An update while I'm on Long Island...

[pseydtonne]

I'm crashing at Gigi's. I came to see two Afroskull shows (next one is this evening in Teaneck). I got to hang out with graciana and sit in Meg Ryan's chair o'gasm from When Harry Met Sally at Katz's on Houston.

Okay, I swear there was some incredibly pressing reason for me to post. Like, totally. Now I can't remember it. All I've been thinking about is AIX, the weird flavor of UNIX IBM sells and none of us in the software end of IBM know how to use. I am quickly becoming "the AIX guy" because no one else on my team is. Work has become very engrossing, so much so that I've been thinking less about how much I want to get laid. This is a big deal for me.

I love my job immensely. They pay me to futz with computers and tell sysadmins things. R0x0ritr0n!

Brain fry resumes. Later, y'all!

-meeeeeeeeeeatty pastrami and driving around, Dante

Comments

[graciana.livejournal.com]

Dude....read the bag....the answer is on the brown bag.

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

This is completely off-topic, but did you get my e-mails? I hate to bug you about it, but it would be far worse for you to show up on Monday and me not be there.

[pseydtonne.livejournal.com]

Caught it. Funny thing is that my Dreamscape email account is officially horked for the whole weekend but I got that from my Gmail stack. Next Monday and not this Monday would be rocksorious.

AIX history

[cris6848.livejournal.com]

Back in the mid-80s, the concept of a "workstation" came along. Instead of buying a VAX or Data General or Prime minicomputer and many engineers all using 24x80 ascii terminals, a workstation featured a bitmapped screen. Think of the difference between an IBM PC and the first Macs.

Ever wonder about the emacs/vi debate? Emacs allowed people programming in the 70's to do multiple tasks within a 24x80 window. vi is easier and became popular when people could use multiple windows.

Sun, Apollo, Data General, Raytheon, Masscomp, DEC, IBM, and many others all entered the market. They all had different operating systems. The masses spoke, and everyone switched from a proprietary OS to either System V or BSD. Except Sun, which had always been Unix. Sun also invented NFS. (BTW, this is when Larry Wall decided to write an Practical Eclectic Rubbish Language to do sysadmin tasks on all these flavors.)

IBM's original OS felt like their mainframe OSes -- anathema to most of their target audience. And they didn't have the installed base that Digital did that allowed VMS to flourish for so long.

So, at the same time as Apollo was converting to SR10 "Just Like Real Unix", IBM came out with AIX. I had to sysadmin a few of their boxes back then, and while the hardware was pretty spiffy, you couldn't do a lot of important tasks (like formatting a drive) without dropping down to the original OS commands.

So that's why AIX is funky and wierd. It is philosophically rooted in JCL!

Re: AIX history

[fuzzplugjones.livejournal.com]

vi is easier? Bullshit. If I accidentally start a program and I CAN'T FIGURE OUT HOW TO EXIT SAID PROGRAM, and I have to go find some 42-year-old virgin with pants that don't fit who SCOFFS at me because I don't know it's Escape-left-bracket-percent-sign-q ("well, duh, that's so straightforward you must be retarded! Har har har!"), it's not EASIER. I figured out sooner how to background it (Ctrl-Z) and then kill the job than I did... come to think of it, I still don't know how to get out of vi.

That's just a great example of why an OS like Linux will never be mainstream. An interface designer's #1 job is to make the interface intuitive. No ifs, ands, or buts. No zealotry that the great unwashed need to learn cryptic key sequences to do basic things like exit the program. I love Linux for server things but goddammit, when I have a problem, 99% of Unix people are so fuckin' smarmy and passive-aggressive. Like it's my fault none of them get pussy. Hey, I fight for every last drop of pussy I get, man! I'm just actually trying to get closer to the mainstream instead of intentionally farther away. If that's what you want to do to make yourself feel better, you go right ahead, but leave it out of your fuckin' software!

[ltbloodrose.livejournal.com]

Would it FUCKING KILL YOU to CALL ME when you're in town so I could maybe FUCKING SEE YOU???!!!

Sheesh.

:)