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Houdenbako Blog
The Computer, Enemy of the User
11:29 AM 7/1/2009
I have never really had a computer that could help me focus on a task.
Some of this is accidental: Any time I'm running a lot of programs and it takes 5-10 seconds to switch, I get bored. Nothing irks me more than being able to think faster than a PC with a 3GHz clock.
Some of this is deliberate - a conspiracy theory waiting to happen, if you will: Many of the so-called "Productivity Tools" on my computer are administrative time-sinks, and on the Internet, I have to wade neck-deep through advertisements for 1kB of text that didn't offer much more information than the page title.
Once I read that users want to concentrate on "the task at hand", and not on the computer's inner workings. For me, those inner workings are the part that fascinates me most. So, I'm a bit torn on the issue.
I can't avoid computers. On the other hand, they seem custom made to scatter my attention. The main reason to be a power-user - to write your own software - to customize your operating system - is so that you can take control over the useless, resource-hogging "features".
Web Designer: Author or Criminal?
What You See Is What You Get... This is a desktop publishing concept. It doesn't work so well in cyberspace.
Reality needed an upgrade. Or, so a lot of people thought... Why should ideas be limited to physics? Stuff won't move fast enough. Stuff can't be altered on a whim. Stuff slows ideas down. So abandon it!
On the other hand, we all have experience with stuff in the physical world. It would be a shame to render all that experience useless... So a lot of designers borrowed features of reality and altered only some aspects. That's how operating systems got "Desktops" and "Folders". That's why the web has "Pages", and why, despite hyperlinks, a lot of pages are numbered and kept in order, just like a book or a newspaper. The analogy is brilliant that lets you use most of what you know. But, after a while, every analogy is limiting.
It seems to me that there were some arguments about webpages, and the browsers that render them. A graphic designer is, rightly, concerned with exactly how the design will look. Web designers are not graphic designers, no matter how much they want to be. Web browsers have always offered the user some choices about presentation, and that means the designer cannot be a despot.
But, the designer wants to be a despot. Wouldn't you? The subtle question here is: What exactly are they designing?
Time was, a brochure could not be altered by the reader. And, when a finished product cannot be altered or updated, some serious concern goes into getting it right. When such serious concern is involved, the "end user" couldn't possibly be given any say in the matter.
With information flowing over the Internet, there is nothing to stop the "end user" from altering the finished product - except maybe some sternly worded warnings. A designer in this medium has to give up forcing the product to have a precise look, and has to settle for communicating useful information. Graphic designers see this as part of their job too, so it shouldn't be too hard to find the relevant wisdom there.
There's one small problem: if the browsers made available to us are put in service of the designers, all this falls apart. Are you capable of writing your own web browser? Most people aren't. They have to settle for what the market will provide. And, the cheaper, the better. In fact, it's precisely the free browsers that will be most beholden to the needs of designers, not users, since users didn't contribute anything. These are the programs most likely to run on your computer and act on someone else's behalf. Taking control away. I know it seems innocuous now, and I sound crazy to suggest it, but if designers were not forced to respond to the users' needs, why would they?
More Cloud Forms
2:50 PM 6/26/2009
Visual Imagery Byproducts
12:10 AM 6/24/2009
It's true what I said before: Tonight is the big night for filming the James L. Brooks movie.
I took a look outside around 10pm, and saw the effect of all that lighting. I had no idea there was going to be so many lights. In the "heat of battle", I completely forgot to take a tripod - there should have been enough light for my camera, but there wasn't always: I got interested in the views of a film crew run amok.
First I went up on my roof. Anyone can walk the whole length of the block up there. The bright lights put much of the footing in deep shadow, so even though I don't remember any great hazards, I had to step very carefully. Neighboring rooftops are at different levels for one reason or another.
Satisfied with my birds-eye view, I went back down to street level to see what I could see. I always seem to be less interested in the primary phenomenon, and more interested in the strange things that happen on the fringes. I don't care about selling photos of celebrities to tabloids - I don't have a suitable lens for capturing them at a distance anyway. The social phenomenon of crowds gawking is much more interesting.
In case you weren't convinced, Hollywood imposes a hyperreality in every location it films. This is either going to be a daytime scene, or a nighttime scene in which everything is uncannily visible. And, although they were not producing fake rain, they did spray the pavement to make it look as if it had just rained. How will the effect turn out? Who can say?
