Learning new things

I ordered two books from Amazon yesterday for a ridiculous sum of money (my wife could probably buy 10 books for the same amount). I realised that I hadn’t learned anything really new in a very long time and that I wanted to teach myself something (more or less) useful.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I recently installed Ubuntu on my laptop. While I can use it fairly well thanks to its Gnome GUI, I actually have no understanding whatsoever of the underlying Unix system. The instructions I would have to follow if I wanted to solve my audio output problem are made up of cryptic lines of text that needs to be typed into a terminal window. Terminal windows are somewhat archaic. This so reminds me of John Zachman, who still makes his presentations with overheads! And John’s presentations rock! Which I think is reason and motivation enough to want to come to grips with this terminal thing and Linux in general.

I do find it difficult to use something if I don’t at least have a basic knowledge of how it functions. Many times I would prefer knowing exactly how things work, but I think that Isaac Newton was probably the last human on this planet who could claim that he understood most things. We have made too many discoveries in the meantime and it is no longer possible to be an expert of all things.

So, in an effort – not to become an expert, but at least – to build up a basic know how of how Linux works (and in the process maybe even solve my blasted audio problem), I ordered “Linux lernen mit Ubuntu“. The mysteries of the terminal shall be demystified. Sound shall sound!

On a totally unrelated note: Ever since I first heard about joomla, I’ve been curious to find out how that works. But after having played around with a test install for a while, I have to say that I have either gone stupid in my old days, or then maybe the interface is just not as intuitive as I am used to. Or, more simply put, the interface is not what I’m used to.

I have no real need, nor use for a content management system. But it is something which I  find very interesting, and the days of web pages being created the “write way” are definitely over. Joomla appears to offer the possibility of creating static web pages, as well as dynamic ones without too much effort. It will also be interesting to see in what ways a dedicated CMS is different from wordpress, which as far as I can tell can just as well be used for content management. And I’ve also been wondering if it is possible to integrate the two

Hopefully, Joomla! 1.5: Das umfassende Handbuch will answer all my questions.
The two books cover subjects which are not related to my professional activity. Nor (probably) are they very entertaining, but it has been far too long since I learned something new about computers and the web.