreeBSD did well enough in one of its weak spots – I didn’t have to restart X or nuffin’!
/danny
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/04/30/thats-usually-not-one-expect/
I figured out how to get the damned Comodo Certificate that somebody else installed into the damn Plesk server to work. Among my obstacles were unhelpful technical support from Comodo, and bizarre rambling posts in the Plesk message board, and at long last, completely inscrutable documentation from Apache:
Because although placing a CA certificate of the server certificate chain into SSLCACertificatePath has the same effect for the certificate chain construction, it has the side-effect that client certificates issued by this same CA certificate are also accepted on client authentication. That’s usually not one expect.
Basically, the trick is that Plesk puts a rootchain.pem in the /usr/local/psa/admin/conf, so what one must do, is try not to read the Apache documentation too much, and add the following line to the /usr/local/psa/admin/conf/httpsd.conf:
SSLCertificateChainFile /usr/local/psa/admin/conf/rootchain.pem
It’s only taken a few weeks of casual research to figure this out.
/danny
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/02/20/make-adobe-fast/
Thank you, NTK:
More cheap hacks to counter-impress smug MacOS X owners.
Yes, Panther's "Preview" app is a super-fast PDF viewer that's
a lot snappier than Adobe "OMFG! A vector! How do I draw
that??!!" Acrobat. Close the gap of shame (and stop yourself
eating your own fist off waiting for Acrobat to start up) by
running ADOBE READER SPEED-UP, a eensy-weensy Windows
program that deletes a bunch of Adobe plugins that you don't
care about. Voila: spend your spare time reading your doc
rather than watching Adobe go "Loading dumb-ass marketing
rubbish/lousy DRM feature" for a thousand hours.
http://www.tnk-bootblock.co.uk/prods/misc/index.php
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/12/02/spam-count-mail-config/
Since Monday, October 27:
Total Number Folder
----- ------ ------
746632 233 .IN.tuna/
40458402 2303 .spam/
66014448 8323 /dev/null
1144201 104 /home/djh/Mailbox
24251285 1358 /home/djh/Maildir/
51940 15 IN/tuna
2470117 245 spam
----- ------
135137025 12583
Yup, 8,000 messages delivered directly to the trash upon arrival, and another 2,000 detained as likely spam. 1,400 messages deemed legitimate and routed to my mailbox. A lot of those are boring stuff like cron output and legitimate commercial e-mailings and news notifications and whatnot. I don’t actually have folks writing me 2,000 messages every few weeks.
You can also see a shift from mbox to Maildir. I’ve found that Thunderbird isn’t a bad e-mail client for offline, but Courier IMAP requires Maildir, so Maildir I use.
So, just in case this ends up in someone’s search, I’ll share the Thunderbird-Maildir portion of my .muttrc:
# Courier-imapd compatability
# Where does mutt look for subfolders?
set folder=$HOME/Maildir/
# Subfolders begin with '.' -- default value excludes these
set mask="^."
# Where do we store our ingoing / outgoing messages?
send-hook . "set record=$HOME/Maildir/.archive-`date +%Y-%m`/"
save-hook . =.archive-`date +%Y-%m`/
# This is compatible with Phoenix "Drafts" folder
set postponed=$HOME/Maildir/.Drafts
# Mailboxes
mailboxes ! =.IN.tuna =.spam
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/11/14/frankensteins-laptop/
I’ve spent a little too much time hacking on my laptop lately. And by hacking, I mean hardware, and by hardware hacking, I mean an iron file, wire cutters, trimming off chunks of plastic, and of course carpet tape, electrical tape and duct tape, all in an effort to install an internal keyboard.
You see a good while back, the keyboad controller in my laptop started flaking out. So, I removed the internal keyboard and have been using external devices. One external device is a compact keyboard that fits very well in the space the old internal keyboard used to occupy, so I’d pack that along with the laptop whenever I wanted to go portable. But now I’d like to roam about the house with wireless, without having to drag a seperate keyboard around.
