Torpedoed!

So, this week one of our assignments for class was to design and post a basic web page. I've been dabbling in HTML for a few years-- took a community college web design class and tweaked the web page I used for my class when I taught school. Last year, for 504, I created a simple web page and was able to not only revisit some of what I already knew, but also dabble a little bit more with CSS. What nearly killed me then tried it again this time.




Float.


I suck at float and one of the reasons is that I don't do much with HTML or CSS on a regular basis. I have to retrain myself to a degree each time I tackle a web page. For this assignment, I looked at what I had done last summer and revised it. I had used div to float my picture and caption then and it when I looked at it again this summer, it looked ugly. Not to mention that apparently I had another div class for a second image that was not in my html (and a background image property that I didn't have either). So besides editing and changing the content and some of the style, I deleted some of the extraneous stuff.

Oops.

When I refreshed the page, my picture slammed back over to the left side of the page. The caption went from red italic to blue roman (matching the rest of the text). Any and all edits I made in CSS were not recognized by the HTML page. Just to make sure I had the right page open, I changed content in HTML. It showed up in my web browser; I knew the CSS was the problem.

For almost an hour I researched and looked at examples of floating, and everybody's got a different way of doing it. Some use one class, some use several. I tried everything. Finally I decided that since I only had one picture, I didn't want to use a class anyway. I wanted to use an ID. As I was doing that, I noticed something very peculiar... and it was the hideous

 

curly bracket of death.

What I had been researching, in a macro-analysis of the problem, was what I had done wrong with the code. I'm not brilliant with CSS or any aspect of web design. I make hideous mistakes all the time. I knew I had made one this time, too. What I should have been doing was reading what I had typed-- or rather what I hadn't typed-- a little more closely. Open curly bracket: yes. Closed curly bracket: oops.

I closed the #dm section of my css with a curly bracket, refreshed, and... We have a floater.

I can't tell you the sense of satisfaction of seeing a doofy little picture move from left to right. It's embarrassing in the grand scheme of things, but boy did I feel like I accomplished something.

Oh, I also cleaned up the caption's style and learned how to place margins in the body of the web page. So, in the end it was OK, I guess, that I spent so much time looking for something I didn't need to know.

I'm going to tell you a little story about myself and then I want you to guess what kind of learner I am.

When I was in 5th grade, Rubik's Cubes were all the rage. Naturally, I needed one. I loved that little thing. In the first minute I had it cut open from the its plastic wrapping, I had turned it every which way. I liked to solve sides at a time and make little checkerboard patterns. The ultimate solution always eluded me, however, which frustrated me to no end. My dad bought me a Rubik's Cube solution book. It was about 60 pages long with diagrams, none of them color. I didn't get past page two. 

One day at recess I noticed one of my classmates with a perfectly solved Cube. I knew he'd had it a while, so I asked him to teach me how to solve it. He got out his pocket knife. We could carry pocket knives to school then. "I pop out the pieces," he explained. I asked him to pop out my pieces because I wanted a perfect Rubik's Cube again. He complied but managed to break one of the little squares a bit, so that it always fell out if tipped the wrong direction. Also, he scuffed up the white stickers so much that we had to take them off, creating one black side. 

But I had my perfect cube again. I loved making little checkerboard patterns that were mirrored all over the Cube. I didn't twist it every which way again, though I had kids grab it and do that (a yellow piece always dropping and the kid crying in alarm, "I didn't do that!"). But of course by then I knew how to reassemble my little broken Cube.

I did feel guilty about tearing it apart and "cheating." I felt that I was punished for that when the one little yellow piece breaking. It also wasn't so much a puzzle as a gadget to make colored patterns with. However, I was no longer frustrated. Only defeated.

So, the moral of the story? The type of learner I am?

An impatient one, for starters. I like to start out by doing and then stop once I get the feel for something to read up on it. I like big picture somewhere along the way to help me understand why I am doing the small steps. Unfortunately, with Rubik's Cube, I could never see the pattern of the twists and turns: why when I twisted it this way, that would be the result. I suck at spatial orientation. So I sucked at Rubik's Cube.

If I had ever seen an animated video showing me the Rubik's Cube pattern, I may have done a little better, as I am a visual learner far and above verbal and tactile. But I doubt it, because it would still involve too many moving parts (literally), something I have trouble with when learning a concept. However, I do remember the animated TV show Rubik, the Amazing Cube, in which three Puerto Rican kids fight bad guys with the help of Rubik, the flying, talking crime-busting cube. It must have been the absolute dumbest TV show ever. Good times.

So I try to take advantage of various videos, diagrams, and images to help me understand a little better and see the patterns that help form the big picture. Sometimes it works, sometimes I have to talk my self out of mind-implosion from TMI and not enough patience to let it settle in. 

I wonder if Rubik knows how to convert decimal to binary, or create a subnet ID? Probably.

