1500 miles down, 700 to go to finish section hiking the Appalachian
Trail with 215 miles completed this year in 3 trips.
Of course, I have some of the hardest miles left: the Smokies,
Mt. Washington, the Whites, the Presidentials, the Bigelows, but with
persistence, luck, health, constant gear tweaks (and some HARD hiking)
I should finish in a few years.
When talking about Internet assets we often confuse “What is it?”, “Is
it bad?” and “What should I do about it?”. This write-up intends to
show why it is important to keep those questions and answers to them
separate.
Below I show an editing session that uses basic /bin/ed commands.
/bin/ed is the standard Unix Editor
ed was written round 1969. It’s still here. grep comes from
/bin/ed: g/re/p works as an ed command to search globally for a
regular expression and print the matching lines. ed commands
will be familiar to users of sed, as sed is the “stream editor”
with a very similar set of commands. ed commands will be familiar to
vi users. If you type “:” in vi, you get, basically, an ed prompt.
You can type ed commands (see below) and they work. “vi” is the
“visual interface” to ed (or one of it’s successors). Though I am a
die hard emacs user, often when I just want to do a quick edit or take
some note I just fire up /bin/ed and go….
1 Videns autem Jesus turbas, ascendit in montem...
or, roughly (my translation):
Jesus, however, seeing the crowd/mob/political disturbance went up on
the mountain...
The word “turba” per my paper dictionary tends towards a crowd that is
politically disturbed. It can also mean an eddy (water) or a child’s
spinning top. Per https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/turba#Latin it means…
Latin flash cards are not what they were in 1983: https://latinlexicon.org.
It’s got a thing where you can pop in a sentence (say, one form Cicro or random #Latin conversations on twitter (yes, they exist)), and you can click on the words (yellow above), it shows you all the possible words that particular inflected word might be and then offers to build flash cards for you…complete with citations/examples from the literature….
I’ve been listening to “The History of Rome” podcast recently. There
is nothing new under the sun: Plagues (er, “pandemics”), riots,
xenophobia, wars, greed, ambition, and political factions.
It’s filling in a lot of gaps and details for me. I would recommend
if you’re interested in history. Today’s basic problems are not new.
Figure 1: Life-Size Lego Roman Soldier, Lego Store, Rome, 2019
Here are some developments in late 70s and early 80s where I started
to become aware/involved in “Online” things that eventually evolved
into today’s Social Media: Modems1, BBS systems, TOPS-20 Bulletin Boards,
Usenet News and the birth of CompuServe.
The opinions expressed in this [FOO] are mine, and not those of my employer. In fact, they may not even be mine. I may have changed my mind. I may have grown beyond a particular opinion. I may be trolling you. I may be engaging in Socratic dialog to tear down your beliefs. I may be tearing down my own beliefs. γνῶθι σεαυτόν!