So, I liberated the mini keyboard from its plastic case and plopped it in the hole in my laptop, which it fits pretty well except it has a little printed circuit board connected to it by a couple of ribbon cables … and I really couldn’t fit that IN the laptop anywhere. Well, it sort of crammed underneath the keyboard fairly well. Also, the plastic from the laptop case chewed into the function keys, so, I trimmed back the laptop case somewhat and filed the plastic edges of the keyboard down a bit, but I still couldn’t get the thing in there with the circuit board tucked underneath. Too springy. Hrmmm.
So I puzzled and pondered and hit on snaking the ribbon cables underneath the LCD hinge and mounting the circuit board on top of the computer. Ugly, sure, but it worked! I wrapped the circuit board in a trimmed plastic baggie, and used electrical tape to mount it on top. Mmmm, not quite — the electrical tape, while black, like the laptop, is just a little too weak to keep the thing on. So, today I upgraded to good old-fashioned silver duct tape, reinforced with carpet tape to fasten the back of the circuit board to the surface. And after much dicking around, I was able to trim the three foot cord down to about four inches, that comes out of the back of the LCD and snakes around the corner and plugs in to the PS/2 port.
Much more portable, so now I can wander off to the living room and sit back in the recliner and type, as I’m doing now.
If only I were doing something useful with my little Frankenstein’s monster CPU buddy.
/d
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/02/04/style-sheets-and-html-elements/
Whilst writing up today’s entry, I came up with the idea that maybe I should make a stylistic distinction for different flavours of content. Most notably, the techy talk in this section. Don’t like techy talk? Skim through it quick. Easier to pick bits out.
Since we like to re-use code, and defer to precedence, I told this document to source in an additional style sheet, instead of replacing the site-wide style sheet. This way I can override the bits I want to change for this log document, while also catching whatever style properties change for the site as a whole.
The problem is that in the main style sheet, I had spelled out “monospace” as the “font-family” attribute for several elements, and now I wanted to change this part of several elements by using the DIV tag on a set of elements. For example:
<h3>Car</h3>
<p>Stuff about the car.</p>
<div class="techy">
<h3>Techy Stuff</h3>
<p>Blah blah blah</p>
</div>
In this way, I wanted the text within the techy DIV to come out monospace, while everything else was in the nice Helvetica font. The problem is that I had already defined the P, and H3 attributes to use Helvetica, so they never came out in monospace.
The answer came out to be that in the site-wide style sheet, I should stick with monospace as an attribute for the BODY parent tag, and tell the P and H3 elements to inherit:
BODY {
font-family: monospace;
color: black;
background-color: white;
margin: 1em 2em;
}
P {
font-family: inherit;
}
H3 {
font-family: inherit;
color: maroon;
}
So, in this document, I set the BODY font-family to Helvetica. Now the P elements in this page inherit Helvetica, instead of monospace, and everything comes out Helvetica. Unless, of course, the P is contained in a DIV tag that spells out a different font-family.
Ah, so let’s take this a step further, and change the colors of the H3 elements from maroon to a green color. Again I run in to that same problem that I have already set my H3 elements to be maroon! But since I want black text, I can’t just inherit maroon from the BODY element. What to do!?
After much searching through w3c’s recommendations, and different style sheet guides, I found a reference to an entry in Tantek Çelik’s log that invokes CSS syntax in a way I have never noticed before:
.techy H3 {
color: #003300;
}
This makes H3 elements within a techy parent class turn dark green. This is different, and vastly more useful to me than specifying H3:techy as I am used to doing. This allows me to take the techy class from my parent DIV, instead of having to specify techy as the class for each element. Yay!
It took a lot of effort on my part to figure this one out, so I had to share here. This is why you see this part of my document in green shades with a monospace font, and all I have to do to apply these styles to this section of the document is to wrap it in a DIV element of the appropriate class!
