Grex Agora46 Conference

Item 49: Too much Grex?

Entered by eskarina on Mon Jun 30 22:34:56 2003:

I had an experience today that gave me an idea for an item.  :)  I was being
bussed around Chicago, and I saw a sign that said "IHB Construction".  My knee
jerk, honest reaction was "What's happy about construction?"  Oh shoot...
that's a company, not the happy item!  

And I realized that I've probably been on grex too much/too long.  :)

So, what was your most recent experience that made you feel like you'd been
on grex too much/too long?
45 responses total.
#1 of 45 by rcurl on Mon Jun 30 23:48:52 2003:

I logged on for the third time today....

#2 of 45 by cross on Tue Jul 1 05:46:29 2003:

This response has been erased.


#3 of 45 by scott on Tue Jul 1 07:44:48 2003:

I'm on vacation in Europe.  I should be out looking at things instead of
sitting in my brother's home office, reading Grex...

#4 of 45 by michaela on Tue Jul 1 19:35:29 2003:

Every once in a while, I catch myself trying to use ctrl-w in an instant
message program.

#5 of 45 by dcat on Tue Jul 1 19:52:46 2003:

This is probably more of a sign of too much use of various computers in
general:  i get my keymaps confused.

I ^U to clear a line in Emacs, and in PINE.  (In the former this is not a
problem, but in PINE this does exactly the opposite.)  I <ESC> before saving
in Emacs, and ^X^S in vi.  (Each comes from the other.)  There's actually a
whole series of Emacsisms I keep trying to use in PINE, and a few of them
actually work (^A/^E to beginning/end of line, for two), which only makes it
worse.

In the shell, I keep prefacing commands with !, which produces some. . .
interesting results.  

Just another (61) reason(s) I need to get a life that's more than Unix. . .

#6 of 45 by mdw on Tue Jul 1 21:36:56 2003:

I find it simplest to use one text editor for everything.
Well, 2 actually, but only one supports visual mode.

#7 of 45 by dcat on Tue Jul 1 21:42:57 2003:

I use Emacs in general, vi when i need something quick w/out waiting for emacs
to start up, pico for mail (i.e., the PINE composer), whatever the editor
picospan has for picospan, and ed very occasionally.

like i said, just another reason i need to get a life outside unix. . .

#8 of 45 by slestak on Wed Jul 2 01:25:12 2003:

Hey cross, how is plan 9? Also, I've given life without *nix a shot. It's not
so hot. "Too much" may even increase my productivity someday.

#9 of 45 by ea on Wed Jul 2 01:48:16 2003:

I've tried using my grex password on other systems.

Also, more of a general unix-ism, but I keep finding that "ls" doesn't 
work in most versions of MS-DOS.

#10 of 45 by cross on Wed Jul 2 01:48:26 2003:

This response has been erased.


#11 of 45 by dcat on Wed Jul 2 03:29:22 2003:

I keep finding that attempting to use the control key on the Suns at the UGLi
only turns on the CapsLock.  After using those machines for a few hours, I
quite quickly discover the reverse on the next machine i use. . . .

(Suns' CapsLock and Control keys are reversed from their positions on the
Windows-compatible and Macintosh keyboards, although I gather the Sun style
is older (and thus its the PC & Mac kbs which are reversed).)

resp:9 - I can't remember the last time I used a DOS shell ;) but
occasionally i come across default shell rc files -- mostly in commercial Linux
distroes-- wherein 'dir' and 'vdir' are aliased to ls w/ appropriate options. .
.

resp:10 - what *is* Plan 9, exactly? 'it's not Unix' is about all I've
heard about it that I can remember. . . .

#12 of 45 by mdw on Wed Jul 2 04:36:54 2003:

It's a sort of distributed computing environment that attempts to have a
very light-weight implementation of all its parts, by reversing some
common computing paradigms.

#13 of 45 by pvn on Wed Jul 2 06:02:18 2003:

How well distributed is it on a laptop?

#14 of 45 by cross on Wed Jul 2 18:14:53 2003:

This response has been erased.


#15 of 45 by gregb on Wed Jul 2 18:33:46 2003:

Lately, I'll sit in front of my 'puter, not knowing what I want to do, 
so I'll Grex.

#16 of 45 by gull on Wed Jul 2 18:41:57 2003:

Re #9: If you're running Win95 or later, install one of the UNIX tools
for Win32 packages.  (I don't mean Cygwin; there are some native ones.)
 Not only will you get 'ls', but having functioning 'ps' and 'kill'
commands is sometimes handy.  Having things like a Win32-native 'find'
command also lets you write more sophisticated batch files than you'd be
able to normally.

#17 of 45 by dcat on Wed Jul 2 19:23:49 2003:

resp:14 - wow.  i'll have to check that out sometime. . . 
  (unfortunately, i won't have a network at least till i get back to school
   in August.  But sometime after then. . .)

#18 of 45 by other on Wed Jul 2 19:40:09 2003:

re#14:  Wow.  That was quite a pitch.  It sounds like a significant 
advance in computer system design and function.  What your description 
really elicits from me in response, though, is the question, "So what are 
the biggest problems, flaws, faults, etcetera with Plan 9?"  Would you 
mind addressing that as well?

