Lab46 Wiki

To review and become familiar with some basic internet and UNIX courtesies.

All of the various civilizations and societies that make up this earth have developed their own set of customs and traditions. Individuals in these societies learn what is acceptable/unacceptable behavior within the guidelines of their culture.

Just as we have defined behavior IRL (In Real Life), the internet has developed some behavioral norms as well.

We develop these shortcuts to facilitate communication. They are relatively unofficial but are growing in popularity. Read on for details.

One of the basic rules understood by all: IF YOU SPEAK IN ALL CAPS IT IS CONSIDERED YELLING!

So don't yell where you are desiring regular conversation.

When we speak, we can often convey a lot of information very quickly. We most likely developed our ability to speak in our infancy far in advance of any structured writing.

However, within the internet, we do not often communicate with others by speaking audibly- instead, we've come to rely on textual communication: strings of alphanumeric characters and symbols that appear on our screens. Here we rely on reading and writing of that text.

As one becomes more and more familiar with something, the possibility for developing shortcuts exist. But like anything, if we want others to understand what is going on, our non-standard “extensions” must be familiar enough to a large group of people.

Many of you have probably used some form of internet messaging (text-conferencing): Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Instant Messenger, etc.

You've probably already been exposed to many of the shortcuts and emotional inflections (Emoticons) inherent to this form of communication, but we'll list some common examples just to provide a knowledge base:

Abbreviation / Symbol	Description or Meaning
BRB	“Be Right Back”
BBL	“Be Back Later”
TTYL	“Talk To You Later”
	“Laughing Out Loud”
LOLOL	“Laughing Out Loud” by someone who doesn't get it
LOLOL!!1!	same as above, with fringe l337 involved
ROTFL!	“Rolling On The Floor Laughing”
ROTFLMAO!	- I'll leave this to your imagination -
:) or	Emoticon: smiley face
	Emoticon: big smiley face (grinning)
;)	Emoticon: wink
:(	Emoticon: sad face
IIRC	“If I Remember Correctly…”
IANAL	“I Am Not A Lawyer”
RTFM	“Read the 'Fantastic' Manual”
WTF	“What the F!@##$!@?!?!”

There are undoubtedly endless more, and perhaps even variations on the ones I have listed, as well as further variations on written languages such as l337-5p34k (leet-speak). This is by no means an official doctrine on shortcuts.

In most cases, it is best to spell things out in order for it to be most accurately interpreted by all audiences. But with anything, YMMV (your mileage may vary).

Since most of our class correspondence will be conducted via e-mail, it would be prudent to heed the following:

Subject lines: When addressing an e-mail, there is a line designated in most mail clients to indicate the subject (topic) of the message. Think of this like labels on manilla folders in a filing cabinet - they help organize the entire system, so you can seek out information in an organized and timely fashion.

Now imagine trying to find something in this same filing cabinet if none of the folders were labelled.

For this reason, you should ALWAYS have a subject for all your e-mails.

Body of the message: The body of the e-mail is where your message is conveyed. It also contains your “signature” (3-4 lines of text that uniquely identifies you) that should always come at the bottom of your message.

When composing a fresh message, this usually isn't a problem- your mail client usually positions your signature below the line your cursor is on.

Quoting/Replies: When replying to a message, however, things can get a little blurry. There are some conventions used that are commonly practiced in technical and professional groups on the internet. Since we're in a technical field (or we want to get a job / impress someone with our effectiveness to communicate), we're going to observe these guidelines:

• Make sure your signature is always on the bottom of the message.
• Quote the material to which you are replying.
• Reply underneath the quoted material.
• Trim excess quoted material that is extraneous/unnecessary to that which you are replying

We will look at these in more detail:

Just like yogurt! Except this isn't fruit…

Common sense here- if it isn't on the bottom, use your e-mail client's cut/paste facilities to put it there.

In pine, CTRL-K will add one line at a time to the buffer (it will cut a line at a time), and CTRL-U will “un-cut” or paste from the buffer. These should be listed on the bottom of your screen.

Most, if not all people already do this - it is simply the act of replying in a manner that makes sense.

This one is easy to miss - as it requires more work on your part.

But it greatly clarifies what you are trying to communicate, as well as significantly improving your level of presentation.

This also allows you to break up the original message and reply to each part in a fashion that lets you get your point across more effectively.

I expect to see you doing this where appropriate.

This can come with practice, sometimes it is clear and other times it is not. There is no right or wrong method of trimming (but in some cases there is a level of appropriateness).

What do I mean by trimming quoted material?

Let's say I post a 5 page commentary on the binary language of moisture evaporators - and somewhere in page 3 you find a couple sentences that you would like to reply to.

Now- you should be able to imagine the inappropriateness of quoting from a 5-page document. Not only will it be difficult to find your message, but it will be difficult to tell what you are replying to.

So cut out all the unnecessary text that isn't required for others to understand your reply.

Why am I even covering this? Well, not only does it make life easier for me and the class as a whole- but it helps you convey a better presentation of yourself, your ability to communicate as well as your effectiveness and showing off your skills.

I'm sure you can think of some situations where this can work to your advantage.

The internet is also filled with cranky, complaining people- the less flamebait you give them, the happier all involved will be.

When using Lab46 or any UNIX/Linux machine, it is polite and/or customary to do the following:

Log out of the system- this is as easy as issuing an “exit”, “logout”, or some other appropriate means of exiting from your shell. Just clicking on the close button on your window may not clean up your session, and you could leave processes running that eat up resources.

Remember “Be kind- rewind”? - same sort of thing.

Don't consume large amounts of resources- on shared multiuser systems, resources are utilized by everyone. Sure, you can compile 12 projects at once, but when you do- it drives the CPU load through the roof, and nobody else can use the system as it is busy dealing with your many compiles. Be courteous to others.

Disabling Messages- if you do not want to be interrupted, use mesg and turn messages off for that session.

Leaving for a while- if you have to go elsewhere for a while - log out and exit from the system. Your account has your data, and you don't want anyone else using it.

Leaving for a while in a controlled setting- If you are in a special-purpose lab, or somewhere that public workstations are not in demand, there may be a “lock screen” function you can employ, which will disable others from getting to your data while you are away. Then, you can resume where you left off upon your return.

Hopefully this was useful/informative. Now for the exercise:

Now that you've introduced yourself on the class mailing list, be sure to use it on a regular basis- post questions, participate in discussions, etc.

All questions in this assignment require an action or response. Please organize your responses into an easily readable format and submit the final results to your instructor.

Your assignment is expected to be performed and submitted in a clear and organized fashion- messy or unorganized assignments may have points deducted. Be sure to adhere to the submission policy.

The successful results of the following actions will be considered for evaluation:

• your responses to questions submitted at the following form:

<html><center><a href=“http://lab46.corning-cc.edu/haas/content/unix/submit.php?cs1”>http://lab46.corning-cc.edu/haas/content/unix/submit.php?cs1</a></center></html>

• the response from the form (received via e-mail) saved as cs1.txt to your ~/src/unix/ directory
• addition/commit of ~/src/unix/cs1.txt into your repository (CS 0x0 sets you up to do this).

As always, the class mailing list and class IRC channel are available for assistance, but not answers.