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/02/03/windows-file-synchronization/
I have files on my laptop that are important. I’d like to keep a copy of them on another computer. The handiest is the desktop machine I’ve assembled by buying a hard drive at Fry’s, and installing in a machine I’m borrowing from Brian. Today I set up a Windows network between the two, to see how well that works. Large file copies from the laptop, on Brian’s wireless network, to the desktop, tended to bomb out any time a packet dropped in the WIRELESS ETHER. So, I kibbitzed with Lemson on IRC, who sent me to the Knowledge Base article that explains how to turn on “file synchronization” and now when I copy to the server, the file synchronization service handles it.
Windows’ “file synchronization” is designed to locally cache files that are stored on a network server. This allows you to trundle away with your laptop, and work with the files, and settle up the difference when you get back near the server again. This means that it acts as an elaborate FILE CACHE.
What I really want, is to have two copies of the same set of files: one on the laptop, and one on the server, and something to occasionally reconcile the differences between the two. On Unix I would use rsync, which I can also use on Windows, thanks to Cygwin, but since I’m operating on Windows, with a “server” that does not have an Internet-style hostname, it seems more interesting to me to see what Microsoft wants me to do, by fiddling with icons, instead setting up a more Unixy environment and typing crazy commands.
This way I’ll be more in touch with what “normal” people do, which can come in handy when you need to help them out.
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2002/10/30/microserf/
I went down to the patio and listened to some Australians and Kiwis talk about bungee jumping. I bought some yogurt and a pain au chocolat from the convenience store, and I was joined by Yiling and two friends she had made in the women’s dorm: Andrea, a Dutch after-school art teacher, and Tran, a brash, butch, Korean-American Microsoft contractor. We walked back in to town together so Andrea and Yiling could have some food.
Tran interested me, as her boisterous external personality reminded me of a part of my own personality that needs refinement; At first she struck me as uncomfortably, stereotypically American, until I dug the common connection that was rooted in the lonely world of being different as a kid, and subsequently embracing weirdness as a strength. If you are then recruited away from the normal social realm into Microsoft or the Silicon Valley, you work long hours with similarly freaky people, and it takes that much longer to notice that you haven’t made that many friends, since you still haven’t had much call for trying to relate to other people on a more basic human level.
Or was that the theme in _Microserfs_, which I finished reading just before Italy? Either way, I think this adventure has done me some good in that regard. I’m pretty sure this is one reason why Mary told me “Just Go!”
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/1999/08/13/penguins/
So, this week Jesse was in town, as part of his grand whirlwind tour of his civilian friends from across our great nation. This morning I dropped him off to the Airport, and North he rode to Portland, I think. Ultimately, he’ll be back on Okinawa. Back to the Marines for the balance of his enlistment.
But it was nice to see an old friend.
This week we went to the LinuxWorld Expo in San Jose. We attended the “Get Sloshed with Slashdot” party – free beer, and last night we went to a VA Research party, where you had to pay for your alcohol.
At one point, I was standing behind Eric Raymond, which was cool enough in itself, and noted he was talking to some guy about a message they’d exchanged the other day. The guy turned to leave, and I caught his profile and a little penguin icon popped up in my brain and I asked myself, “Is that Linus Torvalds?”
It was Linus Torvalds. I talked with Jesse and Dave and they’d both had similar experiences as I had of seeing this dude and realizing that it was Linus – this hero of computer geeks ’round the world. Not like we all think Linus is a God, but it felt like I’d been hanging out in the Silicon Valley, and here I am at this party and I see this guy who’s a great big celebrity, and I likened it in my brain to people who move to Hollywood and have similar experiences at parties where they turn and realize this movie star is a foot or two away from them.
(Thanks to Randy Loux for the photo.)
I thought it was really neat, anyway. Hollywood for geeks!
Anyway, as we were leaving, so too was Linus, to a cheering crowd as he entered a white limousine. Celebrity chiq, neh? Well, it blocked my way out for a minute or two and I bade a last parting glance at this attractive woman who after eyeing each other on the dance floor told me about one of VA’s new wonderful rack-mount servers. I think she said it was 2U with five bays, which I have to admit, impressed me. Well, if I get a call from her I’ll have to admit that Linux boxen were not the first thing on my mind when she caught my eye. I’m hoping the sales pitch was more a reflex action after a few days of conference, to some chatty party dude.
