things I learned this week
Despite the somewhat strange title, I try not to confine my learning to a specific time or time period. This week however, has seen some interesting (well, obviously interesting to me – perhaps not quite so interesting to you) facts emerge.
Newton Gunasinghe and various links between culture, economics and civil war was interesting. Is it promoting an academic theory after the fact or the fundamental reasons for 1983? I guess that’s open to interpretation but it sounded like a plausible angle to me.
It is possible to run a ssh server that listens on multiple ports. Why this is necessary is a long, tedious and probably inappropriate explanation for this forum – but suffice to say that I needed it; and I was gratified to find that it was so simple.
I am going through another period of text-editor upheaval these days. I do this periodically, for no apparent reason. It’s not discontentment with my existing editor(s) of choice – merely an evaluation of the field for something that might be just a little bit better. Thus far – I’ve examined UltraEdit (very nice, but oh so oogly), Intype (pretty, but somewhat dubious in functionality) and a Windows port of the text editor making a splash in the Mac world (TextMate) – the almost-there-but-not-quite E-Text editor. No clear winner yet, but I’m trying to find out why people rave about TextMate.
Apropos of nothing, I had not one but two people express surprise and possibly astonishment when I walked them through the cuteness of xargs and then took them back to my trusty Windows desktop for a demonstration. Clearly, knowing about Linux is verboten if you deign to use the desktop of the evil empire. I must have not read that memo. (The link is only necessary because I’ve been calling some other place an evil empire for a while this week. It’s necessary to disambiguate these things, ye know).
She has at least one tune with an addictive riff in the chorus. (Did I mean riff? Probably not. More like a popping and clicking noise). I know this sounds horribly judgemental (so what else is new) but I had her pegged as a media manipulator and possibly something of a [interesting-backstory-sells-records] publicity shark. She might be all of those, but I liked what I heard so far.
Also, bwahahahahahahaha to everyone who wrote off the Clinton juggernaut. I expect the story editors at the BBC to look embarassed (actually, pretty much everyone will). An interesting factoid I picked up last night though – Clinton the hubby lost 6 primaries on the trot in 1992.
ircatwork. For those with tedious firewalling or connectivity problems. Tried it out this week, was gratified to find that it works. Even better, a quick google revealed a few more sites like it.
On 10-Jan-08 at 5:37 am,
tinylittlefascist wrote:
Gah on MIA! I heard one song and found it addictive.
Shoot me.
On the more interesting topics, my humble apologies to Hillary, and I do believe, as we are speaking of things one learns in unspecified or specified time windows, this must be the first time I’ve seen a word as ugly sounding as ‘xarg’ be depicted as cute.