I really did have this sense while standing on the scene that I didn't care what they were filming, only that it had to be so disruptive. Yes, of course I appreciate the results of large-scale filmmaking, but I hardly find it necessary for my enjoyment. On the other hand, in my own way I look for the beauty of found art, and do not go to great lengths to create contrived alignments.
Untitled JLB Intrusion
3:46 PM 6/23/2009
The film crew has been stalking the neighborhood for nearly a week now. On Friday afternoon, they were clearly shooting a scene in and around a building on Adams Mill Road, but tonight is supposed to be the big night.
I've been gleaning little bits of information by observation and rumor. I discovered that in "Untitled JLB Project", the JLB stands for James L. Brooks. Here it is on IMDB. I was told that Jack Nicholson, Reese Witherspoon and Owen Wilson were starring. Supposedly, I saw Reese standing in a window from across the street Friday.
I'm not really complaining about the inconvenience, although I imagine some of my neighbors might want to. They are probably filming a more extensive scene in the street tonight, and so there are lighting rigs and electric cable deployed everywhere.
I might have some interesting photos, but nothing of interest to celebrity-hunters...
Meteorology
12:52 AM 6/16/2009
This afternoon I looked at the sky, and saw... possibility:
I put my tripod on the fire escape, aimed at this cloud stack kissed by the afternoon sun, and pressed the button once every minute. In the breaks between photos, I even had time to make myself an espresso. I got 23 photos before the camera complained of low battery. (I wasn't going to push my luck on that one again...)
Now I finally got around to assembling the sequence. I'm sorry if it's a big file... Maybe I'll rebuild it smaller. I could reduce the dimensions further, or tweak the compression. But, perhaps you can enjoy it in this format.
As it turns out, my fire escape is very shaky. I had two legs on the metal and one leg on the stone door sill, and the tripod shook quite a bit. I fooled myself into believing that when I pressed down on the trigger, the tripod would be naturally stabilized. I see one frame where that is not true. Otherwise, I got acceptable results.
Gables Antal
Gables Behar
4:17 PM 6/11/2009
This is just a rough draft of something from my synthesizer. I'm mildly happy with it. I'll make adjustments later and post a new version. I'll either play it more accurately next time - or I'll key it into the sequencer.
I'm hoping to come up with a better system for presenting them. This was just an expedient solution.
The titles don't mean anything particular in any language I know. Don't look too hard for meaning.
No Forks For Cygwin?
11:07 AM 6/10/2009
Here's another technical post - I'll try to make it easy...
I got a copy of Cygwin. It's a program to emulate a Unix shell on a Windows machine. If you want to follow the textbooks on writing and compiling C programs, there are all sorts of difficulties you will encounter. Make files are usually included in an open source software package, and they encode several options for testing and building the C files. Make files are also written with Unix shell commands. So they're useless balls of command console errors if you want to run them in Windows. Somebody has to translate those files to make them compatible with a Windows environment.
Or you can do it all from a Unix emulator. That's Cygwin. I think.
There are some differences. If you want to 'port' code from one operating system to another, you've got a little work to do. And, utilities like Cygwin offer you some assistance. Well written libraries are also helpful. In many respects, the underlying philosophies of Unix and Windows are so different. I didn't think I would be using Windows as much in the future, so I'm not interested in investing a lot of time and energy in learning to compile code the Windows way.
It's one thing to write algorithms, but if you want your program to have input and output, you have to submit to how your particular operating system works. Or, you could borrow/buy/steal someone else's solution. I guess it depends on whether you intend to sell your finished product.
I keyed in a simple program to 'fork'. Programs written in Unix can do this, because 'fork' is a system call to create a new process identical to the original in every way except process id number. Program flow continues from the same point in the program on two copies in memory. It's like twins with the same DNA occupying different living bodies. Systems can economize on multiple copies of the same program - every copy can access one instance of the code and constants, but keep their own area for variables. That's not like twins.
System calls have to be written into the library. The compiler has to recognize that I can use a function called 'fork'. Otherwise it will complain. Unix has the code for 'fork' in a numbered index. The compiler needs to locate the listing by number, and the program has to be able to locate it while running. Each program I compile needs to include extra code to make that work. Windows doesn't have anything called 'fork', but somebody could write a fork routine that achieved the same thing with Windows system calls for process creation. Otherwise, I have to remove the fork calls from my program and insert the corresponding Windows system calls. And who knows what else might break when I do?
