Presentation Preferences

We are asked to reflect on "the variety of presentations for [the course] material – the lecture, the links (especially to wikipedia entries), videos and podcasts. Which work best (or worst) for you, and why?"

My response is that I like the variety.

Bruce's YouTube videos have been very helpful for the hands-on exercises. The UA CBT podcasts/videos have not been quite as helpful. A lot of the time, the visual was like a PowerPoint slide and the content was not particularly illuminating. The speaker (Arthur what's his name) has a cheerful presentation style though.

I've been surprised at how many of the links are to Wikipedia. Wikipedia has a questionable reputation in general academia but it seems like for computer science / open source related topics it must be considered more reputable. I guess that makes some sense when you think about it. The hackers are the ones who know about open source and there's a strong tradition of sharing information and documenting open source stuff - therefore the Wikipedia entries in this area are probably pretty reliable.

As someone else noted in an earlier unit, many of the readings - especially the more technical ones related to specific commands - are like reading a dictionary. Rather tedious and much of it hard to follow and make sense of...

My favorite readings so far are Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning Was The Command Line" and “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” by Eric Raymond. They both are written in such an enjoyable, humorous and thought-provoking style but have so much information about the open source movement - the history, the people, the key philosophies and controversies, etc. I think I'll go back to those readings in the future "just for the fun of it". Eric Raymond's lessons or "aphorisms about effective open source development" can be applied to other efforts at collaborative initiatives and innovation in general.

It's all rather overwhelming, both in volume of information and things to read and do. I have a really hard time keeping up. (I haven't been back to look at other classmates' blog in several weeks!) Also, I'm often concerned as to whether I'm really internalizing the content, really learning it. Nevertheless, I think this course is really "stretching" my brain and I'm quite enjoying the experience.

I Must Be Doing Something Wrong...?!

I had a pretty easy time this week setting up the graphical environment on the server VM, installing the Webmin graphical administration tool and adding users. No major problems. I've read through the various posts on the Activity open discussion forum and some people were having some real difficulties. It makes me think that if everything has gone so well for me, maybe somethings wrong! But maybe I paid my dues on the stress front in Unit 2! (I should be so lucky!?) I felt pretty lonely and left-behind then, but from some of the posts I see that perhaps I wasn't the only one.

In any case, I took a slightly different approach to getting the work done this week. I confess that I didn't try to get all the readings done before doing the step-by-step installations, etc. on the computer. I just carefully followed the instructions and as far as I can tell everything worked out. Now I'm going back and catching up on the readings. (I still have a few from Unit 4 to catch up on also!)

Fun with vim?

I installed the vim tutorial. Thirty minutes? Ha! It took me a couple of hours. I think part of the problem was that I found it to be really quite tedious to work through (and also I'm dealing with some sciatica) so I had to get up every now & then for a break.

I started a list of pros & cons (or as we say in the UA Libraries, "plus / deltas") but really can't come up with many pluses. The only one I could think of was that some of the commands are very clever. They allow you to do complicated tasks with a few keystrokes and/or one command line. I can see how they could be useful for people editing code as was mentioned in the tutorial for the % command that is useful when debugging a program with unmatched parentheses.

The deltas for me included:

• hard to see where the cursor is
• generally hard to read the text (especially some characters)
• difficult to remember complex commands

(Maybe it's my aging eyes and brain that handicap me!)

I did find that I easily started using some commands like the ones for moving around the screen. I was quite tickled by the command that turned on the highlighting for the term being searched (:set hls).

The whole experience started to unearth memories of commands I had used way back in the past (or maybe not so long ago), like ctrl-Page Down or ctrl-Page Up. I found that they worked in vim.

By the way, I had a real problem with Section 7.2 "Create a Startup Script". I did not understand what we were supposed to do there. I tried the command :e ~/.vimrc and got what appeared to be an error message "E37 no write since last change (add! to override)".

All in all, I can't see myself switching from Word for vim. I guess I'll be using it in this course though so maybe I'll see more of how it will be useful for digital information management purposes. :-)

Oh Happy Day!

