{"id":1216,"date":"2003-08-26T01:06:08","date_gmt":"2003-08-26T06:06:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.xorph.com\/creator\/2003\/08\/26\/1216\/"},"modified":"2003-08-26T01:06:08","modified_gmt":"2003-08-26T06:06:08","slug":"1216","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/2003\/08\/26\/1216\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Sumana<\/a> recommended weeks ago that I read “In the Beginning was the Command Line,”<\/a> a very long essay by Neal Stephenson about operating systems and Disney World and nuclear weapons. I’d heard of it before, and I like Stephenson a lot, although his direct-address form is so clear and dry that I spend a lot of time wondering if he’s making fun of me.<\/p>\n

Anyway, today I got bored at work, and I read it (213k of plain text; I was very<\/i> bored), and it got me all excited and I went home and dug out my reject iMac<\/a> and now, a few hours of downloading later, I’m watching it brainwash itself with Yellow Dog Linux<\/a>. This is way too easy. I want it to hit a snag now, so I won’t be won over.<\/p>\n

You hear me? I won’t be won over!<\/i><\/p>\n

I don’t know why I have such a grudge against Linux. Maybe it’s because my first experience with it was being thrown into the cold water of a bad implementation of Debian–a hacker’s imp, done by my hacker of a first professor, running chill and unfriendly in the basement that was the old Centre CS lab. (The new lab was still in the basement, it just ran Red Hat instead. I was shocked to realize Linux could do 24-bit color.)<\/p>\n

Or maybe it’s just because I’ve been using Windows for such a long time, and I hate admitting I was wrong. Bleagh. Oh well.<\/p>\n

The install’s 18% done, and I think I’m going to crash soon and let it run while I sleep. In the morning I should just about have a Linux box, as is only fitting for my first day of CS grad school.<\/p>\n

The only problem now, really, is figuring out what I’m going to use it for. I’ve got my desktop publishing and image processing pretty well taken care of on this old warhorse (my PII), so I didn’t install any of that, but do I try to set up a friendly ftp server? Learn to write Xwindows apps? Run a MUD? Suggestions are welcome.<\/a><\/p>\n

Pork-barrel entry-end tagalongs: I baked my first batch of chocolate chip cookies from scratch<\/i> this evening, waiting for Yellow Dog to download. And they’re GOOD! I’ve been strutting around all night thanks to that. Also, The Devil’s Dictionary<\/a> does in fact have an RSS feed<\/a>, and its author, a Mr. Kn____, is apparently some kind of referral-log ninja<\/a>. And I owe Maria big for letting me download and burn like a gig and a half of computer-geek stuff on her shiny new laptop, since my CD burner is still dead. Thanks, Maria! Get a blog!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sumana recommended weeks ago that I read “In the Beginning was the Command Line,” a very long essay by Neal Stephenson about operating systems and Disney World and nuclear weapons. I’d heard of it before, and I like Stephenson a lot, although his direct-address form is so clear and dry that I spend a lot […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,31,29,93,81,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food","category-landmarks","category-maria","category-programming","category-referrer-logs","category-sumana-harihareswara"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1216"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1216\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}