24th November 2002
Wow, first post. Well, I guess this is the beginning of my web log. Hopefully it will become a fairly recent thing, give me something creative to do once in a while.
Man, I had to install wget on Museum. I was kinda hoping to use this web log to track the progress of my journey to become a l33t Linux Mast0r. It always seems to me that people are either clueless about *nix, or are kernel hackers, I’ve never met an in-betweener.
It makes me wonder where people go to learn this stuff. Is there some kind of mystical quest they must take on before they are granted the ability to fprot tarballs or obfuscate perl code? You might have thought that by studying Computer Science, I would have met others in my position. Not so.
Anyway, wget. In b3ta newsletter issue 66, a link was posted to a site called Secret Santa (a term I think that is more famililar to Merkans), a nice idea where people exchange Amazon wishlists, and buy a present for a randomly selected person. I have a banner for it here:
IMG
Originally, I had the image sourced from the original site, but I thought it would be more “proper” (don’t ask me what criteria I use to classify the “properness” of something) to download it and to link it locally. Being the naive Windows user I am, I imagined this would be a simple task. It then struck me that I had never downloaded anything in a terminal environment before, and thus did not know how to continue.
This begins my single grief with linux, the names they give commands. It seems to me that the simpler the command, the shorter the name they give it. Or perhaps a more sensible hypothesis would be that more commonly used commands have shorter names. For example, the GNU C Compiler is quite sensibly named ‘cc’, but, whoever wrote the Copy and Covert utility decided that this meant they had to name their program ‘dd’ (cc was taken, so they moved one character along). Silly.
It doesn’t end there. Looking for a calculator utility, I used tab completion to try and find a command along the lines of ‘calc’ or something. No such luck.If you ask me, this is the kind of reason why so many people stick to Windows. People pass off Linux as being nerdy and complicated. Well, it is. No matter how many desktop environments, window managers and Office alternatives you stick on there, Linux will always be hardc0re.
Hmmmm… Say, I’ve written a fair bit now. As it is rapidly approaching 3am, I should retire for the evening. Next time (hopefully tomorrow), I’ll probably talk about my new phone, my adventures in HTML, my coursework, me, Cthulhu, and other random stuff.