evening heaven

Go to theworld and look up Deeyah. At npr, find kjzz and play while surfing web and blogging. Learn about John Scofield.

OK, this is the FLYP archive, and it's pretty decent. (I complained about the home page in the last post.)

Basically, FLYP has produced a number of issues, 19, to be precise, and the articles in each issue are listed in the nicely designed scrolling box, which is the big black square in the screen shot. Then, there's a convenient button to take you to the previous issue, so you can go back through the magazine's history.

I'm still not completely satisfied. I'd like to see all the articles in all the issues on one screen, or something more in that line.

Nonetheless, I was able to browse back and select an article that appealed to me, and it was excellent, and I guess that's what web navigation is about, in the final analysis.

This is labeled "Dec. 12 to 22 issue" and also "Beta."

A bit of investigation (reading the terms of use doc) shows it's a product of Digital Media International. I've heard of them, but can't remember what. Anyway, sounds impressive. Maybe I can learn more.

Anyway Anyway, the articles are kind of cool. I like the way they use interactive and animated graphics, plus really well constructed reporting, to give me real-feeling instant insight into complicated matters, all within a laudably simple organizational structure. That's using the web effectively. I can't give such high marks to the home page. It's pretty, and that's very good, but here, it's a little garbled. It's hard to tell where to go next. It did get me to interesting places ... but they could work on making it more of a map.

There's a site map link. Let's see where that goes ...

How I Found FLYP

The little picture on the right is captioned "is it porn?" The girl is very pretty. The guy looks really hip. The picture is stylish. It's Talking Points Memo, so, even if it's porn, it's porn with high values. I follow the link, of course.

npr.org on 121252008

Very top at right:
login, register.
Across the top:
npr, hourly news summary, 24-hour program stream, schedule, search npr, and search is supported by Doubt ... view trailer.

... I give up. There are hundreds of items.

Specs for a Personal Photo Printer

You load it with ink and paper, and it is guaranteed to print flawelessly for one year. Alternatively, it comes loaded with ink and paper for a certain number of prints, and is returned for reloading when empty. Regardless, it is guaranteed to print flawelessly for one year.

When you want to print, you select the desired image, press print, and it shoots out the picture. You don't have to set it up in any way (open a hatch, insert paper, etc.).

Instead of wastefully priming and cleaning the cartridge between prints to keep ink flowing, the cartridge returns to a hermetically sealed micro-chamber where it stays fresh forever.

The unit is battery powered. When not in use, you plug it in to keep the battery charged.

The USB connector is built in ... no need to search for it when you want to use the printer.

You can store unlimited numbers of images in the unit's memory. When a picture is uploaded to the unit, it is automatically re-sized to the minimum for a good print. (Alternative image editing interface and mass storage unit.)

Why Teach Web Hosting?

Don't forget, web hosting is creating places on the web.

Don't forget, many hands make light work.

If more people are creating places on the web, there will be more places on the web.

A place isn't defined by existing, it is defined by its qualities. We can say more people creating places will mean more qualities, and that means more quality.

We can also equate quality and customization.

Web Hosting is Interface Design. An interface is a set of tools. Users access web hosting by surfing to the web host's pages. What differentiates the web hosting page from other pages is the ability it gives the visitor to make marks on the page.

We can create a very basic kind of place on the web by designing a place with just this one quality. How to do this becomes a very interesting question.

How Does Computing Work?

Starting with the most fundamental questions would be great, but it might take a while to get to actually useable information, so maybe we should start with something closer to the task at hand ... which is ... ???

Building interactive web sites.
or
Web Hosting.
or
Building On Line Places.

Building a web site is easy. You just get an account with a web hosting service.

Maybe you can host your own.

There's free hosting.

The reason you wouldn't host your own or use free hosting is it would tend to be limited. A good thing to learn would be the exact nature of those limits.

Definition of an on line place: visitors are present in the place. Explanation: when we visit an ordinary web page, we see the page, and maybe the page sees us, in some way, but other visitors can't see us (except maybe in the most limited way).

