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Archives: [+]
The weekend is winding down and it's been a good one. Today, my wife has been catching up on some of her projects and I've been finishing up the laundry, which has been strangely pleasant, partly because I used the downtime to start working again on my thesis. My goal is to have it in my thesis advisor, Dr. Bennett's, hands by the end of November. It felt good working on it. Right now I'm mostly just reading through it and making small changes here and there to the wording of things. Whenever I start working on it, I have to spend a few sessions just getting it all in my head (remembering arguments I sketched out years ago). I'm feeling very optimistic about it. I finally got around to framing my other two diplomas. Now I want this one sitting along side them.
An article I wrote for the Society for Philosophy and History of Education (SOPHE) and delivered at their conference last fall in Oklahoma City has finally been published (in the Journal of Philosophy and History of Education, volume 50, 2000) and there's also a version online (though they left out my illustrations, which confuses things a bit). It's my first journal publication, and I'm proud of it despite the fact that it's in a journal no one has ever heard of. The SOPHE site is a perfect example of the sort of web design you get when the only trick in your bag is to press "Save as HTML" in Microsoft Word. I should offer my services as a favor.
I don't do it very often, but I really enjoy transcribing songs on guitar and doing simple acoustic arrangements of them. Yesterday, I did a little known Bob Wills tune called "Goin' Away Party" that my friend James Katowhich played for me the last time we got together to play music. I've always thought it would be nice to build up a small set of songs that I can play and sing, so we'll call this the first one (I know lots of songs, but I couldn't play them if you put a gun to my head. But I'd like to know more of them all the way through and be able to recall them when I'm playing with friends, instead of having to always rely on James' near-perfect memory).
Oh well, the weekend it over and it's time for recreation. I'm going to surf up some more classic video games, before some court order shuts down the fun. :)
[posted by Wheat]
One of my vices (okay, one I'll speak of publically) is that I like classic video games. I can spend entirely too much time seeking out and playing games that I liked in the arcades in the 80s and early 90s. I just spent about an hour grabbing some more titles (lately I've been playing 10-Yard Fight, a really cheezy football simulation, and I don't even like football). The only drag with trolling for video ROMs is that only about half of them work once you get them downloaded.
I installed MySQL from the Red Hat 7 install CDs. It's there and ready to roll. Monday, I'll try again to get PHP going on lithe. But I have other (alas more important) work to do. The Academy is ready for another big month, and as of this writing I have none of their new content ready to go. It has to be up by November 1. Wow.
My four favorite design sites of the moment: zeldman.com, assembler.org, once-upon-a-forest.com, and extralucky.com. These are the sites that alternately inspire me and then make me want to never code another thing as long as I live out of respect for those who can truly do it.
A guy from Russia who runs a nice web site for bassists wrote me a few days ago about translating Wheat's BassBook into his native tongue. We've worked out a deal and he hopes to have the translation complete by Christmas. I'm really looking forward to that. A few years ago, someone offered to do a Spanish version, but it never came about. I have higher hopes for this one (he already has translations of pieces by Jeff Berlin and other famous players. I'll be an honor to be in such good company, despite my reservations with Mr. Berlin's bass education "theories").
[posted by Wheat]
lithe.uark.edu lives! Unfortunately, despite an entire day of screwing around with it, the PHP4 with MySQL support still isn't happening. We installed Red Hat 7 (kernel 2.2.16-22) last week. But I didn't realize the packages I neded most (Apache, MySQL, and PHP) would be so outdated already.
This morning, Apache 1.3.12 was running with PHP4.0.1pl2, but the PHP was built w/o MySQL support. So I had to start from scratch. First I nabbed PHP 4.0.3pl1 and tried to configure it against Apache 1.3.12. But, evidently, that version of Apache was compiled w/o DSO support (necessary for PHP). David had already downloaded Apache 1.3.14, so I installed that. It gave me a few problems (mostly resulting from the Apache group's tendency to move the document and server root directories around with each distribution), but I eventually got it up and running fine. In fact, it's a pretty easy install.
So next in line was PHP4. That gave me all manner of hell, mostly due to a problem with APXS, which I fixed thanks to a FAQ item at php.net. But then PHP coudldn't find MySQL because it didn't get installed (maybe David missed it when he installed RH7. Maybe it wasn't really in RH7. I'm not sure). I tried to nab a new version, but our net connection is buggy, so I can't get to mysql.com.
It's the perfect formula for a frustrating day, but I'm over it. I'll just have to hit it hard on monday. At least the new Apache is up and running. And PHP is ready to go as soon as I can download MySQL (though I'm sure PHP will give me more problems. It's a beast to install). Eventually, I'll have lithe up and ready for some database backending. That's the whole point of this. And then I can stop doing my poor imitation of a sysadmin and get back to making web pages.
