I grep it.

Tried grep again today - for the first time without either looking in a book or at documentation.

th'Mr asked me to email him th'Son's address. I knew I've put it in my journal, and my journal is spread out over separate files for each month. My files are named something like 200503 (for March of this year), etc.

I cd'd into the journal directory and did:
cat 2005* | grep -i "john doe" -A 3
meaning look in every file in this dir whose name begins with 2005, for the string "(th'Son's name)" and print that line plus the 3 below it.

No, it's not a big deal, it's not a complicated command, but it's something I couldn't have plucked out of the blue a month ago, and I'm glad that I can today. :)

second thoughts on postfix, more thoughts on perl

I am wondering if, by using postfix for a single-user system, I'm not using a chainsaw to butter my bread.

I've finished chapter one of the perl tutorial. At the end it tells me to "go read my perl documentation." This is the point at which my internal engine normally stalls.

I'm totally charmed by the knowledge that if we used binary instead of decimal, we could count to 1023 on our fingers. I can't help but try it out. I get to 31 on one hand, one hand plus one finger is 63, and one hand plus two fingers is 127.

Hmmm... thus follows that eight fingers is 255, nine fingers is 511, and ten fingers is 1023 - always double plus one.

If all bugs are due to faulty math and *if* I get through the tutorial (instead of stalling by just writing about getting through it), then with my strong math aptitude I ought to become a pretty decent programmer.

That's a lot of ifs.
stall, stall, stall.

digits/	capacity/	digits/	capacity
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8	1 3 7 15 31 63 127 255	9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16	511 1023 2047 4095 8191 16383 32767 65535

woo.

google

as I mentioned last night, google is my friend.

Not only "my .muttrc" but "favorite .muttrc" "my irssi settings" "my postfix config" et cetera get good fast results when I'm just trying to get over a hump that's blocking my view of the learning curve.

It's like trying to grill out while battling mosquitoes. If I light a citronella candle to drive away the bugs I can stop swatting and concentrate on cooking.

muttrc

Mutt has been irritating me in lots of small ways. The documentation is huge and will take several thorough readings to sink in, and in the meanwhile I am straining my eyes trying to read small white text on a black background.

Today I found this lifesaver: http://www.spinnaker.de/mutt/muttrc-1.4 which I saved as ~/.mutt-example and from which I pulled several lines to configure the coloration of my muttmailbox. Much better now. When I get brave I'll explore this file more thoroughly, but for now one small irritant is gone and my concentration on other things is improved.

a perly outlook

For months I've been whining to myself, "this is too hard! I can't learn it! I don't understand anything!" in regards to the world of linux.

I've always been good at seeming to understand. This is not deliberate at all, but what I (think I) do is pick up some jargon, use it, and everyone assumes I know much more than I do. So they quit explaining things to me, and I don't ask ...because frankly, I'm usually too clueless to even know what questions to ask.

So, I think I've been going about this all wrong. Here I am, stumbling around trying to understand my linux box, when what I need to know is a programming language. Found a great tutorial today, which is here: http://learn.perl.org/library/beginning_perl/ . Well, it may be a completely shitty tutorial, what do I know? But it feels like a starting place. It feels like I finally have a square one and a direction in which to go from there.

What I'd been doing up till now is window dressing: learning vim, learning irssi, figuring out where config files are and how to config them, learning css, skipping around in the man pages... stumbling around in the dark, in other words.

I've downloaded the first three chapters in a surprisingly small .pdf format. If it's actually the breakthough I've been needing, when I can afford to I'll buy the book.

For the first time in months, I feel hopeful.