Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2001 21:28:40 -0600 From: David Kelly <dkelly@grumpy.dyndns.org> To: David Scheidt <dscheidt@tumbolia.com> Cc: dannyman <dannyman@toldme.com>, Rob <europax@home.com>, "freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG" <freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: How do you get kids interested in computers- other than playing games? Message-ID: <200103140328.f2E3See16304@grumpy.dyndns.org> In-Reply-To: Message from David Scheidt <dscheidt@tumbolia.com> of "Tue, 13 Mar 2001 17:06:54 CST." <Pine.BSF.4.21.0103131640420.55797-100000@shell-1.enteract.com>
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David Scheidt writes: > I tried to explain to someone why I used a UNIX > box to read my mail, and not the company normal Outlook. That the user > interface is awful wasn't really the point (pine's sucks pretty hard), > but that I couldn't make the machine do arbitrary things with my mail. > I had a hard time time convincing him this was useful until I showed > him a webpage that showed some interesting stats on it. I built it > with a makefile, which ran a script to grab some data from a database, > process it, and update the webpages with it. The kicker: it was run by > procmail, and got kicked off by regular mail message that had updated > data in it. He was unable to suggest a way to get a windows box do the > same thing, particularly one that didn't cost a cent. Showing people > things like that often generates a "Wow, I didn't reallize I could make > a computer do that for me!" response. Did something like that at a previous employer using FreeBSD 2.2.8. Happen to know that machine is still chugging away just the way I left it. Anyway, the task was to turn an email subscription to Commerce Business Daily into a form that people were used to seeing it. Used slocal to pluck it out of my incoming. Metamail to extract the mime attachment. par and awk to reformat. Zip to compress. Netatalk, Samba, and Apache, to place the data on the company network where others could get to it. And /bin/sh to glue everything together. The NT lovers in the IT department had already proclaimed this an impossible task not worth the effort to automate. I threw most of this together in 4 hours one night. A couple more late night sessions had it working smoothly including procedures for manually pushing one thru. Got a panic call from my ex-employer last year. Machine didn't reboot after a power failure. Turned out the Gateway BIOS lost its mind and decided to boot IDE rather than SCSI. That's all the problems they have had with it. Poor little useless 24MB P-133. -- David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@hiwaay.net ===================================================================== The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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