school news

School has been in session for four days now. Whoopee. Spanish class is going well, it's easier than I thought; chemistry is going to be a pain, and calculus is just weird this time.

Calculus is a mixed telecourse this semester. That means, the professor is here for three days a week and at the other campus for two. No matter how hard they try, the 'other campus' always seems less involved. Not to mention the professor can't use her mad chalkboard technique. <g>

Interesting event happened yesterday. I was sitting in the TLCC (Teaching/Learning/Computing Center, my school's name for "computer lab". Yeah, I know it sounds stupid, but I didn't make it up.). Anyway, I'm sitting in the TLCC, sshed (using PuTTY) into my home box. I'm sitting at a computer with my back to the supervisor's desk, so she can see what I'm doing.

Said supervisor comes up behind me and asks, "What are you doing? Is that DOS?" Obviously, any window with white text on a black background is automatically a DOS box, no matter what it actually says.

Me: "No."

Supervisor: "What are you doing, then?"

Me: (How do I explain ssh to an intellect the envy of apes worldwide?) "Umm, telnetting into my home computer."

Supervisor: "Did you install any software on this computer?"

Me: "No." (Actually, a copy of PuTTY was sitting in My Documents, but I don't consider it "installed". Besides, I usually run it from a floppy.)

Supervisor: "Are you doing chat?"

Me: "No." A bald-faced lie, because I had a second PuTTY session minimized with BitchX running. (The one I was using was only running Emacs. No, I don't have the Emacs IRC client installed. Maybe I should.)

Supervisor: "OK." Moves on.

About ten minutes later, I repeat the scenario with a man in a suit who I later find out is a network manager. It seems the supervisor had to call in reinforcements.

Later still, I notice the supervisor hovering behind me. She was obviously seeing what I was doing, making sure I wasn't cracking the Pentagon, etc. I was still in Emacs, so I didn't worry. (I had closed out BitchX by then.)

Why are people so afraid of anyone with any knowledge? "Oh my $DEITY, he actually knows how to use a command line! Quick, call the FBI, we've got a hacker here!" (Yes, I know the difference. They don't.) I mean, I've never done anything like that (except that one time I put NetBus on a bunch of computers in a lab at my last school, and I paid my debt to society: my internet access was suspended for a month. That was because I intended no harm, as evidenced by the use of my real username.) I've never done anything malicious, anyway.

Let's just hope they didn't realize I printed about 200 pages of code, because, "Printing from the Internet is for Academic Use Only!" First of all, it wasn't from the Internet. It was from the lab computer. I downloaded it to the computer, and printed it from there. Second, it is academic. Just because I'm not enrolled in a class on a subject is no reason to say it isn't academic. (I'm learning how to use GTK. It's a learning activity.)

ithought news

We released alpha 3. It's still got some bugs, but it's usable. I'm posting with it now. You can post to Advogato and LiveJournal, with full Kuro5hin support soon to come.

I wish I could figure out how to debug a module loaded via g_module_open(), etc. gdb doesn't want to recognize it, so I can't debug it. Shame, since there's a strange error: for some reason, GTK thinks the label in the LiveJournal dialog is actually a ScrolledWindow, which it isn't.

life news

Are you kidding? You mean there's life outside of school?