Not like any sane person goes to a geek party expecting to meet women.
Things are just weird out here.
As I was checking out the conference, a few different things went in to my head. The first was that it was interesting to see all these companies gathered with the intention of making money off a Freeware OS. Corel’s demonstration of their pre-beta distribution was the most poignant, for me. They had four graphical dialogs and after a point-click-click Linux was installed on a computer in four minutes, requiring no thought as to partitioning.
It booted in to a somewhat polished KDE desktop. It struck me as a rather hard sell aimed at users like my mom. I could give mom that Corel Linux CD and she could have Linux up and running as easily as any other program.
Of course, its a whole OS, so you have to boot it separately, but hey.
Another thing that struck me was that all those years spent as a geek child were somehow paying off. I was entering a conference of people with interests very similar to mine, along with living in a part of the world where computers is the thing – everywhere you look. It felt like I’d graduated some weird alien test and was entering the temple of the promised land.
But I don’t actually like computers that much. I wasn’t going nuts or anything, I just thought it was all kind of cool.
Revenge of the Nerds.
But what struck me as most interesting, in my mind, was how Linus must feel, strolling between the booths. A fun little project to write a useful OS back when he was a grad student has blossomed in to something huge, with growing momentum behind it. It must boggle his mind. He seems to keep it all in stride too, at least from what I can tell from an interview I recently read. I think without his attitude, Linus would have become a world-class dork by now. You know, like Bill.
One interesting thing about the attendees, was that most folks were young. Sure, there were the occasional scruffy-lookin’, old-school, Unix types, (Erm, you like that? I stole it from Sven’s site.) But most of the people there were twenty-somethings. Some were business types, and many were just geeks. there was definitely some undercurrent of revolutionary fervor. I proudly wore my FreeBSD tee-shirt, to show what flavor of geek I was. The FreeBSD people I ran in to tended to be older, and more scruffy-flavored.
Kickin’ it oldschool BSD at the Linux con.
Does this make sense to anyone? Only a select few, I’m guessing.
Heh.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/1999/06/18/gettin-the-job-done/
Ah, so yesterday I drove over to Wal Mart and picked up some Liquid Wrench and a kit with a 2 ton jack and jack stands. And I adjusted the brakes. They’re better now, though not as good as I’d like … some of those adjusting stars are damned stuck. I’ll take it some place professional and hard-core perhaps.
Got to work around 3:30. Then I figured to punch down the Ethernet cables I could to the patch panel once and for all, while I installed FreeBSD on a machine to determine if Apsfilter and Samba could do a better job of sharing a printer than NT Workstation. Been bleeding my forehead trying to figure out how the freak Windows 95 clients were supposed to print to the NT Workstation that had adopted the printer before my arrival. FreeBSD and Samba proves to have better interoperability with Windows than NT Workstation does. The irony is not lost on me.
Since the machine I found happens to be a PentiumIII at 450 Mhz, and I was installing FreeBSD, and the graphics card looks pretty bad-ass too, I’m using the print server for my new desktop machine. It is too hard-core to be a humble printer server.
Left work around 3:30. My message about getting printing to work was well received, especially with the Windows 98 crowd. Slept in. Then I went to the Men’s Wearhouse and spent a lot of money. I bought a suit, shirt, two ties, socks, fancy shoes, some italian sandals, hell a belt, uhmmm. I even got a Men’s Wearhouse credit card. My first suit. Well, I bought about half a suit once for the Allen Hall formal one year, but this time I got all hard-core.
With the Men’s Wearhouse credit card, you get free pressing.
Anyway, then I did the laundry, eating at this chinese greasy spoon. Greasy food, but well, a big plate o’ stuff for $4.90, probably the best deal I’ve had yet in California.