A web hosting service is a kind of on line place. Seeing the pages we created can be equated with seeing us.

What a web hosting service doesn't really offer is a way to see the place. We can see the people there, under certain circumstances, mainly one at a time. In a real place, though, we can see lots of people at once.

What kinds of tools can we use to create places on the web?

Features In Concept

Site Following 11-21-2008

application component

This component finds the first file on the drive and reports its name.

I want to use a programing language that is loaded on my computer to run this component. How can I tell if there are any programing languages loaded on my computer?

Can I use JavaScript to run this component? I'm pretty sure JavaScript is running on my computer. To run the component using JavaScript, I would create an html file, save it somewhere on my hard drive, then open it with my browser.

I kind of suspect this isn't possible with JavaScript, though. If so, it would presumeably require me to change some settings in the browser or elsewhere, to allow JavaScript access to my hard drive. That would make my system vulnerable to prying eyes, at best.

I suspect I'm going to need to install one of the free programming languages - Java, Ruby, PSP.

I want to emphasize that I am interested in any alternative ways to do these things.

As for installing the above programming languages, I'm really reluctant to do it without knowing certain things about them. I might go ahead and do it, though.

President Obama and E-mail

Info I Seek

PHP Code Please
Purpose: learning to use variables and looping to draw or paint an image.

1. create an image (define the image area)
2. define variables r,g,b, or equivalent as appropriate
3. assign zero to r,g, and b
4. define variables rownumber and columnnumber
5. assign zero to rownumber and columnumber
6. do while rownumber
7. assign color (r,g,b) to (rownumber,columnumber)
8. increment all the variables
9. do loop
10. display the image on the web page

Info I Seek

PHP code to

1. create an image file
2. draw a line between two points in the image
3. display the image

I asume I am sending the file to my web hosting account, and will run it by opening it with my browser.

This is part of or one step towards something more substantial I hope to create.

Stalled. Need more clarity.

Links List Comments

htmlgoodies: found through blogger help, as described earlier.
www.blogger.com/help/Blogger Help Center/"Posting and Editing" (at end of list)/"How do I make a link to another page?"/"How can I do more with links?"

php manual (the)
I stumbled on it in an article at htmlgoodies

I wonder if the blog will become slightly less urgent once it fill out a little. Right now, every hour or two, I have to drop everything to record some vital thought.

This one truly is a core issue.

Incidentally, today is the 9th aniversary of Talking Points Memo. Huzah! Well, they asked readers to take a survey, so I went and did it. Several questions asked about my use of forums, which got me thinking about the subject. It's something I'm very much interested in, and, at the same time, a source of frustration.

I want to start one or more forums around assorted topics myself.

There's just one thing, one thing, I think, that can make the forum radically more useful: all posts should be displayed in a single thread, in chronological order, reliably, and by default. This means no new threads are alowed.

That's a starting place. Now that I think of it, it might be doable.

I talk in earlier posts about purposes. I identify the original purpose, and still the central purpose, of this blog, as ... related to ... teaching myself to compute.

Really, that's making it possible for me to learn to compute, or, as a tool towards that end. (I wrote that creating a tool for people in general to learn computing is a way to make it possible for me to learn computing.)

I also write about having other purposes, and being able to make places for them in this blog.

Here's another of my purposes: learning how to start a business ... and teaching it.

I have lots of ideas for businesses. I have ideas about how to run them, too. Actually, what I'm fuzzy about is how to start them!

Here's a business I just got to thinking about, again ... I think about it often: custom wood. You describe the part you want, the kind of wood you want it made from, and, if you like, the exact way you want it made. We have tools and wood (you can browse our inventory when preparing your specifications), and we make the part, as you describe it to us, and then deliver it. (An issue, here: what if you are prototyping something you want to patent, or otherwise retain rights to, as a design or concept? Can we offer you some kind of assurances in that regard?)