[posted by Wheat]
Slow day. Most everyone has been out of the office. I've been tooling away on little projects. David is working on getting lithe.uark.edu back up. It's probably live by now, and if you hit it you'll get redirected to ubets.uark.edu. Our goal is to get the latest server software going on lithe. We already have the latest Red Hat running and the latest Apache. Now we need the new MySQL and PHP and things will be swell.
After much poking around the network control panel and cursing of microsoft's user interface, David and I managed to get the new lab workstations to map remote shares on the server as local drives (like the others in the lab and my laptop already do). David told me with some pride that the new 933 Mhz Win32 boxes are still not as fast as our beloved G4 (which runs at 500 Mhz or something like that). Just goes to show you that processor clock speed isn't everything.
I'm eager to get to work on my PHP chops again. We have PHP on the ubets box, but isn't not compiled with support for MySQL (due to an incompatibility with the version of Apache we're running on ubets). So this new install, on lithe, will have the database connectivity ready to roll from the start.
Here's a tip: if you need to download quicktime or a macromedia free trial, grab it from download.com instead of to the actual sites. This saves you from having to deal with the slowness of apple's server and those stupid surveys at macromedia.com.
[posted by Wheat]
Today started off so crappy that I almost called in sick and stayed home. But things have picked up a bit. Two more Gateways came in, so I've been setting one of them up. To speed up the process for the remaining ones, I'm burning a CD of all the shareware/freeware that I install on every machine (Acrobat Reader, Quicktime, EditPad, Flash 5/Shockwave player, Mozilla M18, Aladdin Expander, etc). I'm sure I'll think of something else to add the minute I'm through burning these to a CD.
Not much else on the horizon. The Academy is gearing up for another month of assignments, which means more web work for me. My main task right now is dealing with all of this incomming gear and setting up our tiny lab into something workable.
Watched a documentary about the Rockefellers last night on PBS. I caught the first part on Sunday. This was the second (and longer part). It was very good. I knew very little about them before. I remember John D. senior as a union buster and monopolist from high school history classes (and he was both) and I remember him as gentle philanthropist handing out coins to children (from stories my father, who was born in 1917, had told me). And I'd heard of the Attica prison riots, though I didn't associate them with Nelson Rockefeller. It was, as far as I could tell, a reasonably balanced portrait, though it did tend to focus more on the inner dynamics of the family than anything else (that "great man" theory of history isn't behind us yet). Still, it was an incredibly interesting portrait and very well directed.
I think Gina and I both ended up admiring John, Jr more than anyone else in the whole clan. He was neither as mired in the blood of Standard Oil nor as contradictory as his most prominent son, Nelson. It's easy for me to hate the great capitalists. I still have enough of a progressive neo-socialist strain in my thinking to want them to pay for their good fortune. At the same time, it's impossible not to admire their philanthropic interests (especially the MoMA) and their suprisingly progressive moments. Having grown up in an era when the republican party has been controlled by its right wing fundamentalist faction, it's refressing to see Nelson, championing an older idea of the party with a genuine interst in public giving and progressive ideals.
[That quicktime installer download has ground to a hault. I'm not sure what's up with it.]
[posted by Wheat]
Blogger is getting so popular that logins during popular times of the day can take forever. They should use a little of that venture capital to upgrade their servers. :) I spent most of the morning working with 8th and 9th grade students in an area school. One of them was an very talented artist (she had a notebook filled with her pencil sketches). Some of her stuff was hip-hop oriented: kids hanging out in exageratedly large pants and huge platform shoes. It was well done. I did some one-on-one counceling with a kid interested in medical school and what sort of degree you need to get in the door.
Visited my father Saturday. It went better than I thought it would. We went grocery shopping (he likes that) and then visited a friend of his. They sat and shared stories about their ailments. I think it was a comfort to them both.
Our new Apple iBook arrived today. I'm not sure how I feel about it. It's big and blue and kinda heavy. We'll see. I need to integrate it into the network and install some software onto it. But I did so much of that Friday that I'm really not in the mood for it right now (plus, there's no where to put it in this tiny lab). I don't really have any big projects until the new server gets going (should happen sometime this week). One of our servers crashed back in July (lithe.uark.edu) and it wasn't a priority to fix it, with so many other things to do. So I just sat it in a corner and worked on other things. But now the software on our main server (ubets.uark.edu) needs upgraded, so it will be nice to have a second server where we can install the latest stuff and test it out without crashing the main server (and bringing the office to a standstill).
