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[htmlize [J Internet Skills for Disconnected People] 

[HLIST1 [J I need to organize this urgently]
  [AL eev-current/article/eev.txt#iskidip]
  [AL eev-current/examples/iskidip.e]
  [AL eev-current/examples/iskidip2.e]
  [J To do: describe the several "flavors" (chroot, qemu, etc),
    provide screenshots, make the emulated machine access the outside
    world - currently it can resolve hostnames but not much else.]
]

[P A call map:
  [IMG /home/edrx/eev-current/article/iskidip.png]
]




[H2 How the project came to be]

[P I know that I am an exception --- a freak between geeks ---, but I
have never had full access to a second machine. None of my closest
friends were technical people, and my feelings towards practically all
the sysadmins that I knew[FOOTREF .note1 note1 (*)] were more like
``gosh, behaving like this gives bad karma, I don't want to ever be
like those people''... The admins at my home university all adhered to
the principle of ``security through uselessness'': everything was a
security risk, and as their role was to keep the machines safe they
would allow only the bare minimum: basically only e-mail, TeX, and a C
compiler without manuals. There were other programs and services that
could be used, of course (probably talk and news were available, and
you could set up an anonymous ftp directory if you were a professor),
but anyway, the fact that it's so hard for me to remember these other
programs is symptomatic... So, I quickly learned that the real
computer was the one that I had at home.]

[P I had some evidence that internet and sysadminning skills were
important - many HOWTOs and articles in magazines dealt with that, and
indeed, it would have been nice to understand how e-mails travelled
from sender's machine to destiny, how to make machines share
directories, and how to use the system as a non-root user... oh, and
why the people who gave me web hosting for the eev project didn't
hesitate to give me shell access, while everyone else around me had
goosebumps at the mere mention of the idea... But anyway: the task of
learning internet and sysadminning by myself seemed to be daunting and
far beyond my capacity, sort of like learning to use vi had been; it
was no wonder to me the sysadmins that I knew were so arrogant and
secretive - after all, they were an elite group with a though
initiation process. And even though all those difficulties, I did try
a few times.]

[P My early attempts - in 1997 or 1998, I think - consisted of
borrowing my father's computer during the night and trying to make it
and my machine talk via ethernet or SLIP or PLIP. That turned out
being incredibly frustrating, due to faulty hardware, lack of
knowledge, lack of real motivation, and even psychological pressure:
all quirks in his machine for the several months following each of my
attempts were blamed on me... The software couldn't be causing any
side effects - I was booting a linux kernel there with loadlin, and it
loaded an e2fs image in a file, that I created with [R
http://www.linuxlots.com/~fawcett/yard/ yard], but ]

[P In 2001 I was hired to ]

[P ]





[P [FOOTREF note1 .note1 (*)] - The first exception was Greg LeBaron,
who I met in 2002 at McGill. Hi Greg!]


[P In my earlier attempts - in 1998, I think - I borrowed my father's
computer during the night, while it was idle,]








]



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