jeweled platypus

 

tuesday, january 18, 2005
Nerdy nerdy wordy wordy

The best unixy things have names that are so obviously right, so well thought-out, I love them. I forget syntax and flags and how to do things, but the names stick. (Translations included for my mom [and grandma?].)

ls - list directory contents
cd - change directory
rm - remove files

They’re weird little names: whole phrases reduced to two letters. They’re the right length for basic commands that get typed a lot. The names don’t share any letters, which sort of subconsciously makes them harder to confuse. I like them, this little triplet of useful things. They go in that order, of course.

vi; emacs - text editors that can do a lot
nano; pico - simple text editors

“vi” and “emacs” look and sound appropriately different — with a longer name for the more complicated one. “nano” and “pico” sound and look similar — but not identical — just like they should.

This had been sitting on my desktop since July. Someday, I’ll write about HTML tags and the worst names.

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friday, april 23, 2004
platforms and protocols for fun and pleasure

windows internet explorer through wine on gentoo linux, over ssh, on x11 in os x.

screenshot of windows internet explorer on os x

yeah, mister kyle is awesome.

comments (5)
tuesday, june 17, 2003
mmmice

hehe, with my new irc client, part of my dock looks like this:

dock

itunes (mp3 player), limewire (gnutella filesharing), adium (aim client), irc (self-explanatory), netnewswire lite (rss aggregator), and camino (web browser).

matching colors and a trio of globes. :)

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I’m Britta Gustafson.


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