Oh, I got the car washed yesterday too. There’s this big ol’ place on El Camino right by the house (like, a block or two away) where this army of Mexicans in blue shirts cleans your car inside and out for $13.25, I think it was. There’s a sign that says that they recycle the water, so going to the car wash uses less water than doing it yourself. And they give you lemonade and popcorn so it’s just really sweet.
I think the guy who gave the car back was hoping for a tip though. Next time. While they didn’t get all the little insect guts that had been pounded onto the hood at 75 MPH and then cooked on in the California sun over these past weeks, the car was really clean … I like it. Had that newish feeling.
Well, the plane leaves tonight at 11 PM. Mom is gonna meet me for tomorrow morning’s 4AM layover at O’Hare.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/1998/04/17/procmail-filter-duplicates/
Fri Apr 17 23:34:18 CDT 1998
# Just to be sure anything mailed TO me aint filtered elsewhere ...
# (after deleting duplicates)
:0 c: .msgids.lock
* ^Message-Id: *\/[^ ].*
| formail -D 16384 .msgids
:0 e:
* ^TO(dannyman|djhoward)
$DEFAULT
That’s what I spent my evening hashing about. That’s a procmail recipe which I wrote because often when someone responds to a mailing list that I’m on, I get two copies of the message – one sent to me, and one sent to the list. That recipe will send the first copy of a message that I receive to my INBOX if it is appropriately addressed. Subsequent copies will not be placed in my INBOX, the net effect being that if someone responds to me and a list I’m on, then that email will go once to my INBOX, and subsequently to the list folder. This keeps my INBOX slightly less cluttered – which with 207 messages sitting in it is a bit crowded, and will help in keeping context in a message thread on a mailing list.
Personally, I think it’s a very very cool thing.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/1998/04/03/dawn/
Fri Apr 3 01:28:39 CST 1998
I started the journal back in … well, sometime between early 1995 and the March of 1997. I’d say sometime during 1996. If memory serves, it ran for more than a year, closer to a year and a half. Put that around late 1995. The web seems awfully young back then.
Originally, the idea was taken from some sites in Hawaii, notably Stacey Hayashi, who had not only a pretty face, but a compelling website with a journal on it. A journal, I observe, that is no longer present. It seems some of the pioneers in the Hawaii crowd, like Stacey, Jay, and Kat have since abandoned their public journal-writing practices. At least with the latter two, I know that part of the equation is busy-body Asian parents, whom I’ve met from time to time in my life, but have never had to worry over. My Dad’s still a hippie!
Anyways, in Marc of 1997, the old journal – hell, my entire website, in it’s second or third incarnation, was no more. It, and the entire contents of Dannyland had been wiped out in a hard disk crash. Nowadays I keep some backups. I didn’t mind terribly starting over from scratch – regrowth and renewal, but the lack of backups meant that that First Epoch, as I now call it, is gone, probably forever.
The Second Epoch ended just yesterday, as I concluded that the journal could reflect my interest in segmentation – dividing stuff into months and such. This era lasted a year, from the time I brought Dannyland back up with a new hard drive last March. I think, most immediately memorable in this period, is my relationship with Asao. I’d been dating her when the new journal came to take the place of the old one, and I dumped her in July after reluctantly concluding that the way things were just weren’t going to make it. I start out with a lot of cocky self-confidence, got shaken up by the whole break-up thing, then hide in pretentious soul-searching, reading Gandhi and all … I’m feeling much better now, and more honestly righteous, a little bit wiser, and somewhat humbled.
Another thing reflected in the Second Epoch is my growing prowess with Unix. From the start, the journal was indexed by a CGI program, which I revised over Winter Break. It has now been considerably lobotomized, to form more a role of that of a museum, because it should no longer be actively used. I’ve already adapted a few bits of the old code to indexing in the month section here though. In June I return to EnterAct where I will work in a system administration role – a definite change from my old technical support position!
Today, it is the Third Epoch – the perl wizardry can fill in the cracks, ligaments between the bones, but now my concerns are with information structure, hierarchy, and interrelationships between different modes of authoring and different contexts of experiencing the information. I want to structure my journal much as I would want to structure my life … I’m bringing form in, I hope, something that while it won’t give me doctrine or answers, it can at least serve to structure information, and facilitate my understanding and other’s understanding of me and my life.
