Russell Beattie

So I'm posting this from Lynx right now on a Debian box that I'm setting up at work because my computer is dying quickly. The drive started making funny noises this afternoon, then the entire computer shutdown unexpectedly on me and I knew something was wrong. So I spent the evening backing up my laptop's important files (who ever thunk that a CD would seem so small?) and now I've grabbed what was an internal Linux server and am setting it up as a development box.

While I'm waiting, I decided to flip to another screen (alt-F2) and use Lynx to browse the web. First I checked my comments, and noticed that XHTML standards look awfully nice on Lynx. Then I figured I'd log into Bloglines.com/mobile and check out my feeds. I normally do that on my phone but since the formatting is made to be super-simple, it worked perfectly on Lynx as well. And now? Now I'm posting about all this as the 600MB or so of X-Servers and Gnome download in the background. God bless Debian (apt-get install gnome). Well, I shouldn't say that until I have a working system, but it seems to going well so far.

I guess there's some sort of parallel I could make between text-only browsing via Lynx (which I'm doing on my server, actually, via SSH) and the ability of smart phones... I guess the link is just that it's amazing how much you can do on the web with little-to-no real display power. I'm reading posts, I'm creating links I'm doing it all via a text screen reminiscent of DOS 1.0. I've seen browsers and servers before written for the CLI (which could've been run in 1985 had we gotten a clue then) but it really does show you the power of simple text.

No *wonder* SMS is so popular. ;-)

-Russ

P.S. Hmm... now I'm in a bind. Usually I select-all and copy the post before submitting it just in case there's a browser hickup. I guess I'm just hoping this works...

Update: Looks like it did, so I uploaded an image from my phone to decorate... ;-)