I go a little farther, and think in terms of creating a chain of shops, and I mean lots of them ... franchising the concept, I guess I'm saying.

So, if readers have suggestions ... I'm thinking in the form of a series of steps to take toward creating this product and organization ... or, too, series of generalized steps people can take to start businesses along lines that might be similar ... as per the standard plan for the blog, you are invited to post such thoughts in the comment section for this post. This last is a process I think might benefit from some kind of formalization. For the moment, though, it seems like a useful way to build a resource, as it stands.

About the question I asked earlier, as to why people should know how to program, true power is not just a matter of domination, it's a matter of accomodation, or fitting in. Computing is useful for that. It makes it easier to organize things, so they all fit together.

If we don't know how to program, the power of computing is limited, especially the power we could have to customize our computing experience. That last item is really what I'm working at, here.

Here's what I was thinking that brought up these thoughts: my theory is it's very useful for people to record, in detail, their activities, thoughts, and so on. Computers can make this possible in a greatly elevated way. Still, its usefulness is limited if we can't efficiently utilize that record. Today's computing is very good at gathering and distributing information, not so good - though, in some ways, not so bad, either - at condensing it so that large realms of data can be effectively reviewed. (This is related to the portal theory, again.)

Before I knock off for the afternoon, this note: John Olson of Atomic Medium helped me work out the structural concepts I'm using to organize this blog. Please visit his amazing site.

It's actually scary. There's so much to cover.

Please look at the time stamps on these posts!

True, I'm not sure how much of the slimming effect I seek, in general, the little routine I described in the last post is likely to produce. Moreover, I've done some snacking, as the morning progressed.

These seem to be issues of self control.

And my sense was, going to bed last night, that I was going to be very tired, in the morning, and would have trouble, to say the least, getting right to work. I thought I might look at my books on magic for spells to give me energy. What I found (in Wizards Handbook, Anton and Mina Adams, Barnes and Noble Books, New York) was a spell for "Will Power."

Funny enough, I didn't read it!

And, sure enough, this morning, after breakfast, I went back to sleep. (I never go back to bed. Rather, I get a cover and sleep on the floor.)


Thinking how to possibly do better another day, I thought maybe I could start work with something a bit less taxing than blogging, such as building Amazon Associate pages.

I also just got the idea to look up helpers in the area of "energy" in Virtue's Archangels and Ascended Masters.

Here's another purpose: health.

For comments on purpose(s), start four (4) posts back, with "I've been thinking about adding off topic posts," and work forward (through the material on portals).

I lean towards a no-medicine approach. I think it puts me in control.

Also, in general, as regards how-to type information, I think descriptions of how someone did something are the most effective vehicle.

So, this morning, after I got up and did a few things, I felt sort of, well, icky. Actually, there was a tightness around my heart.

This reminded me to do some yoga. I felt impatient, though. After a moment's consideration, I decided to do just a little.

I did just a little, and very easy: half triangles. My whole routine lasted about two minutes. I just did the forward triangle, half way, in each direction.

I did concentrate on being meditative, and doing the movements and possitions elegantly and completely.

To do the pose elegantly, I just thought about what elegance feels like, and asked for assistance from Apolo.

Doing the pose completely means bringing the parts of the body towards alignment with the ultimate expression of the pose. In this case, arms are extended cleanly in each direction, legs are straight as arrows, hips and chest face precisely forward in a smooth plane, and head is turned to look squarely at the palm of the trailing hand. (There must be a yoga reference where you can look up the details of Triangle, I would think.)


Also, my feeling about yoga is that you assume the pose, then breathe ... not, I would say, "deeply" ... because that depends ... but "deliberately." In fact, in a sense, the nature of the breath should be "normal." The idea is to breath. The in and out breath interacts with the pose to create the therapeutic effect, deep in the body.

And, indeed, I felt greatly refreshed, after my little bit of exercise.

In the previous post, I assigned this blog two purposes:

1. teach computing
2. act as a portal.