From the depths of despair (yesterday) to the heights of nerdy joy ... well, I guess it's not that big a deal but my poor CPU has been healed. I hauled it in to the UA OSCR (Office of Student Computing Resources) Lab in the ILC. As I carried it through the door of the Main Library, a colleague saw me and said "You know, you could get a laptop." (Ha Ha!)

In any case, I had somehow partially installed Ubuntu within Windows and it was a fast and apparently easy fix for the student employee who helped me. After he deleted the problematic file(s), we tested my Desktop cd and to my great delight, Ubuntu booted up! I'm so happy! :-) Now I can go home and catch up on some of last week's hands-on work.

Going Through the Tutorials

To continue my whining... In addition to not being able to boot Ubuntu from CD, I haven't been able to login to UA CBT from home. I've been back and forth by email and phone with UA CBT/UITS staff (and also the VCT help staff) on this. The latest word is that UITS is going to re-set my password and they'll get back to me. I'm still waiting to hear from them about that. In the meantime, I'm going to go as far as I can with the free sections of the Linux tutorial on VCT.

I'll also read the other tutorials on Linux, the shell and commands but without having Ubuntu to practice with on my workstation, the benefits will be somewhat limited.

Nevertheless, I'll do what I can. Persistence! Courage!

Left Behind

A friend was describing a recent dive trip he took. He went by himself to a resort and signed up for a dive trip. They were going to do drift diving where the group goes down and drifts along the reef and the boat, after dropping them off, goes to the pick-up point. Apparently this guy has a lot of problems clearing his ears (also apparently he didn't have a designated buddy) and it took him a long time to get down to depth and by the time he did and drifted or whatever, when he came up to the surface there was no boat in sight! Fortunately another dive boat came along and took him back to shore.

I'm feeling a little bit like that diver - left behind because I can't keep up with the group. I can't get past the boot from CD step (Assignment 1). I've tried all kinds of things. I've made sure the BIOS has the CD drive before the hard drive in the boot sequence. I've tried booting up the CD in different drives. I've even re-burned another Ubuntu Desktop disk. Nothing works. Bruce says maybe somehow I've installed Ubuntu on my workstation and its trying to do a dual-boot or something and I'll have to remove Ubuntu and restore the Windows Master Boot Record, etc. etc.

Perhaps the OSCR lab (or the Geek Squad company?) will be the dive boat that picks me up? I guess I'll find out.

I have a headache. :-}

Booting Ubuntu (Not!)

OK, I turn on the computer, put the Ubuntu Desktop disk in the drive and when the BIOS black & white screen comes up, I have the choice of either Windows or Ubuntu. I choose Ubuntu.

The Ubuntu splash page comes up - very pretty with orange and yellow & black. The orange bar goes back and forth across the screen. Now it's stopped. Nothing appears to be happening. I'm waiting...It's 8:55 p.m....How long should I wait before I give up?...It's 9 p.m. Should I wait another 5 minutes?

While I'm waiting, I guess I'll read some more from Stephenson's "In the Beginning...". I'm reading about cruft and seismic upgrades. This guy is great!

...OK, it is now 9:08 p.m. Almost 15 minutes and the Ubuntu screen hasn't moved. The orange bar is frozen in the middle. I give up! The computer won't respond to keystrokes of mouse clicks or ctrl-alt-delete. I guess it's time for "Power Off".

On a second try, I repeat the first few steps...The Ubuntu screen splash page comes up...Wait! Wait! Something different is happening! I'm getting a message from beyond! ;-) It reads "_usy Box v1.1.3 (Debian 1:1.1.3-5 ubuntu 12) Built-in shell (ash) Enter help for a list of built in commands _initramfs" [The characters on the left side of the screen are cut off / don't show.]

There's a blinking cursor. Should I type "help"? Should I wait? I don't think so ...I'm going to "Power Off" and go eat dinner!

Tomorrow I guess I'll search around on the Ubuntu Forum (Absolute Beginners) for some clues, some help! :-}