With the myriad of platforms used to counteract the absence of most direct interactions at work, I start to suffer from platform fatigue, constantly switching to a different interface and wasting a lot of time on retrieving links from old emails and reentering passwords… Even a single platform like Teams requires permanent juggling between Dauphine and Warwick (obviously linked with Microsoft constraints), plus repeated updates that clash more often than enough with Firefox. Not to mention collaborative systems like Overleaf, Wikimath, Git, and others. Same thing for regular Zoom meetings which fail to reopen from one week to the next. And calendars that cannot keep track of everything or even anything! The only interface that keeps working (for me) across accounts is my Thunderbird email interface, except for the sharp increase in the email volume (and the fact that many now bypass emails for chats on Teams, Slack, and another myriad of platforms).
Archive for the Linux Category
platform fatigue
Posted in Kids, Linux, University life with tags calendar, COVID-19, Firefox, la vie au bureau, Microsoft, platform, Skype, Teams, Thunderbird, Zoom on March 1, 2021 by xi'anlove thy command line [Bourne again]
Posted in Books, Kids, Linux, R, University life with tags bash, Bourne shell, command line, cron, echo, Nature, rm -rf *, shell, unix on February 15, 2021 by xi'an
“Prebuilt into macOS and Unix systems (…) the command line (also called the shell) is a powerful text-based interface in which users issue terse instructions to create, find, sort and manipulate files, all without using the mouse. There are actually several distinct (…) shell systems, among the most popular of which [sic?] is Bash, an acronym for the ‘Bourne again shell’ (a reference to the Bourne shell, which it replaced in 1989).”
An hilarious rediscovery of the joys of shell (line) commands in Nature! Which I use by default for most operations on my computer, albeit far from expertly (despite the use of a cheat tee, from time to time!). One of the arguments in the article, “The mouse doesn’t scale,” is definitely mine as well. Among other marketing lines, wrangling files with no software interference (check), handling huge files (very rarely), manipulating spreadsheets (I don’t), parallelising work on remote servers (check), automate via cron (not anymore)…. Unsurprisingly, most of our students are never using terminals of command lines.
errno EFBIG
Posted in Books, Kids, Linux, Statistics, University life with tags asymptotic variance, central limit theorem, CLT, common mistakes, cross validated, errno, teaching on October 12, 2020 by xi'anubuntu update
Posted in Linux, pictures with tags beavers, Bionic Beaver, COVID-19, graphics tablet, on-line course, Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04, upgrade on August 11, 2020 by xi'an
As I had delayed my ugrade of my Ubuntu 16.04 Linux OS way beyond the reasonable, I eventually found myself forced to do it in the least favourable version earlier this week, as the University was closed and my computer support friends were on (well-deserved) vacation. Indeed, my graphical interface went blank and no amount of rebooting was making any change, while I had access to a line editor which was kindly suggesting the command for the upgrade. After a moment of hesitation, I followed the recommendation and prepared for either a long wait or a tragic error message, but nothing like that happened in that the download of the new version was lightning fast and the upgrade itself lasted less than one hour, leaving me with a fully operational 18.04 version. And amazed at recovering my earlier tuning, with even better performances..! (The only glitch is that the colours seem to have turned more reddish or auberginish.) One worry I had with using a Huion graphics tablet [that I had just bought with my amazon credits in preparation for my on-line classes next semester] vanished when I found it had the same minimal performances as earlier [meaning I can write using Gimp, although this app always challenged me, Xournal, which allows for writing on top of my pdf slides, or Microsoft Whiteboard, which works like a potentially infinite whiteboard, but I have no access to the physical control buttons on that tablet]. A happy ending or rather beginning with Bionic Beaver, then, albeit a possibly short one as I should move now to Ubuntu 20.02 version, expecting a similarly smooth transition unless my HP laptop has some compatibility issues…