Soap Box...

From: Fan Li TAI (tai@bbo.memphis.edu)
Date: 06/20/95


Hi...
	First off, I want to thank you guys for having this list and 
jeremy for writing circle.  It's been a great learning tool for someone 
(like me) who've never coded in C before.  Having said that, I would like 
to remind some of you here (and this is in part, brought on by the guy 
who said "I've seen that 4 times now" and earlier discussions about FAQs) 
there are, in fact, imps who can't code, but are trying to learn.
	Personally speaking, for me myself, I'm running a mud for fun, 
because I wanted to do it, and it's also a great excuse to learn C.  I 
don't program for a living, nor do I intend to, but I do want to learn to 
program.  Anything that can shorten my learning curve would bring great 
joy to me (such as a circle coding FAQ) since it means I can 1) learn 
from examples and 2) provide a better service to my players.  There are 
those of you who learnt to program the hard way, and seem to want the 
rest of us to do it the same way.  That just hurts newbie imps and turn 
people away from coding.
	For example, I'm a GA in the stats department here.  We have a 
few unix boxes, a couple of which are used for sas.  This particular 
machine I'm writing from, I've just managed to get mail working here.  
Previously, you can't receive mail.  I've checked everything, ftp'ed 
sendmail binary from other Solaris machines on campus, begged, borrowed 
and stole sendmail.cf from various machines, and yet mail consistently 
bounces.  Set permissions, suid, set everything I could.  Still don't 
work.  Finally, while talking with someone a couple of days ago, I 
realised that the problem could be because / is full and /var/mail is in 
/ partition...  4 months after I first started trying to solve that 
particular problem (no, we all use other machines for mail, and in fact, 
the "owner" of this machine tells me if I ever get mail working her, make 
sure she doesn't receive _any_ mail on this machine... 8-)).  True, this 
was not a pressing problem for us, but that was 4 months of on and off 
work that could have been solved quite trivially had there been a source 
of information I could have tapped.  (And I did post on comp.unix.solaris).
	So, please, think of those newbie imps and have a heart.  I still 
can't code worth shit, but hey, at least I've reading Practical C 
Programming.. 8-)
	Not a flame.  And if anyone is working on the coding faq, and 
want to bounce a copy of me, for a truly newbie point of view, you're 
welcomed 8-)

-Tai
ps:  Heh, I wish I could code better, running a stock circle on a sparc10 
that have next to no users seems to be such a waste 8-)  But hey, no lag 8-)
pps:  Does anyone have any tips on adding areas - esp those that use 
special procedures or spells or such?
ppps:  Thanx again.  Especially those of you who do take the time to help 
newbies.  Mucho gracias.



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