The great and powerful

So I got a taste this week of the POWER OF THE SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR. It's fun adding users who can't use my system until I'm done adding them... and I will be done when I'm good and ready! And only giving users permissions I want them to have. They will have to be nice to me. Ha ha ha ha ha.

Don't make me release the flying monkeys!

I actually had a small bump in the road on my way to becoming the System Overlord, receiving a message akin to this as I tried to install the libdm5-perl component:

Heh, Heh. Oops. It seems I had some trouble unhashing hash marks in last week's unit. Oh, well, not to worry, I just went back and redid all of unit 2's configuring and the second time I attempted to install the libdm5-perl component, I basically got this message:

So, all was right with the universe again, and I went about creating and destroying lives as I saw fit as the SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR!!

Ahem, if you would, please do not tell anyone that while system administrators are great and powerful, like Oz, they are in reality merely men (or women) behind the curtain. In reality, all I was actually doing was following instructions on a little piece of paper (virtual, of course) and adding pretend users to my pretend system. If I were actually in Oz, I might have expressed my week this way:

Oh, you liquidated her, eh? Very resourceful!

I need brains to be a systems administrator. Duh. But in this week's learning, I was once again reminded about using your brains to work through a problem. When I wasn't given permission to download the perl component, I knew I hadn't done something correctly last week. In discussion boards, classmates had said something about doing Unit 3 over. I went back and looked at the assignments-- sure enough, I saw some things about getting permissions. I went back to my first snapshot and started all over again: it worked. And, I was also reminded once again, much like saving your work as you go, take snapshots. It only takes once to learn the lesson. Usually.

I should have felt it in my heart.

I need a heart to be a systems administrator. Or, rather, ethics. Which, luckily, I have. Systems administrators have Super Powers. Powers most people don't even know about. You know that paranoid feeling you get when you rip on a co-worker in a company email? Hang on to it. Systems administrators can read your email. And anything else on your system, except your password, and big whoop on that because they can always reset it, anyway. Systems administrators can determine who can do what on the computer. I suggest you bring them candy and flowers on a regular basis.

You are talking to a man who has laughed in the face of death, sneered at doom and chuckled at catastrophe.

And you need courage. At first, you need courage in abundance. I'm the kind of computer person who feels just enough courage to try things but doesn't have enough brains to pull them off each time. But hey, that's what snapshots are for, right? So as I'm reading about the commands we've used  I'm also fiddling around with commands to see what works and what doesn't. I know from experience that fiddling around with computers is really the only way to understand them. Many of us are self-taught, and we do pretty well, because we learn the tricks as we go. Sometimes the hard way. Right now I think most of us are feeling pretty courageous just using the command line. So, we're getting there!

So while systems administrators are all-powerful, ultimately they are just people behind the curtain who can be revealed by little Scottie dogs and the FTC. And unless they have brains, a heart, and courage, they really won't be very good at their job.

But, please don't tell anyone that because I like them all to be afraid of me. VERY AFRAID! HA HA HA HA HA.


I accept chocolate any day of the week. Goodbye, folks!

The VI editor, in the directory, with the pipe

Do you remember playing Clue? Of course you do, and so do I. Do you remember announcing to your competitors, "I suggest that..." with a smug look on your face, then opening the envelope and discovering that you were dead wrong? And then feeling inadequate to the challenge of the game, and realizing that maybe you're not as good as you thought, and deciding that everything you thought you knew about the world was in fact, a horrible lie?

Me, neither.

But I felt a little bit like that this week! I, the person my family and friends turn to with computer problems, know now, with firm conviction, that I am an absolute idiot! Or, at least, that I've got a ways to go in learning about Linux.

This week I used the VIM editor, and wheeeeeeee! Not really sure what I was doing in there, haha, but I did go through the tutorial step by step and did very well at the exercises. My favorite little personal triumph was using a number followed by "GG" to get me back to where I was when I exited. "Oh, I think I was at around 600," I'd muse to myself, typing in 600 GG!! I still do not know if I believe the tutor when it assured me that I would eventually LOVE the H, J, K, and L directionals. Hmph, if you say so. I shall trust in the process.

I felt pretty proud of myself, hitting "i" to insert and "a" to append. I followed all the directions and felt pretty good about understanding until I took a step back and thought... Where am I in the computer? What am I doing? When I make a file in VIM, where is it? What is the difference between : and ! ??  I can do what the tutor wants me to but I can't understand why! I need my dunce cap now. Hopefully, I can take it off in a few weeks, as it all starts to make sense. (Trust the process, trust the process.)

Still, I must claim a small victory. Back in the shell, I decided to try using the pipe in a command. Nothing fancy, something simple.

cd lib | ls -l

And what happened? In one fell swoop, I changed the directory to lib AND listed the contents with their permissions.

VICTORY IS MINE! 

IN YOUR FACE, COL. MUSTARD!