Noble, immaculate goals, spoken so flowerily at 0200h. We shall see what may become of them. Feedback solicited!
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/1998/03/23/to-work/
Mon Mar 23 19:39:28 CST 1998
There’s a guy on the radio who is talking about public school reform, and is lamenting that the ideals of Horace Mann have been replaced with those of Adam Smith.
Mon Mar 23 21:28:14 CST 1998
You know, I really can not concentrate in the presence of any noise that might stimulate me in any way. Certain background noises are okay, but speech that might interest me, or music … no.
We’re over next door for a few days. I’m back in Chicago for Spring Break. The guy at Drollinger Auto Repair managed to get the van fixed after I managed to reproduce the problem I had been having with it. I made it back to Chicago alright, and now, like I just wrote, we’re taking refuge next door on account of they’re refinishing the floors. It is no small production to move everything in your apartment over next door for two or three days and then back again. ![[Kitchen]](/journal/images/980323.gif)
Uncle is having the apartment here done after ours is done. We’re being done over Monday and Tuesday and this apartment will be done over Friday and Saturday. Meanwhile, Uncle is busy painting ceilings and getting other nice things done to this apartment because the guy who’s moving in next door to us, a middle-aged African guy, will be storing stuff in the apartment in the part that wont be finished starting Wednesday. I’m wondering how quick Uncle’s going to get the kitchen here done. I know he’s going to fix up the floor before the guys come to sand and finish it, ripping out the tile to let the wood come out, but to get it to be a nice kitchen like ours, with lots of cabinets and neat things instead of the pantry he ripped out, that’s going to be some work!
Anyways, Wednesday will be busy – we gotta move a lot of our stuff back and wash the walls next door, so that the guy who’s moving in can move his stuff in. It might be worth it though. Mom says that since she’s getting the floors done and the walls washed, it’ll be like a new house – a non-smoking house. She’s going to make another try at kicking the habit – she says that she was pleasantly suprised that the nicotine gum that a friend had offered her on a long trans-Atlantic flight, didn’t upset her teeth and calmed her nerves during the long, smokeless trip. I offered that a gum might also satisfy the oral fixation, which I understand to be an ingredient in cigarette addiction.
I went in to EnterAct today to talk to Tracy about summer work. Ended up sitting on an admin meeting, and discussing oh-so-briefly what I might be able to do with them this summer. Tracy beamed at the idea of having four full-time admins! Charlie bragged to me that they were signing two to three CompleteAct accounts per day – that’s the expensive business stuff that makes them the real money. $20/month dialin accounts are a lot lower revenue. EnterAct seems even more complicated than NCSA’s network … but that’s largely because the admin staff do a lot of things that at NCSA is handled by other departments, partly because they’re dealing with commercial dialin access mostly off of PCs as opposed to networking several hundred people in different buildings to campus, Industrial Partners, vBNS and some other experimental networks … well, actually NCSA seems more complicated, but the stuff we do downstate is a little more static – EnterAct is growing at least as fast as the Internet at large, whereas NCSA has been around since before the modern commercial Internet has been on anyone’s mind, and so doesn’t have to move quite as fast, or something. EnterAct is about three years old see, everything’s being reinvented at once.
Anyways it’s a bit chilly in here, I’m going to lay off typing for awhile and scan in a few pictures before I go to bed. Jessy’s boyfriend, Dion, managed to get the scanner working with mom’s computer, and now we’ve got it talking to stumpy’s Sambda via NetBEUI, not to mention sharing stumpy’s ppp connection. Sweet. WinAmp was able to read in stumpy’s directory of MP3 files and throw them into a random playlist a lot quicker than I was able to write a rather crude perl script on stumpy to do the same thing. Sometimes, Windows-based software does just what ya need it to do … maybe I need to learn me some Unix GUI programming! :)
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/1998/03/09/computer-literacy-narrative/
My history with computers begins Christmas of 1984 when Grandpa gave our family a Commodore 64 computer. It was several years before we had a complete system including disk drive, monitor, and printer. At first I was relegated to typing commands into the basic interpreter and playing cartridge-based games.