Once the new server is going, I'm going to work on my PHP and MySQL chops. I've been doing a bit more with Perl lately, and I need to hit that as well. But the big thing on my mind at the moment is my M.A. thesis, which I hope to finish up by the end of November. I just loaded it onto my laptop the other day (in an effort to minimize the range of possible excuses for not working on it). And there it is: sitting on yet another hard drive.
When I started my the thesis, I was using Macs exclusively and I began writing it using MacWrite Pro (if you can remember that far back). Now MacWrite Pro (the successor of MacWrite II) was out of date even then. It came out, I think in 1991 or 1993. I still used it because I hated Microsoft Word (MS Word 6.0 for the Mac was such a disaster that MS had a free downloadable plug-in that would let you read Word 6 files in Word 5.1. Everyone I knew who used Word and upgraded to 6.0 eventually downgraded back to 5.1--which is still a much loved version on the Mac platform). Furthermore, MacWrite Pro was the the only small wordprocessor on the Mac that had style sheets (well, to be fair, so did Nissus Writer and Wordperfect, but I didn't like either of those). Using an antiquated word processor wasn't as big deal because I could cary it with me on a floppy or two and install it wherever I needed it.
But after Word 97 came out, I had a change of heart. That was the first Microsoft program that I found useful and pleasant to use. In fact, I've liked Word ever since the 97 version. So I moved the thsis to Word 97 (for Mac) and kept it there for the remainder of grad school. It was also there while I worked on my ETEC degree (since we had a lot of Macs around). Now I'm running Word 2000 on a Windows 98 laptop, so I've migrated across platforms and up a few version numbers.
I'd like to finish this thing before Word 2001 or Word ME, or Word.Net, or whatever they're going to call it comes out. :)
[posted by Wheat]
Life: Gina's birthday was a success. She liked the gift I bought her and the ones her mother and my mom, Vicki, sent. We also caught Nurse Betty which was a lot of fun. We were going to dinner at Bordino's (a nice Italian place), but we'd already eaten at a better place in Tonitown the night before. So I guess we'll have an excuse to eat out this weekend.
I just remembered that I have to visit my father tonight. That'll be an ordeal. My father, who has always been a little nuts, is getting worse and worse (physically and mentally). He has what his doctors think are the early symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. Because of this, he has a tendency to tell you the same thing he just told you, over and over again. He also (and this is perhaps unrelated) has a tendency to obsess about certain things (he has a pet list of things to obsess about, which he rotates through every month or so). Right now, his obsession is with visiting the farm where he lived until his health recently took a turn for the worse. I promised to take him out there, so we can be bitten by ticks and grab a few things from his old house.
Alzheimer's destroy's the memory of recent events, so you can never trust my dad's impressions of things (though he is always certain they are true and it's pointless to argue with him about them). Right now, he's also obsessing about the power of attorney that my sister had him sign earlier this year when he was hospitalized and near death. The whole point of getting this legal leverage was to take care of him and ensure that someone was able to make decisions for him if he were unable to do so for himself (and, in a lot of cases, he is unable to make decisions because his damaged memory makes it hard for him to understand the implications of things). But now he's convinced that my sister tricked him into signing that document in order for him to be released from the hospital. It is this mixture of confusion, paranoia, and obsession that drives his every move. Part of this is from the disease, and part of it is from god knows what else.
I didn't like my dad much when I was growing up, at least not after I hit my teenage years. He could be very harsh and narrow about things. And since I was always curious and interested in new ideas and ways of doing things, this put us a loggerheads on more than a few occasions. During parts of my young adult life, we weren't on speaking terms for half a year at time. But, oddly enough, I find myself unable to hold any of this against him, because, in a very real sense, the "him" that did these things is either no longer with us or quickly becomming a thing of the past. My father today doesn't remember any of our difficulties. He doesn't remember my wife's name. He doesn't remember what day it is or what month.
These days, he lives in an appartment in Huntsville, a small farming down about 40 miles from here (Fayetteville). Before, he'd lived in his own house out on a large farm of around 300 acres. The move into town has been hard on him--a big blow to his independance. But he's 83 (will be 84 in less than a month) and very frail. He can no longer drive. The appartment is essentially a stopping-off point between the farm and (as they used to call them when I was a kid) a rest home.
All of this is very sad stuff, but I don't know what to do with it other than state it plainly.
Work: I spent most of yesterday installing and configuring client software for Meeting Maker, a calendar sharing software that we're going to start using (many departments on campus are using it already. Though I don't like it as much as Kalendar (the KDE calendar program for Linux), which I was using previously, it does make sharing information easy and it prints out nicely too. I think our staff will dig it once they get over the fear it seems to have inspired in some.
