Standard Mischief

I don’t really talk much about my personal life in my blog, but I’m happy to report that my new “consulting” gig has at least a part of my duties and responsibilities occurring right at the command line. That self-directed Linux total-immersion course I undertook a few years ago has begun to pay off. A few observations:

• n00buntu makes you lazy, (in a bad way), with it’s fancy-pants GUI. I’m working partly in embedded systems. While looking at log files on these thingys, you don’t really have many options. You don’t have less, you don’t have more, and you certainly don’t have nano (a small, much more intuitive editor than the classic choices). I’ve ssh into my remote server for my websites and nano had always been available in the past to do the odd editing job. Locally, it’s always been nano or something like kedit, you know, something that does not require you to RTFM before you can figure out how to call up the help menu that would hopefully allow you to figure out how to exit the program. Anyway, for embedded systems when cat or head or tail -f isn’t enough, I’m getting reacquainted with vi.
• The breath of the Unices continues to amaze me. I got a rep I did not deserve by looking at a script that had my vastly more experienced mentor stumped for several days and seeing the problem immediately (sort before uniq, or sort -u). After that, he sent me off to debug his busted perl scripts. Not much success yet.
• If I ever had the idea that I could be a successful and lazy (in a good way) sysadmin without knowing perl, well that’s pretty much dispelled now. The basics of perl are fairly easy to learn when you put your mind to it.