Early-morning groggy grumblings

[azurelunatic]

It's not as bad as it could have been. The radio alarm clicked on to bring me "Forever Young", which I listened to, rather than writing weird artsy Madonna popslash in my head while falling asleep again; this means I'm awake and in lab.

Neither pico nor nano seems to be on Carmen here. Poor Carmen. I'm sure I'm scandalizing Sandstrom by having an emacs window open...

...and now it is closed. Text editors and I, command line ones, are not awake enough to appreciate each other this morning. Rather, it is knurd, and I am zonked. I think most computer programs are constantly knurd,unless they're permafried.

Now, http://www.frozentux.net and I are talking to each other. I think I'm still asleep.

Comments

[wibbble]

> Neither pico nor nano seems to be on Carmen here.

Eep! How crappy! What distro are the machines running, do you know?

Try also 'joe', which is another friendly editor. If you're used to DOS editors, there's a version of joe which emulates 'wordstar' - type 'jstar'.

Hope that helps. :o)

[azurelunatic]

Kate was there. I told Sandstrom that vi and I had pretty much declared blood feud on each other since last time, and he helped me bring up Kate.

[wibbble]

Is Kate a machine or an editor? If the latter, I've not heard of it. (Sounds like it might be a KDE GUI editor...)

[azurelunatic]

All GUI.

[wibbble]

Ahhh.

I'm not up with X11 text editors, other than gvim (vi-for-GNOME, which is basically a wrapper around normal vim).

Very strange that they don't have pico, though.

[azurelunatic]

We installed it very bare-bones. So "they" in this case is "me".

[wibbble]

Ahhhh.

You set up your own entire machines?

Do they have some sort of virtual machine thing going on, or do you all each get your own physical box?

If you decide you do want pico, it's linked with the 'pine' package, so you'd need to find that RPM and install it.

[azurelunatic]

That's just the one networking lab. All the other labs but that one (and I think the tcom lab as well) have boxen set up by the computer guys, and the students cannot do jack on them.

But in the tcom lab, they have machines set up with removable harddrives, and each student with reason to be in that lab has a drive issued to them, and they are allowed to set stuff up. In my networking class, the one with Sandstrom, we get a Win2KPro, a Win2Kserver, and a Red Hat per lab group.

[wibbble]

Ahh!

I see now.

Interesting set-up. Here there's uni-wide unix accounts and all the machines are clones of each other. Even the pure-CS people don't do things like setting up machines on their own.

[azurelunatic]

Oh, and then there are the very weird boxes in the Architecture & Operating Systems class, where we get to tear apart computers, and then install from the ground up, many different times.

[wibbble]

Weird how?

In terms of the hardware or OS?

[azurelunatic]

Well, old, and weird in terms of never being settled down to stably use for anything; they're torn apart both metaphorically and literally all the time.

[wibbble]

Ahhh.

Still, that's a productive use for an old machine - better to teach a new generation of hackers how to hack than to sit in a cupboard gathering dust... or worse, sit in a landfill waiting to decompose.

[azurelunatic]

Yep. The old machines are pretty happy.

It's fun to shred 'em. Though there are some things that just aren't so pretty...

[wibbble]

*grins*

Geek growing pains. ;o)

[azurelunatic]

Yep.

Though, after I stopped shaking from the fight-or-flight chemical cocktail, which was put to good use in unplugging so fast like that, I was just fine and even a little amused.

...I learned my Geek Combat Reflexes young, when a label-printer of my father's caught fire when I was about 7. Then, my reaction was limited to jumping up and down and screaming, "It's on fire! It's on fire!", but I watched my father's actions closely (unplug first) and afterwards was the one who ran toward the smelly plastic smoke rather than away.

[azurelunatic]

(And yes, I did Google to find it. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=azurelunatic+smoke+disk is a three-parameter googlewhack.)

[wibbble]

*grins*

I /had/ wondered how you dug the exact post out so quickly. :o)

[azurelunatic]

I figured I could have spent too much time combing my archives, or I could let the master do its work.

[azurelunatic]

We're using Red Hat ...9-something, I think.