Upon graduating eighth grade in 1989, I convinced my family to reward my endeavors with an Amiga A500 computer, which blew the 64 away, holding twenty times more memory, much more speed, a capacity of 4,096 colors at higher resolution with special graphics chips, compared to the 64’s 16 colors, and best of all it had a cool built-in disk-drive on the side.
By 1992 I had saved up half the money required to make the purchase of an Amiga 1200, the descendant of the A500, with more advanced graphics, processing power, and a continued low price tag of around $600. The A1200 and A500 were cheap enough for my family to realistically afford, and gave a great amount of ability for the price. The graphics, sound, and multitasking Operating System were far superior to that offered on any other platform. Unfortunately, Commodore’s management and marketing sucked, and they went belly-up by 1996.
After being discharged from the Army in 1994, I began attending the University of Illinois in Winter of 1995, where I was for the first time exposed to NCSA Mosaic, and was induced to create my first web page. I remember the great effort it had been to find, scan, crop, and convert a small photo of me to augment what I had there. The web loaded a lot quicker before everyone started putting graphics all over the damn place like they do today.
Telecommunications has always been a strong interest of mine. Unfortunately, online services were priced beyond my reach throughout most of my childhood. By the time I came to the University I was finally making enough money to subscribe to a local Chicago Internet access provider. I’d felt like I missed a lot not having the financial capabilities to get on the networks sooner though.
When I first arrived at the University, my interest was in not going in to Computer Science, as I really only liked the Amiga, ever-waning in it’s popularity. That and I wasn’t particularly interested in making Math a great thing in my life. However, I eventually did join the CS department after my first experiences learning code – it was so fun and liberating! Now I had some power over computers, I could write the software, and do things the way I hoped they could be. And, after all, the other computers weren’t so bad. The Unix systems at least seemed to work well enough.
Well, Math of course, is not my strong suit. A year or so ago I met Brad in the Allen cafeteria, and was shocked at his approach of being a Rhetoric major with a minor in CS! Gee … I’d always enjoyed writing for my own personal interest, much as I loathed research papers. And I did hit the 99% percentile on the ACT for “Rhetoric” – whatever that was, I had not known at the time. And come to think of it, hadn’t I placed out of Rhet 105 three different ways?
The next week, I proudly made the switch.
The Internet continues to play a very big part in my life. My web site grows slowly every week. I keep my diary on-line for others to read. I write CGI applications. I’m a hard-core Unix geek, administering two of my own systems, writing my HTML and perl scripts in vi, wowwing friends with afterstep. I work for the networking group at NCSA, for the CSIL as a labsitter, and worked last summer at an ISP in Chicago called EnterAct, where I may very well return this summer.
I now use only Unix, and my old Amiga systems from time to time out of nostalgia and respect for history. I own two Unix boxen, four Amiga systems, and the old Commodore 64. While most of these are antiques, I still lend some systems out to others from time to time to facilitate their computing needs.
My fanatical Unix snobbery does mean that I know very little about Windows 95 or Mac. Because I have good computer karma, I still tend to negotiate such systems better than the average Joe, but I’m by no means a wiz. Instead I enjoy spending my time tinkering with completely open systems like FreeBSD. I am proud and inspired by the idea that there are now several very competent Operating Systems available even for normal users that are built and maintained entirely by volunteer effort. It is my goal to continue to learn and ultimately contribute to this effort as I can.
I hate Windows though. I find Microsoft’s philosophy of “Might Makes Right” peculiarly offensive. It seems a holy war between the dark forces of greed and the efforts of people writing useful stuff for free. I’m proud to say that not one byte of Microsoft code has ever run on any system that I own. In order to push this idea of independence I am even now writing a school paper in the archaic language of troff through vim, sending the job to the Dorm’s NT print server through lpr.
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