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penny March 2nd, 2007

(Geek speak alert)

Checks, one of the Honours students in our lab, is setting up a server for us. Ever since he set up an account for everyone, I was playing around with the space provided. My brain is cobwebbed with html so I whipped that up pretty quickly. Anyhow, the fun part was learning how to connect remotely to the host, and using this ridiculously barebone internet browser called “lynx” (screen capture shown here courtesy of wikipedia). Browsing the worldwide web with text… how crazy is that? Mark wanted the server stripped as much as possible, and one way to do that was to not have an X server. That meant having purely command line interfaces with this machine and no “GUI” whatsoever. I spent a considerable time goofing around with this browser, forgetting that Firefox will cut my troubles tenfold. I do scare myself most of times.

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Which brings me to rave now about another thing. I found the lab machine naming scheme so cool: each machine is called by the name of a classic thinker, like Thales, Parmenides, Democritus, etc. When I first came I could not help but look up the names of those I have not heard of (Archytas, Heraclitus, Zeno, Leucippus). What personification.

“So how’s Parmenides going?”
“He’s not too bad, thanks.”

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