Unit 5: The Networked Environment

Overwhelmed?

I think we had a lot of material to cover in Unit 5. I was familiar with the concept of the OSI model of internet as Seven-Layer Burrito, but there was a lot of information just to act as foundation for the things we needed to learn. I appreciated Warriors of the Net (although I still have no idea what the "Death Ping" could be).  As I have mentioned elsewhere, metaphors and analogies go a long way for me to conceptualize processes or things like how the Internet works.
I really liked the clip about Bob Metcalf, founder of 3Com. I was really overwhelmed with many of the wiki articles. When wiki articles about technology do overwhelm me I have been known to "translate" them into "Plain English" however a lot gets lost, but sometimes I need to know functions and not profound technical details. But "Plain English" will get me to the kernel of the matter. The assigned reading by Nemeth about TCP/IP was completely daunting but I understand why UDP might be preferable for things like a Skype session instead of TCP/IP. The reading on name resolution on the LAN was where things really broke down for me in terms of doing well in comprehending things And then it was really rough going. I am having a difficult time discerning what parts are just background and what we will need to know for quizzes and what will be critically important to know once I am looking for work. However, I think I understand the that the Bridged mode is a means of bypassing one's computer and just having your virtual machine access your router.

I really liked the material we had about the Plain Old Telephone System (POTS), again it is really useful as a model for understanding and contrasting with the Internet, plus I did some cable pulling in the early to mid 90s, so I have run (and terminated) a lot of CAT5 cable and have even seen the ancient twisted pairs. Oh and also my dad was an engineer for Ma Bell for about three decades, so it's one of the few safe topics with which I can talk to him. Physical connections (Layer 1, the physical layer of the OSI model) of copper wires make a lot more sense to me as a physical model, but it can serve as a conceptual model for the later systems of information transfer. I guess things started to make sense for me when I realized a quarter inch phone connector was the same that you use to plug a guitar into an amplifier. It wasn't until I had left that field that I found out TIP="tip is positive" and RING="ring is negative." So when it comes to plugging things together and running them, I have no problem, RCA cables, phone connector cords, heavy duty audio cable, or USB cables.

Regarding learning style, I guess I am primarily an auditory learner (50%) followed by the visual (40%) with some tactile (10%). This might help why I really appreciate classroom learning as well as the kinds of YouTube videos instructors post of themselves demonstrating how a task is done. I took a test to determine my learning style at educationplanner.org but honestly, I doubt the validity and methods of any online test to determine anything of importance. However I agree that the auditory portion is crucial to me. I have no idea if this online test even checks for social versus solitary learning, which is another aspect I think is important.  I'm realizing that there are several competing schools of thought regarding learning styles including those who find the whole notion of "learning styles" to be bunkum. The primary argument is that breaking learning down into sensory components ignores that we learn through our entire sensorium, not just seeing, hearing or touching.
When it comes to computer learning, again, I like the YouTube videos that go through each and every step. I anxiously take lots and lots of notes, frequently pausing the videos and scrubbing the playback head to the previous slide to take note of EVERY DETAIL, EVERY CHECK IN EVERY BOX and the correct answers to EVERY FIELD. Oftentimes my notes seem useless in hindsight, however.
For the readings, I make it a point to print out every reading (under 50 pages) and really, really mark them up, both with a highlighter pen and a ballpoint pen. I find this helps me retain things and distill it to manageable portions. I also print out PPT slides if they are available if it's something I'm not particularly familiar with. In fact, I have been known to take screenshots and print out the PowerPoint slides if they are not available.

Anyhow, I actually have no problems with written text. Some bitter, mean old commentators have said that the current generation of "digital natives" are allergic to the written word, I'm just thinking that to them it's not as exciting as the many newer media available to them.  But I prefer print. Before I started taking classes in SIRLS, I was really getting into Gibbon's immortal and monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (despite his tendency toward overly attenuated prose) and once I am done with my MLIS, I really, really, really want to read Tolstoy's War and Peace, mostly to read the history of Napoleon's invasion of Russia and to find out what happened to the Rostov family. I have no problems with books and print and reading.  I appreciate print as a medium but the dynamism of the net where reading is still the most substantial mode of learning. One could call the Net "enhanced reading" or I guess they already call it "hypertext." But that said, receiving instruction in installing, configuring or adding users in Linux in print make me want to ask questions, lots and lots of questions plus I get easily frustrated with technology issues and never know if my problems are unique or just something that happens when you are running Ubuntu on a Macintosh. Finally there is the complete lack of feedback in the shell which is terrifying especially in a learning environment where I wish every action I make got some feedback.

