Frenzied Daddy

Have I ever told you how much I hate spaghetti?

Yes, I’m avoiding work. You see, Hal died, and coincidentally, my linux server at home died. Both computers suffered, what one might call ‘catastrophic hard drive failure.’ Yes, that means that there’s no backup for the three sites I had on Hal. I found an old copy of arghwebworks on the laptop, but wishease.com and veeshans-fury.com are both … down.

With it coming into a serious gift-giving season, it’s really appropriate that I get wishease.com back up and running, if I’m serious about providing that service and theoretically making money from it.

There are two weblogs that I read for no other reason than they give me an excuse to read weblogs and pretend to be working. It’s not making me any money directly, but I can see reflecting on them making me a better … wage-earner. Or whatever. Anyway, one of these two is Paul Graham. His essay on Ideas helps me understand myself a little better. On the one hand, I know that I don’t learn something very well unless I’m using it to solve a problem. Writing a hello world program in javascript is pretty dull, but I can see learning the same techniques to a task that’s more interesting. Like parsing a stock market price and updating a web page in near-real-time.

According to Paul Graham, ideas come up like doodles.

Perhaps letting your mind wander is like doodling with ideas. You have certain mental gestures you’ve learned in your work, and when you’re not paying attention, you keep making these same gestures, but somewhat randomly. In effect, you call the same functions on random arguments. That’s what a metaphor is: a function applied to an argument of the wrong type.

You need to have some knowledge of techniques (mental gestures) before you can be inspired with an idea. I rather like that, because it meshes well with my need to, for instance, learn C so I can write a water-sensing program that turns on a waterpump. It’s also crucial to “fill the hopper” (my term, not his) with a lot of interesting arguments that your function can be applied to.

I’m working for the man, working on a bunch of files someone else set up. And I’m editing PHP code in files that end with .htm; so when I use vi (the one true editor), the color coding is all messed up. Until now.

I’ve found the “// vim:ft=php” line, and my sanity is saved. With it, I can set file specific vi settings in the php code and not hassle with the change every time I open the file. Yee-Haw!

Geeks Gone Wild!

Ewww, there’s an image. “Show us your code!”

I have a linux server at home. At the moment, it’s down, and I need a new hard drive; but I have a temporary replacement up and serving. It’s not really a server, just a place for me to work and see my files. And the guys at work have filtered out most of the world for connections to their development server. Sometimes I actually leave my cave in the basement and sally forth into the world, bearing my intrepid laptop, and since my own development work is done on this linux box, and since I can connect to work from the house, I need a way to connect back to it. It’s fairly straightforward, I forward a port from the firewall to the linux box, and then I can connect to our external IP address from out in the world, and I can work from there.

Yeah, I know, a VPN would be awesome, huh?

Anyway. Sometimes our external IP address changes (thanks Comcast) , and I may not notice from inside the house. So I have the linux box updating a file outside with our current address. If I can’t connect, I compare the IP address I’m connecting to with the address in that file, update the address I’m connecting to, and then I’m back in the game. Recently I updated this with a little perl script on the laptop that updates my hosts file with the ip address on the web-file. So I connect to a name, not an IP address, and it’s all automated, though there is a window where it might not work.

Some poeple would ask me why I don’t just sign up for one of the free dynamic dns services. And my answer is … “uhh, I dunno.”

Sometimes I’m saddened by the terrific picture I thought I’ve taken, which turns out to be so totally out of focus that Mrs B has to check and make sure she’s wearing her contacts. However, some of these images turn out to be fairly ok subjects to experiment with those awful ‘photoshop effects” you have in your menu. A lot of them I’m not sure how to use, or why my results look so bad. Even with starting with a terrific sharp picture. But this one came out OK. It’s out of focus, Miss B was “protecting” Miss K with a towel at the fountain this summer.

Amazing

I was stumbling the internet, bleary eyed and work-avoiding when I happened across a “ray tracing contest” site. Ray tracing is the computer graphics where usually you see a steel ball bearing suspended above a checkerboard, with the checkerboard reflected in the ball bearing. It’s tracing the rays of light, or something.

There were some gorgeous examples of it in this competition/exposition, but the most jaw dropping was this gentleman’s. I find it particularily amazing because he will explain in math terms what the shape is that his pov-ray picture is of, and he has an artist’s sense of color and composition. Real left-brain and right-brain unity.

Hard hats required; the whole web is under construction. Usually, I say this because every single website out there is in a state of flux; any “good” site will be updated regularily. However, this time it’s because of something fascinating; greasemonkey. No, that’s not a perjorative, it’s an extension to firefox that allows the user, aka, you to write scripts (in JavaScript) that manipulate the data the server is handing you.

Want to link to your library from amazon.com? This doesn’t change the amazon site for everyone- just you, when you’re using that browser. There are a lot of greasemonkey scripts already available, and I’m sure there will be more.

Like most things where I can see both sides of an equation, I’m not quite sure where I stand on this. On one hand, it’s totally cool because I can see the use for a lot of neat things; automatically finding addresses in a page, and generating a google map. On the other hand, I write (in general) server programming for that sort of thing, and if I want a google map there, I’ll put it there thank you very much. Maybe I don’t want it there for a specific reason.

I suppose, it’s your browser experience, you have every right to customize it. But I’ll be interested in seeing the outcome of the first lawsuit over the use of this scripty-goodness.

Pretty much aimed at those of you who do different ‘projects’ at work. Most of my jobs have entailed the assignment of different projects- not like “take orders in section A” or “stock shelves in entertainment,” but more like “build website for foo.com.” When I get a project like this, I visualize two things; on the one hand, the relationships of the database tables to each other (books to authors, books to inventory), and on the other, the way the user will experience the interrelationships of this data (the website flow) - index page has a navigation bar, click on authors, or click on books, or click on inventory . In fact, part B really defines part A; generally speaking, someone has specific demands laid out for how a site works, as opposed to specific demands as to how a database is organized.

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Spoiled Gamers! I bet he even uses one of those computer programs for rolling dice. I tell ya, back in my day we used faux vellum and ink and liked it! Why … harrrumph. Never mind that I do a similar thing now, without the “overhead.” I scan the map, save it on my laptop, edit and use a “mask” on it.

Thanks for the Link