#19 of 45 by orinoco on Wed Jul 2 19:49:14 2003:

re #11: I find myself making the same mistake with the control and option keys
on my Macintosh keyboard, since I use the same finger for both.  Using control
instead of option is usually pretty innocuous.  Using option instead of
control does some strange, strange things.

#20 of 45 by cross on Wed Jul 2 21:48:24 2003:

This response has been erased.


#21 of 45 by dcat on Thu Jul 3 14:55:51 2003:

re: too much computering: 
  http://images.ucomics.com/comics/nq/2003/nq030702.gif

#22 of 45 by gregb on Thu Jul 3 15:18:17 2003:

Phew!  I wore myself out reading all that.  B-)

#23 of 45 by jaklumen on Sat Jul 5 10:19:17 2003:

*That* was funny as hell, especially in regards to the Danae 
character.  I didn't think she'd be that isolationist, but hey, I 
suppose you can cut yourself off in cybersp...

#24 of 45 by slestak on Sun Jul 6 22:48:24 2003:

Thanks for the tutorial cross !! A few months back I took a look at Bell Labs
site for Plan 9, began reading through the install notes, but became side
tracked with Gentoo Linux. I like the 0% analogy. I'll dig into Plan 9 this
week and take it on as a new project. Cheers!!

#25 of 45 by albaugh on Mon Jul 7 03:51:05 2003:

I have been grexing while on vacation in the Philippines.  Is that too much?

#26 of 45 by cross on Mon Jul 7 19:32:11 2003:

This response has been erased.


#27 of 45 by remmers on Mon Jul 7 23:22:25 2003:

Yeah.  I think of vacations away from home partly as "computer breaks".
That includes Grex, of course.

#28 of 45 by tod on Mon Jul 7 23:26:25 2003:

This response has been erased.


#29 of 45 by dcat on Thu Jul 24 23:40:45 2003:

You may have been using computers too much if:

        ... you look for the page-down button on your book.

#30 of 45 by novomit on Fri Jul 25 11:40:30 2003:

You have been using UNIX too much if:
        ... you hit the ESC key while in notepad.

#31 of 45 by scott on Fri Jul 25 12:06:48 2003:

   ... your friends keep asking why your Word documents have a long string
of 'j's at the top and a "ZZ" at the end.

#32 of 45 by mynxcat on Fri Jul 25 12:57:25 2003:

Heh... that was good. I've done that when switching from vi to Word

#33 of 45 by novomit on Fri Jul 25 13:01:19 2003:

Me as well. Problem with notepad is that ESC kills the app and you lose what
you were typing!

#34 of 45 by gull on Fri Jul 25 13:07:21 2003:

nedit deliberately doesn't bind the Esc key to anything by default, so
recovering vi addicts can bang on it without hurting anything.

For me the more dangerous thing was the default binding of Ctrl-Alt-Del
to "shutdown -r now" on most Linux distributions.  Why is this
dangerous?  Well, when you have Windows NT machines on the same KVM
switch, and you're used to hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del to log in...  After a
couple unfortunate incidents I disabled that "feature".

#35 of 45 by novomit on Fri Jul 25 13:12:27 2003:

I did that as well. You get used to doing a lot on windoze machines, and when
you switch to Linux, you can shut down your system too easily since I kind
of do it "automatically" when something fouls up.

#36 of 45 by tod on Fri Jul 25 16:44:09 2003:

This response has been erased.


#37 of 45 by novomit on Fri Jul 25 16:48:25 2003:

Dont use hotmail anymore, all I got there was spam.

#38 of 45 by oval on Fri Jul 25 17:00:30 2003:

http://www.notmail.org

#39 of 45 by tod on Fri Jul 25 17:09:40 2003:

This response has been erased.


#40 of 45 by gull on Tue Aug 12 20:29:10 2003:

I'm pretty much deleting all mail from Hotmail these days, ever since
they stopped sending text along with the HTML.  Pine can't deal with HTML.

#41 of 45 by dcat on Tue Aug 12 21:02:37 2003:

What version of Pine?  Some recent versions can render it to some extent. 
Grex's, of course, is anything but recent.

It used to be possible to set Hotmail to only send plaintext, but you probably
had to be as obsessive about your system preferences as I am to find it, and
may have been eliminated.  I haven't had an account to check with in three
or four years, though.

#42 of 45 by gull on Wed Aug 13 00:04:21 2003:

Maybe the next incarnation of Grex will have a more recent Pine.  Grex
is about the only place I use it.

#43 of 45 by gelinas on Wed Aug 13 02:25:59 2003:

Yes, the new grex will have a new version of Pine; probably 4.56.  Unless a
newer one is realised soon.

#44 of 45 by oval on Wed Aug 13 11:17:41 2003:

will the new version also have pinepgp & gpg?

#45 of 45 by dah on Fri Aug 29 22:19:48 2003:

YEAH WILL IT?

There are no more items selected.

You have several choices: