Dgplug

Ok, now that I’ve installed CentOS, I decided to install X Windows. And like Rip Van Winkle, I learnt that a lot has changed in 20 years :) A windowing environment was easy to install … sudo yum groupinstall "Gnome Desktop" and the trusty old startx & gave me a Windowing Environment (which I have yet to explore) However, switching permanantly to graphics mode (or vice versa) wasn’t so easy. I wanted to set my command line as the default startup environment and so I went to look for the default runlevel. I coudn’t find it. That’s because they don’t exist anymore. No inittab of old, nothing. ...

I got myself a new pc to learn Linux and do all my crazy experimenting on. What’d I use as my primary OS? Why CentOS, ofcourse. Two reasons … These are long term, slow stable releases, just the way I like my software to be. My last exposure to Linux was Red Hat Linux v5 & 6 way back when1. CentOS looks familiar enough to ease my apprehensions. First step on the way, was getting the OS installed on the machine. Slight hiccup though. I had the ISO and no optical drive! ...

1 Started: 2018-01-27 Finished: 2018-01-28 I started my modern non-fiction journey only a couple of years back, with Antifragile and Thinking Fast & Slow. (I’d only read older, motivational self help before then, Ziglar, Carnegie etc) I made the mistake of thinking everything was as wonderfully dense, yet rambling and well written. I was sadly mistaken. I realised that just like fiction, most non-fiction wasn’t worth my time and that just like most fiction, non-fiction followed a beat; a predictable path. ...

Started: 2018-01-24 Finished: 2018-01-24 The book had so many parallels to what I’ve learnt at DGPLUG that I decided to do this book’s notes here, instead of over at the home blog. I want to grow and become known enough to find my thousand true fans. I was lucky then, to find this book that has the exact same premise. You don’t really find an audience for your work; they find you. But it’s not enough to be good. In order to be found, you have to be findable. ...

(This is a rambling, introspective post, with no particular point to it, other than a reminder to my self to do better.) Kushal Das, wrote a lovely piece on inclusivity and generosity of spirit. What hit me though, (ergo this note to myself), was his thundering twist of a climax He goes through the post talking about how his life’s been one roller coaster of highs and lows and people pulling him down like crabs in a barrel, yet other mentors pushing him hard to do his best. ...

Kushal Das, on developing his writing chops … It boiled down to one thing. One has to write more. This is no short cut. So, I tried to do that throughout 2017. If I just look at the numbers, I wrote 60 blog posts in 2017, which is only 7 more than 2016. Austin Kleon, on trying to get his son to draw … Several times a day since October, ever since the Halloween decorations went up, my two-year-old son Jules has asked my wife or me to draw him an “x-ray.” (That’s his word for skeleton.) … We’ve drawn hundreds of skeletons for him, over and over and over again. He flat-out refuses to attempt drawing one for himself. ...