Network Administrator
I haven’t blogged in a while. I have had a lot going on, including having my living room repainted. I wanted to share a funny thing that happened tonight.
Last weekend, I helped my brother fix his wireless network. Today, his wife called. “I can’t get my laptop to connect to the network. The message it gave me said to contact the network administrator for help.” I knew the message she meant. We laughed. “It said to contact the person who set up our network, and since you helped set it up, I’m calling you.” I didn’t mind of course, but still silently cursed Microsoft for yet another completely unhelpful message.
It struck me as really funny. Why the hell does Windows XP Home still have that stupid message? In a business environment it makes sense, but Windows has such wide use in the home sector, it just seems ridiculous. Most home users will not have a network administrator to contact. Give me Linux any day.
We did get the network working. We had to disable McCafee and reboot. Of course, I then had to tell her that she didn’t have to worry about the scary looking message informing her that she had decided to customize which programs run upon startup! Oh the horror! We can’t have the slaves doing that! Give me Linux any day.
Speaking of Linux, I have Talking Arch Linux running on my netbook and on my desktop as well now. It works nicely for the most part, though I have experienced some problems with the latest Firefox and Orca. It’ll work out.
Inside a Microsoft Computer Lab
My sister needed help studying for a Microsoft Computer Lab test. After taking it, she showed me the exam. She got a hundred.
It really made me laugh to think about how they went out of their way to call it a Microsoft computer lab, then had the students take a very easy examination which two computer literate slackers had no trouble passing. I love to laugh. They had three groups, one of five questions and two of four. Each group shared the same multiple choice answers, more like a matching test as opposed to a real multiple choice test. All the questions simply matched rather lame definitions against one of the shared terms.
Looking at the terms and definitions, it occurred to me that some words have changed. For example, they match “Home Page” with the page which a browser loads upon starting, which I would call a start page.To me, a home page refers to someone’s personal web site. They also refered to saving a local copy of a web page as downloading. To me, downloading refers to saving a file. I wouldn’t consider saving a copy of the currently viewed web page as downloading it, because I have already loaded it. On the other hand, if I explicitly save a single web page, or a hierarchy of pages, I would call that downloading them, since I went out of my way to save them, if that makes sense. Of course, to me, a “computer class” refers to a computer science class, not this hilarious joke.
Things change. When I took my note-taker to class, people still considered it a novelty, and treated it as such. Now, they have kids taking classes and even exams remotely. This opens the door to all sorts of opportunities for good or ill. It also allows for such a disconnect, that the professor would never know which. Why even go? What do students pay for with that sort of arrangement?
I hope you have enjoyed my tour around the potential Microsoft Lab of the future. We will do this once a week for a little while, so I may have more tales of hilarity to report.
Summer Shines in the Winter
I have done it! I have gotten Linux installed on my Netbook. Specifically, I used Arch Linux for the Blind. Coming from Slackware, it made a good choice, since it already has Espeak installed, and I can get Gnome working out of the box as well. I believe I may even switch my desktop over, since Slackware 13.0 couldn’t even compile the stock kernels which ship with it. They require a newer version of gcc, which I installed, but that of course has broken some other things. I feel very impressed with Arch Linux so far.
I love having a portable computing device. The blind have had portable note-takers for years. I first got my Braille ‘n Speak in 1988 or so. I used and loved that thing for over ten years, then the company merged with others and became the Microsoft of the blind community. After that happened, I no longer had a constant computer at my side tow rite things down. I tried to fill the void with crap, but nothing satisfied me.
The Netbook has arrived in full force of course, and Linux accessibility provides incredible solutions. I can even ssh (log in) to my desktop upstairs while sitting in my living room recliner, and control it pretty much as if at the console. Can you do that with Windows? One crappy note-taker costs the same as thirty-one netbooks! They provide the lock, and GNU/Linux the key. Making a note-taking productivity suite under Linux has the advantage that I can port it to whatever machine I wish no matter what cool thing in the future comes out. As long as it runs an accessible version of Linux I can rock and roll!
I can’t reiterate how great this feels. I feel rejuvenated, like part of me has come back, now that I have this new medium of expression. I feel comfortable and free. This will go very well with blogging. I have Twitter running under Emacs. I also plan to make extensive use of Orgmode. “Your life in plain text” sounds just about right!
I find that suspend works far better under Linux. I disabled it under Windows, since it locked it up and didn’t seem as stable. Linux works wonderfully, I just keep the suspend mode active when I close the lid while on DC. It uses around one percent of battery charge per hour while in suspend. Then, I just open the lid and it pops right back up.
