Ottawa Canada Linux Users Group

Title: "Unix Mis-conceived"
                    - or -
       "Things that don't work the way you think they do."

Speaker: Ian! D. Allen
         Algonquin College
         National Capital FreeNet

Summary:

    This talk incorporates a few things about Unix that I've not seen
    well-documented elsewhere.

    1) The One True Unix File System Diagram
       
       All the Unix textbooks draw a nice little tree of the Unix file
       system, with the root at the top and file names at the bottm,
       and thus completely mislead people about how the file system
       actually works.  Nobody who learned Unix from such a diagram can
       understand how Unix file links work.  I'll draw the real diagram,
       and you can take it home and paste it over all the other diagrams
       in all your Unix texts.

    2) Stupid Interactive Bourne Shell Tricks

       My Algonquin classes remain somewhat mystified by the way the shell
       handles redirection, expands variables, and locates file names.
       I'll give a quick demo of the basics, including some things that
       might surprise you.  Some important differences will be noted
       for CSH users.  Yes, you can easily fill your disk.

    3) Programming as Hacking Until it Works (most of the time)

       I found a pile of bugs in the original (Bill Joy) C Shell while
       avoiding working on my Masters Thesis at Waterloo in the early
       1980's, and so I went about trying to fix them.  The resulting
       shell ("itcsh" - Ian's Tenex CSH) was in use at Waterloo for
       many years.  I'll talk a bit about just how awful C shells are for
       writing programs even 20 years later.  Don't do this at home, kids.

    4) Don't Throw Anything Out (Anecdote Section)

       I started using the X window system when it arrived at UofWaterloo
       in the 1980's, first with X10 [not the cameras] and then with
       X11.  A feature that X10 had was the ability for an icon to be
       changed when the xterm window associated with it had output.
       This feature was lost in X11, so I dug into the code and added
       it back at Waterloo.  Little did I know where it would go.

Speaker Bio:

    Ian! Allen <idallen@ncf.ca> currently has a day job as professor
    of Computer Studies at the Algonquin College Woodroffe Campus.
    At night, in between marking IBM JCL and Bourne shell scripts and
    dodging his Web Cam, he writes Perl and shell scripts to automate
    things on his Linux desktop and does volunteer system administration
    for the National Capital FreeNet.  He has an Honours BA in Psychology
    and a MMath in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo,
    where he spent most of his time doing amateur theatre and rewriting
    Troff and the C Shell instead of working on his thesis.  His first
    computer course was WATFIV (FORTRAN) on punch cards in 1974.
    His first email account was "idallen" on a Waterloo Honeywell 6050
    GECOS system in 1976.  He has been programming on Unix since 1976
    (V7 on a PDP-11) and the Internet since about 1981.  His first
    home computer was a VAXstation 3100 running Ultrix.  He acquired
    his first Intel computer (P166 Windows 95) in 1996 and his first
    Linux distribution (SuSE 5.2) at an OCLUG meeting a few years later.
    He currently has five computers on his home network: the one-floppy
    Linux Router, Mandrake 8.1, Mandrake 7.2, Corel Linux, and Mac OSX.
    He is married to midwife Jan Teevan and plays step-father to her
    three young adults.  He has two favourite sayings:  (1) Less code
    is better code; and (2) If this were easy, everyone would be doing it.