Test Post Please Ignore
To be honest, it would’ve been simpler had everyone used the same nomenclature, but I got to play around with all these different configurations.. It’s not like my time is worth anything – maybe it’s a French thing? Like, imagine if it’s just something you could put blame on a cultural thing. Their culture is different from ours, and our culture is somewhere hosted in Arizona – I’ve no clue what type of culture Arizonians have. Either way, despite being across an entire ocean; I’ve managed to assemble data from several sources to get this thing running. CNAME, zone file, unregistered proxy domain, mail exchange, etc. Now all we have to do is wait for DNS propagation. Time Till List – approximately 3 hours. Pretty standard.
Learning is slow, but it leads to something. It always has. I can’t put blame on culture, not as much as putting blame on me for not understanding it. There’s usually a missing context somewhere. My WORST experience overall was probably trying to figure out dynamixel specs from their source. Of course, it’s all there if you could speak/write Korean, but when an employee made the documentation your academic life depends on.. it’s frustrating. I mean, it certainly doesn’t help, yet it’s the only help you have. I’m sure the guy on the other side is 50 times smarter than I, but I just can’t understand him (or her). It’s a similar experience, except this time the ocean you have to cross is the other one (as opposed to the French one). #rant
Yet again, I feel validated in having gone with vim and acknowledging its superiority over emac. I spent the last several hours in someone else’s server (rented) making configs here and there, and just overall exploring. Rented doesn’t come with sudo access unfortunately, but a lot (most) of what I can do in a /home directory, I can do over there. Time and over again, I’ve found myself in need of vim; and it’s proven to have been the better choice. Do you know how many times I’ve needed to use emac for anything? None.. zip.. 0 – as in “zero” times. I’ve needed to know vim for a broad range of applications.
Imagine being inside a multi-hundred-thousand dollar system just digging through code, all the way to fixing a twenty-something dollar raspberry pi. Vim is so light and you can pretty much expect it to be installed in any system you plan on using, especially if it’s old. If by chance it’s not on there, getting it on there isn’t difficult. My chrome netbook was the first time I really needed to use vim. This was maybe 2 or 3 years ago. My ubuntu installation crashed, and so I needed to find another way to get the laptop running again because let’s face it, a chromebook isn’t’ really a laptop. It could be, but the operating system leaves so much more to offer and I don’t particularly like the idea of being locked in anyone’s ecosystem for too long. But my efforts failed, and I found myself in the middle of a bad install with an unsigned BIOS I had chosen to replaced the standard chromebook one. The only way to do that was to short the leads underneath the the laptop so the write protection would turn off – a simple jumper. I felt proud, it being a small, but meaningful hardware hack; but I soon found myself staring at a terminal that wasn’t acting right.
At its bare minimum, my new boot loader had some software to help it get to through the rest of its installation. I was going to put ubuntu on it, because at the time that was pretty much the only linux distro I had any experience with. Among that short list of software in the boot-loader was vi. Not vim, just vi, and I knew what it was. In the past I had forfeited getting acquainted with it because who in their right mind would use such a primitive text editor when you have all these other O-M-G-EYE-CANDY alternatives with so many other useful features? Why would any sane person torture themselves with this nonsense keyboard layout? But there I was, staring at a terminal and I had no other choice but to figure it out. So vi it was.
Fast forward a year or two, and vim’s my favorite editor. It wasn’t until, about 8 months ago that I REALLY began to appreciate it, and even more so this past summer. Back in January, I was sitting next to a professor watching the guy do kongfu coding on that aforementioned multi-hundred-thousand dollar system. I remember asking him why, and it didn’t make too much sense back then, mostly because I wasn’t the one doing it. Regardless of what you’re working on, it really comes down to the fact that you’re probably working on a terminal. Furthermore, that terminal, probably isn’t on your computer. It’s somewhere else, on an entirely different platform or maybe on an entirely different planet (or not a planet, maybe it’s traveling beyond the now detittled Pluto, and the only way to interface with it is to recompile a Fortran oracle by which the only means to edit is through..). On top of that, you’re probably connected to four different platforms at the same time. Some of these computers might be running sub-controllers, and somehow you’re beyond seven layers away. The good news is, you can control all of them; and instantly reprogram and reedit them while they’re running, (even literally as they’re running/or flying), through vim.
PuTTY was my first real linux experience, granted that was through a windows XP and 3 laptops ago. As a freshman in mechE, we had an amazing professor who made us use it, but this wasn’t something that was drilled into typical mechE students. There’s a real lack of computer programming experience brought into us by the intuition we pay tuition to. There was hardly any back in high school and I wonder how the education system has changed since. So, any of this, is something students will have to learn on their own (or they could quad-major in everything). The other day was my first time being inside of a BSD system – a unix system. I’m a senior, so maybe there’s something poetic to be said about this? So yeah, vim. Not because of the plug-ins or its advanced features, but because there’s beauty in simplicity. It somehow became simple. Also because of the terminal thing. That and I love my color syntax. It’s awesome.Oh, and I’m also on awesomewm. Seven years ago, I wouldn’t have dreamed of being able to write code like this. Seven months ago, I could hardly believe I was controlling platforms like this. It always felt surreal, like I didn’t belong here; and it still does at times. Seven layers ago, I was somebody completely different.
Let’s recheck that propagation
*hits*F5