For myself, I am cultivating a list of purposes, and even lists of them.

I wrote, maybe two posts back, about off topic posts. (I'm still on that topic, as you can see.)

A topic is something relatively specific. A purpose is more general. They overlap, blend together. We'll see how that goes.

As a portal, this blog can reference, among other things, my various purposes.

Here's one: I seem to have become one of the garbage people. Actually, I've been one for a long time. I've recently become more and more focused on that, and now I'm becoming more and more aware of being one of many.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/science/plasticoceans/index.html

http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/rough/2006/06/germany_heart_ocredits.html

and click through to

http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/rough/2006/06/germany_heart_o.html.

Wow. A "garbage poeple" gold mine. This was a search on an On Line News Hour page for "garbage people." I was looking for something about an artist someone (I think the News Hour) reported on. Most of these links are about something quite different, and, really, more serious, atl least for those involved ... and yet, there's a real connection.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/search_results.html?q=garbage+people&x=8&y=9.

Searching on "garbage art" produces another interesting list:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/search_results.html?q=garbage+art&x=16&y=6.

I'm having a hard time finding this guy, though. I guess I need to look at some of the links in these search results.

A search for "garbage people" at yahoo produces ... not what I had in mind, but sort of interesting. http://www.choicesforliving.com/spirit/part4/garbagepeople.htm tells an interesting story, to be sure. No way am I joining a church, but the story is really interesting. The second is also preachy, and also totally ignores the issue of garbage, and, if you ask me, it's messed up. I mean, if you don't accept garbage, who will? But, here it is. Maybe if I bought the DVD, I would get it. (And maybe not.) (Also, prepare for crappy music.) http://www.bewareofgarbagetrucks.com/home.htm.

Then there's the links to Garbage, the band. If, for some reason, you want to look them up, that's your business.

"Garbage art" returned nothing but garbage, on yahoo.

I decided to search for "garbage sculpture," but, on the way there, the "search assist" bar on the Yahoo search page started flashing a bunch of somewhat compelling words. I usually don't pay too much attention, but now I stopped and looked. For the first time, I notice it says "explore concepts." Also, the list scrolls down, so I'm looking at more than a few concepts. One of them says "garbage people trash." I click through. (You can run the same search by typing those words in the search bar.)

Lots of interesting looking links. Still not the thing I'm looking for, but, by the look of it, stuff to look at.

www.eia.doe.gov/kids/energyfacts/saving/recycling/solidwaste/primer.html

Isn't that funny?!

Cairo's Legendary Garbage People Threatened ... if you read the earlier story from the missionaries, here's something else about the same place and people.

http://news.ncmonline.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=613edfdfadaf067e8236239ff1d91f2b

Here, a garbage theme takes us to a clip-art resource, if that's of interest. (So dreary. I wonder if there's really great clip art?)

http://www.clipartof.com/details/clipart/15406.html

Goody-goody. Sort of interesting, though. Also, a professional look.

http://www.sierraclub.org/sierrasummit/coverage/r073.asp

Preachy, but with facts and links to "resources on trash and recycling" and various articles.

"What did people do with their trash and garbage in the 1830s?"

http://www.osv.org/explore_learn/document_viewer.php?Action=View&DocID=2154

Ok, now here's a garbage person of the sort I sort of was looking for ... a garbage artist. (I also had in mind the eco-warriors. In every case, the search continues. For now:)

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89237219.

You could say this blog has a defined purpose, which is teaching computing.

(It's quite to the point that it's purpose is teaching me computing.)

(Teaching other people computing is very much on purpose, since my sense is that will go a long way towards teaching me computing.)


This blog does have a more general purpose, very much assigned, which is to act as a portal.

In the case of portals, any purpose native to the portal is ancilary to the purpose of the portal.

A portal can be described, even defined, as a place (on a web/matrix) from which many places can be seen.

This is interesting: it is characteristic of the web that we cannot see it. We can only see individual places on or in it. However, a place on the web can show us representations of other places on the web. It then becomes a portal.

