Remember the command line?
Aahhh, the command line, also referred to as the Command Prompt or DOS prompt. You tell most people these days to open up Command Prompt and they respond with a “Huh?”. Try it sometime. We’ve all grown so accustomed to pretty, fancy-schmancy GUIs, it’s easy to forget about our good ole long lost friend, Mr. Command Prompt. Lately, I have had the pleasure (seriously, I’m not being sarcastic) of working at the command line with some simple, easy to use, no frills programs – executables you can just copy and paste from one directory to the next, then open up Command Prompt, navigate to the directory, type in one or two simple commands, and voila!, results, usually in the form of ascii files.
The one shown here is called LOADEST, which is a stream load estimator developed by the USGS. I won’t go into what it’s for, but I will tell you it is an executable, coded in Fortran, and it runs off of four input text files supplied by the user. Took me all of a day and a half to figure out how to use it, build my own text files, and successfully run it. See the command? One word: loadest. Pretty nice.
The other command line program I used recently was png2ico, a great free tool for converting png files to favicons. One simple command executed on two png files, and you got yourself a favicon.
Oh yeah, and I got the LOADEST package via FTP from USGS, and I FTP’d on what else, but the command line.
In a time of using software that takes 45 (OK, maybe only 30) seconds just to load the splash screen, the command prompt can indeed be a breath of fresh air.
Black and white are my favorite photos too, you know who does some good ones are Dunstan. Could I maybe see some more of yours if you have them up?
Scott, I don’t have any of them up yet, haven’t had time. I plan on posting some more, and when I do, I’ll send you an email. And yes, Dunstan does have some good shots. I especially like the ones of his dog Poppy.