The first of our new lab machines came in today: a Gateway GP7-933 (933Mhz, Pentium III). It's a nice box, though Gateway has adopted a look that is a bad implimentation of the imac idea. They've tried adding color to their white, industrial-looking boxes by rounding them off a bit and adding these stupid gray panels on the front and the top. The result is an ugly two-tone box. The older design, while far from attractive, at least had the integrity of nearly pure functionalism; it was just a big white rectangle with a power button and some drive bays. But, aesthetics (or a bad attempt at aesthetics) asside, it's a nice box with plenty of speed and lots of nice features (DVD-ROM, Zip250, 20GB of hard drive space, 128MB of RAM, nice video and audio cards, and USB ports on the front and back for easy access). And besides all that, it's brand new, so I'm enjoying configuring it installing software on it. It's nice to start from scratch with a machine that didn't wind up here because it had gotten too old to be of use in one of the staff offices. :)
I'm hoping another one of these will arrive today. We have six more comming, and I'm ordering two more today (though those will be for staff, not for the lab).
[posted by Wheat]
I just posted a review of my Carvin LB76 (six-string bass) to musicianreview.com (a site I found quite by accident). They didn't have any other reviews of that bass, so mine is the first (woo hoo!). In other bass news, the new student will be starting this week. I'm pretty excited about that. He'll be my first student to be learning on a five-string.
The software archive is very nearly through and I've started designing an Access database for it. Once the new server is up, I'll migrate my database to MySQL and use PHP to serve it up web-style. But for now, I'm going the easy route.
The big Academy launch went well. The kids learned how to use the site to submit their work and everything on the backend is working smoothly (knock wood).
I had all manner of memories from my childhood to post here last night, but I slept instead. So tonight, you get this meaningless drivel.......
[posted by Wheat]
The software archive is very nearly finished. I have less than ten discs to add. Somewhere in the shuffle, we lost our Authorware 5.1 install disc. So I'm going to get Macromedia on the phone and see if I can convince them to send us a new one. I hope they'll be cool about it, because I'd like to do some multimedia development and I really dig that program. Our gear is trickling in from the recent purchase requests. Our new Kodak digital camera came in today, as did some Intel PC camera packs. I'm eager for the CD burner and the new desktops.
The Academy page gets put to the test this comming Saturday. Once it's all functional--right now I'm adding the assignment pages and some form-to-email gateway scripts--I have to put together some training, which I'll deliver in two sessions this Saturday. (That same day, we're going to celebrate Gina's birthday). This is our first bold experiment in distance education. And I'm happy that we're rolling our own solution. We took a look at WebCT, but found it, like all products that try to take the pain out of web development, clunky, ugly, and hard to use.
A new potential bass student contacted me today. I quoted prices and times. I hope he wants to join up (having good students keeps me sharp). Speaking of which, I need to grab some new strings for my bass (the stores around here charge incredible amounts of money, so I'm going to grab these off the internet).
This is the most gabby and pointless thing I've put up in a while. So I'll cut my losses and end it here...
[posted by Wheat]
It's been a few days since my last post. I've been busy with lots of stuff, both in and outside of the web. The Tares site has undergone a major overhaul. Now there's a new image gallery, some video, and a guestbook. I also redid the news page (turned it into a blog) so the band can update it themselves. Now if there were just as good a solution for the shows page, we'd be in business (and I'd never need to touch the site again). I still need to add a few graphics in the navigation area and a rollover thing on he contact page. They also requested title attributes on the rollover links (to explain them a bit). That'll be fine.
[posted by Wheat]
I'm surfing the web with my new Dell Latitude LS laptop--thanks Vicki! It's funny how a new machine makes the web seem like a new place. I've been to download.com loading up on shareware. I might eventually make this a dual boot linux/windows machine, but for now I'm just running Windows 98.
I'm happy with the recent revisions to the tares site. I need to add a few more small things and one more image gallery and I'll be through with it for a while. My work-related projects have been less fun than usual, but I hope to hit them hard tomorow and get the academy site ready for the start of our fall semester (a little over a week away).
I've started using Dreamweaver a bit more for updating older sites. I used it for the image gallery on the tares site. I've been using it on the bassbook site. It's fun. The site management aspect of it is really the best part. It's also nice to be able to click on any image and see how big it is. And the download time estimations are a very handy thing to have (though I haven't checked to see how accurate they are). Dreamweaver is the only WYSIWYG design tool that doesn't insult you for knowing what you're doing. I still use a text editor (Kedit, for KDE) for 98% of my stuff. But this is a handy tool to have around (especially for image rollovers, which are just a pain to code).
[posted by Wheat]
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