Thursday, January 21, 2010

Geek Joy

I have a little task at work that will be trivial with UNIX tools (some basic PDB file munging, for any readers in the field) but that I honestly do not know how to do in Windows. All of my serious techie work has been done in Unix. Windows is for management work. I don't know how to do much of anything truly techie in Windows. In fact, I am having our IT support guy (who reports to me) train me in basic Windows administration, so that I can be his back up and let him take vacation days that aren't interuppted by desperate phone calls and emails from work.

So tonight, I logged in to my work machine and downloaded Cygwin. It took maybe five minutes to get it installed and get some soft links set up so that I can easily access my desktop and My Documents files without having to escape a bunch of spaces in directory names.

It is sort of pathetic how happy it made me to type the commands. I was literally bouncing up and down in my seat with joy. I should have installed Cygwin ages ago (to which Hubby says "Duh!")- I already feel less like a hopeless manager and more like a techie again.

3 comments:

  1. I could never figure out windows, either. If I can't figure out where the OS has put the DLLs, what hope does an ordinary user have?

    I was using my windows machine only for email, web and to run Hummingbird x-windows to a Unix box.

    As soon as OS X came out, I switched to a Mac. After I installed the power tools, I had an Unix workstation in a laptop package. I installed compilers so that I can prototype software on it, too.

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  2. Okay, this is even more techie than I understand!

    Although I'm with you about typing commands. I'm always thrilled when the developers I work with show me a sql querry that I can run myself to get the information I need without having to constantly ask them to look it up.

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  3. OMG. I am so IT illiterate. I'm glad you got things working :)

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