Today has been a good day. I spent some time in the classroom teaching a group of Upward Bound students how to create presentations with PowerPoint and how to edit down their graphics files with Photoshop. It felt good to be teaching again (even just a one-shot seminar) and I did a good job of it. Sometimes I get so stressed out that I forget to take pride in the things I do well.
David, the other computer guy here, paid me high compliaments on my OPRT web application (the UB/UBMS Online Progress Reporting Tool). He said he’s leaned a lot from looking at the code and was greatful that I’m commented the hell out of it. He said he was amazed at what I’d managed to pull off in that app in only 88 hours of production time. It made me smile. I’ll have screenshots and a demo eventually. Right now, it’s all password protected.
Geek out: Cygwin is an API and a set of ported apps that lets you run a Unix/Linux-style operating system on top of your crappy Windows 98 (or whatever) that you’re still using for whatever reason. I got it originally so I could use navigate my Win32 file system using Unix commands rather than DOS commands (and if you come to DOS from a Unix background, you’ll know why I’d want to do that). First, I looked into some small collections of Unix utilities ported to Win32 (things like “ls” and “more” and path translators that turn “c:\whatever\whatever\foo.txt” into something useful. I was scared of Cygwin at first because I figured it would be slow, but it’s not. It’s a pleasure. It’s a quick download, a quick install, and it makes me smile every time I’m fire it up. I found out today that you can run X Windows on top of it (and KDE on top of that, if you’re brave), so I’m going to look into that sometime soon. Until I can afford enough hard drive space and ram to run Vmware, this is going to work just fine (and, hell, it’s GPL, so I might just keep on using it).