Fiddling¶

Fiddling around with software is what I do a lot. Certain things should be doable, so I try to find out. Repeat this week after week and you're quite an expert at a lot of things computer-wise.

I mean, the amount of people impressed when you do some simple grep, sed, sort or cut...

Dorothea: "Where did you learn this stuff?" By being dropped in the deep end and swimming out. Because the frustration of not knowing it got to be more than the frustration of learning it. Most of all, by fiddling around.

But if I need to get something done, and I think the software I'm looking at can do it, and I think I can figure out how to make the software I'm looking at do it, well, I don't just sit there - I fiddle. And most of the time, I can fiddle it into something that pretty much resembles the outcome I wanted.

Nice case-in-point was the recent move of vanrees.org to a new machine. That also meant a newer debian version. So I wanted to have the proper imap server, with a newer mailserver, the new 2.0 apache, subversion instead of cvs, etcetera. Newer config files, a few days of tweaking and getting it to work just right. No big problems, but some things needed some serious googling for answers. Fiddle, fiddle, fiddle, it works. Getting a certain relative to join the fun (and to share the root password) helped; it also made sure we both did a tidy job.

Most people will just happily use whatever's pre-configured. But I'm just so much more happy with a smooth-running well-configured server...