UNIT 4: A New Hope?

OMG: after 22 years of fear and loathing for the command line environment*, I think this week's assignments were actually pretty straightforward!!!!!!!! For once all I needed to do was just follow the instructions exactly as written (this does not insure there will be no typos, however) and go along with it. If the remaining units of this class feature so few unpleasant surprises, I can stop shaking at the mere thought of working in Linux and relax and learn! Of course the first new user I added was "newuser" but we are going straight for functionality and not aesthetics in this class. But yeah, watch out for typos, Doug.
Have I mentioned that I work well with downloading all the assignments, printing them out and keeping them on hand? Yeah, I'm like a serial killer of trees, but there's no way around it for me. I have to check things off and cross them out and write extensive notes. Do all UNIX users need a physical notepad for this stuff? I do so far. However, I can seldom make head or tail of these notes once I am done.
It was kind of cute when I logged in under newuser and attempted to use the sudo and got reminded that I wasn't logged in as dougwelch and didn't have those admin privileges. I guess that's how we learn. But it's a lot easier to learn when you can just chuckle instead of when you are hysterical and just about ready to throw things in frustration (like the last two weeks). Just because that mouse has a tether doesn't mean you can't do some damage when you throw it out of anger/sadness/frustration.
During this unit when I was hung up, it was generally because I had miskeyed something, or had started typing while my last command was still processing/running a huge list of some kind and the last thing I was typing came up at the command prompt, I typed out the new command from the   instructions and was not aware that there were some random letters at the beginning of the line, near the command prompt. But I was able to figure it out with less emotional attachment.
Nevertheless the nice thing about the command line is that you can see what it was that you keyed in and say, "Gosh, maybe I shouldn't have typed in "sudo" twice?
Oh yeah, was that grep command new? It seems like a "find" type command. Oh it's on our cheat sheet under "searching."Nice. I hope I cna use that someday and actually get what I'm looking for.
I am hoping that I have turned some kind of a corner here. No I don't think I could talk to Neal Stephenson about programming like I could talk to him about Mediterranean geography in the era of Louie Catorce, but I'm now feeling like I can do a couple things with Ubuntu and Ubuntu Server that I couldn't do a month ago.
My fear of Linux and UNIX style OSs took a little vacation to Bora Bora while I powered through with little difficulty. If only my fear took me along to the lagoon, I might be even happier. Well, I'm grabbing my snorkel and fins and watch out for the stonefish and gars!


*I took a class in BASIC in the summer of 1982 and decided to hold off until computers got "user friendly" enough for me to comprehend them. That would be about a decade and a half later.

UNIT 3 Configuring with text editors on Ubuntu Server

UNIT 3

Well, in this unit I learned about vi and nano. I prefer nano out of the two, because I am not the world's most organized mind. vi's separate modalities were a source of frustration, but only almost as frustrating as the number of articles and websites saying "Now this part of starting up Ubuntu server will be utterly confusing and frustrating for the novice user." I would like that kind of language only if it "prepended" a good metaphor for how remember how to do the task in question, one featuring cute bunnies or traveling salesmen would be nice. Anyhow, I am told that vi can be referred to as nano without the training wheels.

 So, there is a command mode and an insert mode in vi and clearly I wasn't always onboard as to which of those two modes it was currently in when I started typing text or when I wanted to either write something up or make vi do something like insert text. But I did find out that "dd" and "dy" are good friends for people who are lousy at remembering which mode they were in. Those two command are "delete character" and "delete whole word" in vi and they got rid of a lot of "I's" and "a's" which came up when I was in edit mode while thinking I was still in command mode and needed to type in the commands for "insert" and "insert right here."

Oh yeah, another priceless lesson (I should have learned last unit) is the sudo addition to commands that sometimes were not working otherwise.

I don't think I've ever done any kind of configuration before on this iMac. I think I set up devices on an old parallel port on the Dells we used at that mapping software company about 14 years ago, but I was given a printout of what I was supposed to do each step of the way, the hardest thing I recall being how to figure out a number or address for the scanner in question.  That, of course required knowing which devices already attached to my computer had which addresses already. Thank goodness for the rise of USBs! Yes, there was a time that each time you added a new peripheral or device to your machine, you needed to have a disk to mount the device driver, which would explain that whole systemfile directory called "dev." Also note some of the crazy antiquated devices that are still supported by Linux, like SCSIs, tape drives, floppies et cetera.