I now have my EeePC 1000HE in a very nice configuration. I kept the original 80GB Windows partition, and installed Arch Linux on the second partition. I now have a nice dual-boot configuration, though will do 99% of my work under Linux. I even have Firefox working under Gnome with Orca. Having Linux on a Netbook rules, and I would recommend it to anyone who has the time and desire.
It just occurred to me that I didn’t blog about what happened. The Thursday before last, a freak power surge took out the drive in my desktop. I’ve had to rebuild since then, and wanted to get my Netbook functioning, since I sort of needed it. Now things will work out, I will have a rocking new setup, and hopefully I can get the data off the old drive.
How to Find Peace within Twittering-mode
I love Emacs. I love using Twittering-mode to read Twitter from within Emacs. Only one thing bothered me about twittering-mode, and quickly browsing through its source-code showed me the fix. I also modified a tip on their page to give a text notification of new tweets. Just place these lines in your .emacs and enjoy. Modify as appropriate. Send me a tweet if you found this useful.
(add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/twittering-mode") ; if non-standard
(require 'twittering-mode)
(setq twittering-username "yourtwittername") ; replace
(setq twittering-notify-successful-http-get nil)
(add-hook 'twittering-new-tweets-hook (lambda ()
(let ((n twittering-new-tweets-count))
(format "%d New Tweet%s" n (if (> n 1) "s" "")))))
Guess the Algorithm
A few days ago while aimlessly surfing the world wide web’s waves, I came across Vintage Basic.
I don’t even remember what weird tangent I had gone on to find it, perhaps something related to reading about Lisp and old computers, I don’t even know. While there, I saw their collection of old BASIC games. I felt so grateful, since I remembered them from my days as a child on my beloved Apple II/E. The computer still works, but a girl who will remain nameless (especially since I now host her blog) lost all the discs. I still feel rather annoyed about that, but this helped a little.
In the course of downloading and running these great old programs, I found guess.bas, a simple number guessing game. I wouldn’t have gotten it, except that I remembered it.
] catalog A 005 GUESS.BAS
Does that conjure any memories for anyone? I recreated how it might look as best as possible. The game works very simply: you put in the maximum number, the computer picks a number between 1 and the maximum, and you enter your guesses. The computer tells you if you guessed too high or too low. Simple, right?
Two lines of code caught my eye, however.
11 L1=INT(LOG(L)/LOG(2))+1
56 PRINT "YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN ABLE TO GET IT IN ONLY";L1
After getting the maximum number in the variable L, it assigns INT(LOG(L)/LOG(2)) to the variable L1. In other words, it adds one to the integer (whole number) part of log base 2 of L. Why, I wondered, did it use this value for the number of guesses it should take you to guess a number?
For those who slept in math, the logarithm refers to the exponent that indicates the power to which a base number is raised to produce a given number. For example, the logarithm of 100 to the base number of 10 is 2. Since I slept a lot in English class, I ripped that definition off from my dictionary. I thought about the relation between logs, exponents, bases, multiplication, division, anything I could think of that might solve this fun little mystery.
I took a shower, and my mind wandered. I began thinking about how I would actually solve the problem myself. If I had to choose a number between 1 and 10, I would first guess5, the halfway point. That way, the answer would automatically eliminate half the numbers. I would then continue this process, each time eliminating half, narrowing down until i guessed the number. I think most people would solve the problem in the same way. It then hit me! The integer part of log base 2 + 1 would roughly compute this number. It makes total sense! Think about it! To illustrate, if L=10, then L1=4.
I find it interesting to reflect on this. You can tell a lot about a person and the time period by analyzing code. That fragment told me that whoever wrote that dinky little program probably had a background in math or computer science. Today’s kids pumped full of Java probably don’t even know what a logarithm even does! I took standard math in high school, then in college I took three awful semesters of discrete math followed by two semesters of calculus – pure Hell. Any system that bases itself completely around limits just doesn’t jive with my world view. To me, such a proposition denies the limitless nature of the universe and the soul, but I digress. I love all the wonderful opportunities modern home computing has brought to the masses, but sometimes I long for the days when you actually had to KNOW about computers and have some command of programming and math to use one. I confess it took me a little to figure out this mystery, but I think I did. Many greater than myself have come before, and
many will come after. I saw an entire legacy encapsulated in two lines of code. Don’t forget.