2015 — 20 May: Wednesday
Not the happiest day in my annual calendar.1 The planned walk later this (sunny so far) morning should certainly help with that.
There are glaring gaps...
... in my present knowledge and understanding of the issues surrounding Linux file and directory access permissions and ownership. To be honest, I didn't think2 there were. However, after last night's irritating series of mis-steps and misadventures with a set of files on an external USB hard drive this has become horribly apparent. I had got my hands back my new 4TB external drive yesterday afternoon and was simply trying to transfer some files (from a new directory on it) over to my NAS. All my attempts to do this trivially simple thing have so far ignominiously failed.
What's worse is that the series of screen captures I took (of the command line terminal sessions with which I tried to perform this "should-be-simple" task) have also served to confuse the guru currently assisting me.
So I've dug out Mike McGrath's "Linux in easy steps" — I'm not proud — from underneath an accumulating pile of other stuff and will be revisiting a couple of the tutorial chapters therein later today. It's almost as if Linux isn't quite "ready for the desktop" (as the old saying goes). Although I don't doubt the current deficiency lies within me, I suspect I'm unlikely to be the only user to have been caught in this sort of pickle on occasion.
Eerie parallels
Just sayin'. :-)
But the problems of false findings often begin with researchers unwittingly fooling themselves: they fall prey to cognitive biases, common modes of thinking that lure us toward wrong but convenient or attractive conclusions...
Nice article.
Now here's a chap...
... whose approach to blogging (I've read, and quoted from, a number of his pieces in the past) seems to mirror mine. Not that this ¬blog is a blog, of course!
Write on!
The momentary...
... unpleasantness with file transferring is resolved, though without me yet understanding quite why. Acting on orders received I first attempted to "touch A" into the reluctant folder. Came the reply:
touch: cannot touch 'A': Permission denied
I then tried "sudo touch B", supplied the password, and got no hint of non-compliance. At that point the troublesome folder now contained two zero-length plain text files, "A" and "B". I therefore concluded that it might well be possible to copy more useful files into that folder... and so it proved. Weird are the eldritch twists of the path leading to Linux guruhood.
Speaking of touching...
... I have a quote here from a book by Mary Roach ("Stiff: the curious lives of human cadavers") that first introduced me to the curious concept of what she termed a "professional vagina". This report of a Florida lawsuit now offers me a horrible variant.
If I read this...
... correctly, my feet shouldn't quite be touching the ground!
Meanwhile, buried in this paragraph lies (I hope) a perfectly sane explanation of the discrepancy between the number of physical share certificates I found among dear Mama's files, and the (lesser) number that the share registrar believes she held when she died.
I will check carefully, Big Bro, don't worry. But not before at least one further cup of tea.
Incoming
I was very impressed by the film "Margin Call" a couple of years ago — hence "A Most Violent Year". And, as I mentioned a couple of days ago, I've long been a fan of Robert Altman's Altmanesque oeuvre.