A moment of discomfort with myself. I think I'm going to get criticized for my high-falutin language.

I've been thinking about adding off topic posts, so to speak, the nominal topic of this blog being computing.

Computing, of course, is a means to an end, or to ends.

Am I belittling computing by saying that? It sounds like it, but I'm really not. What could be better than a means to an end?

There's a guy I go to to riff on stuff. I visited him, yesterday, and started going on about all these circularities in my work. It sounded kind of crazy, but I've got this theory going that reflexive action is actually the foundation of existence. (Reflexive action? Is that the right terms. My intent is to describe something that acts, through some process, on itself.)

Anyway, as regards something being a means to an end, according to my theory, being a means to an end is the essence of being.

Ok, is there anything else? Is there, perhaps, being and then living, where living would be moving through being, moving from one means/end to another?

Thus the logic, in a sense, of including off topic posts in a topical blog.

Yahoo highlights a Reuters article about an article at VirtualTourist.com. A visit to Virtual Tourist suggests it's a good site, worth studying.

It's slow as mud, though ... except the home page, which does come up right away.

I'm going, "what gives?" Then I realize I'm one of about a billion people trying to access it now.

So then I'm going "how can I prevent my site from bogging down if I get a big run of viewers like that?" I'm thinking maybe the content pages I'm linking to from their home page are more processor intensive, or something, so I need to build in a fall-back page structure that displays something without asking a lot of the servers, or something.

Then I realize what might be happening is they do have an enlightened hosting service ... maybe it's standard practice ... that displays the home page as often as it's requested, but slows down other parts of the site to keep within the hosting packages demand limits.

Windows (XP) Issue
Also, General Practices Issue:
Updates

Jeepers, I get automatic updates all the time, and no one says a thing about what they do or why I need them.

I went to the Blogger Help Center ("help" link from blogger.com pages), and followed the "Posting and Editing" link. From there (a list of questions), I linked to "How do I make a link to another page?"

I wanted to know about a list of options on a pull down menu in the link creation tool in the blogger post editor. It asks what link type we want: other, file, ftp, gopher, http, https, mailto, news, telnet, wais.

What are these? Why is it asking?

What's a better way to ask what they are?

If I select one or another of these types, does it put a different link in my code?

If I link to the same page with different link types, will the link produce different results when someone clicks it?

(If each option is just to be used to link to a specific file type, why do I need to make this selection? Isn't the file type reflected in the url for a file?)

Perhaps more importantly, these link types hint at different things I can make my links do for readers, or different kinds of content I can link to. How can I document these options?

Documentation by example seems like the thing to do. If readers could send examples of how they use different types of links, with information about how they selected that type, other readers can link to the example and see what that link type does.

I want to introduce this idea separately, but my hope is that readers will post examples in the comment section for this post.

My goal is to build my own browser and my own CAD.

People should be able to do this. That's a real blanket statement, of course. Why should they? That's not the right question. The right question is is it possible? The answer: of course it is.

To start, we need to go back to what I said in the first post: learn to do something simple. Learn to do something.

In order to code, we need compilers or interpreters.

These need to be running on our computers.

This might be a computer we are directly working on ...

or it might be a server we are accessing on the web.

This means:

1. You might already have compilers and interpreters running on your computer. In fact, it's almost certain.
2. You almost certainly have Javascript running. It's my understanding that's a quite capable language. Are there things it can't do? Maybe it can't write to or even access files on your hard drive, because it's designed not to raise any security questions.
3. What other compilers or interpreters might already be installed on your computer? Java? Could you write and run a Java application with your system as presently configured? How could you find out?

Then, you can also instal compilers or interpreters. Some of them are free.

1. Ruby.
2. PERL
3. CSS

The question is, once you install one of these, what can you do with it.

What is something very simple you can do with it, right from the start?

I'm going to explore that question in future posts.

Can we learn to program by doing something simple?