Getting back to text editors, I remember using Notepad and Text Edit, specifically for writing html 4 code and then you could just drop into BBEdit, update the file and refresh my browser to make instant updates on web pages I was doing back before Dreamweaver made all of that seem like a waste of time. All of this I am speaking of took place in the late, late tail end of the 20th century. I initially did not see the value of unformatted text files and the very long lines of text they created, but I'm sure InDesign probably saves text that is being shoehorned into the user defined dimensions text boxes in a similar manner. It's just that the textbox objects are courteous enough to let you know if some of the text is outside the little window the user has created, a nicety that text editors do not extend to users and probably never will, considering that they do not serve the same purpose a text box in InDesign does.

Unit 2

UNIT 2

Working in Ubuntu with the command line!!!
Wow, I felt like I had a lot more control this time than at any other time! I guess the fact that I am operating in a sand-box like environment of this "Shell" as to working on an actual network, off of my own "box" gave me a better feeling of being grounded! Essentially, I just made a few directories using the mkdir command and then using the cd command, I jumped form one to the next. They had simple names like "Things_I_Like," "Yukky_Things," "Iron_and_Rust" and "Severans." These would be good directories to store images or documents. When I changed directories to "Yukky_Things" I learned, the hard way about what William Shott had been saying regarding the case sensitivity of Linux (due to a typo, the system didn't recognize my request as a directory that existed), I also followed his advice regarding using underscores instead of spaces to separate words. But I got stuck in "Yukky_Things" because there was nothing in that directory and I wasn't sure where I was, so I used cd command without any filepath, so I was taken back to the home directory (root directory in this case) and then used to ls command to see all four of the directories I had created. I had to use my computer for something else and got a little panicked as I didn't have my arrow cursor. Sadly, I had to reboot and the arrow came back, so I was able to hit the "pause" button in the Ubuntu interface. Still this is the most productive session I've had with a minimum of confusion.

UPDATE

 UNIT 2.1

I have somehow muddled my way into X Windows!

Like everything I have done in the command environment, I will be surprised if I can replicate stuff I have figured out. That said, I was able to open Writer, Calc and Impress and create files in those applications, saved in my "Documents" folder. However, as a librarian/curator of multimedia I made the fatal error of saving a file with the name "Untitled." If I am able to stop VMWare and reopen the app and find my files in the "Documents" directory, I will have impressed myself. I was really happy to be working in a GUI environment briefly, especially with apps that seem to copy the MS Office apps and their tools and menus. But I know this will be leading to bigger, better and more complex things over the course of 672.

UNIT ONE

Well, that didn't take long!

Well folks, it's just the beginning of this class and I guess for me, it's kind of make or break. If I can make it through this class and even retain the slightest part of the content, I will hopefully have a clearer understanding of Linux, UNIX and the cold heartless realm of the command environment. Part of me thinks that if I could have ever gotten my brain wrapped around it, I would have done so already and having been exposed to the BASIC programming language in the summer of 1982, maybe that just might be the case. Nevertheless, this is the first time I have had formal, academic training in this powerful mode of computing since the rise of the internet.

I know a lot more about "computer concepts" than "Computer practice"

I have been enthralled by the ideas of open source software since I was first exposed to it in about 1998 when there was some publicity on the financial media about LINUX and Linus Torvalds himself and his radically community inclined ideas of distributing software creation and bug fixing throughout an entire not-so-organized community. That's all good, but now I personally must roll up my sleeves and dig into the work. My first query on the Ubuntu user site was about "How can someone who came to understand working and navigating across networks in the GUI Windows Explorer era build a mental model to perceive working in the UNIX/Linux command line universe?

Well, this response to someone asking about "Virtual terminals"seems to help me out a little. For some reason the metaphor of teletypes, an early precursor to, say, a fax machine which is text only is really helping me right now. Teletypes were essentially networked typewriters which could communicate over (usually dedicated) phone lines. A user at one end would enter text by typing and then the user at the other end would get a typewritten text message.  That notion of computers being "glass teletypes" fits in well.

http://askubuntu.com/questions/14284/why-is-a-virtual-terminal-virtual-and-what-why-where-is-the-real-terminal

I guess my first working experience with the internet was a cruddy beige UNIX machine where everything was menu-driven and I input data, composed emails and did very crude searches on what was then called a UNIX dumb terminal.
As I mentioned above, when I worked at a more modern workplace, three years later I got a lot of help conceiving of where I was on the network with Microsoft's Explorer bar, a bar on the left of the screen that showed your computer as a terminal in the office network. Occasionally, I had to take care of work that was on a coworker's computer or utilize their software remotely from my computer. The Explorer Bar helped me keep that stuff straight. UNIX doesn't have anything like that, so I frequently can't figure out in which directory I am currently working.