Ideally, any system-dependent code ought to be stashed away in a library. A library with the same name for the same functions on different systems. But C isn't always like that. Programmers on one system are not usually worried about portability. It's not really worth their time, just as they wouldn't worry about whether the comments were easy to translate into Swahili, or Nepalese.
Street Sunset & Urban Landscape
10:10 AM 6/10/2009
Yesterday afternoon some thunderstorms rolled through my neighborhood. At five o'clock, I noticed that the sky was getting dark. I checked the weather online, and sure enough, there was a long line of severe thunderstorms bearing down on the city.
I went out to the fire escape to look at the sunny half of the sky, and the storms were rolling in overhead. The clouds were very active. It didn't start raining just yet - for about fifteen minutes, I watched the clouds above me tumbling like the boiling water in a pot. Most of the sky had become swirling turbulence as the updraft air baked by the city ripped into the cold air above.
But the best part was the breeze. My air conditioner was just not cutting it, and suddenly the temperature difference between inside and out was something like thirty degrees Fahrenheit. But then, there was rain too. I had to sit in the doorway to take advantage of the cool. Just out of splashing range, and I could actually read a book.
When the rain throttled back to a drizzle, it was still too hot inside, so I went out for a walk...
I had to fight with my camera a little on exposure, which means navigating through its menu interface, but eventually I got what I wanted. It was also a challenge to hold still for some of the zoom shots. I didn't know that I would regret not lugging a tripod around.
This color scheme reminded me of something I cooked up a couple of weeks ago: Audacity does a spectrum plot for audio tracks, and I took a screen capture of one to play with the colors in Photoshop. Today's photos of the sunset reminded me of the colors I saw while doing that. I see now that I settled on something different.
This plot is taken from Robert Fripp's "Urban Landscape". I realized one day that this particular track ought to provide a very coherent spectrum plot, because it is a gradually developing 'frippertronics' piece with guitar tones accumulating on a tape loop. The plot does look like a bit like a city skyline, which may or may not have been intended. When you listen to the tones, they paint a sound picture of alienation.
A few weeks ago, I watched the film "Radio On", and that Robert Fripp track was featured on the soundtrack. It was a German-English production from 1979 with not much plot to speak of - A radio DJ whose life is disintegrating out of apathy or drug abuse (it's not clear to me which) drives from London to Bristol to 'investigate' his brother's death. His wife/girlfriend has walked out on him (it's not clear to me why), and while in Bristol he encounters a German woman and helps her search for her daughter. In one scene, he stops for gas and the attendant is an aspiring musician played by Sting.
It is one of those absolute classics of unwatchable cinema. Shot in black and white in 1979, and full of disaffected, disjointed 'dialogue'. Don't watch it for its redeeming social values.
The Fripp track is playing over a moment in the film when the main character is gazing out over Bristol from his dead brother's apartment window. It lasts about ten seconds. It made me want to go back and listen to the whole track. And that was when I realized that the spectrum plot might look cool.
Melon Soda & Mammatus Clouds
2:10 PM 6/6/2009
Tuesday was the day I chose to sort out my camera problems. I don't have any other devices that can read an SD memory card, so I went to Penn Camera with the following agenda:
- See if the photos could be copied off the card,
- Reformat the card, since the camera was demanding it,
- Possibly buy a new card.
The photos would not copy, because no computer at the store could read it. The only other option was forensic-level data recovery at exorbitant cost. No thanks... I gave up on the handful of lost photos and reformatted the card instead.
Then the camera was happy. A part of me thought I should just go ahead and buy a new memory card, but another part of me was excited to be getting through this ordeal without laying out any money. I headed home.
It was a nice morning, and the walk downtown felt good, but in no time, the weather got hot. I took the opportunity to buy a strange snack from the Japanese market on U St. I got seaweed-wrapped rice crackers and a can of melon soda. As you can see here, the 'can' was shaped like a bottle anyway. And, sadly, there was no Japanese writing on the package, despite being so obviously a Japanese product. At least I found it refreshing.
But, would't you know it... I failed to test the card properly. Maybe I was too excited about not having to buy that new memory card. I updated my Facebook status with a mention of the Japanese snacks, and when I went to take a picture of the can of soda, the card crapped out after one picture. I knew instantly that I would have to go back.
As it turned out, buying a card wasn't so bad... I saw prices on the store's website, and I was prepared to pay that much, but they actually sold me a card with a slower transfer rate. I doubt that my camera can transfer data that fast anyway. And, I'm taking 5 Megapixel images, which means I can keep hundreds and hundreds of photos on a 1GB card. It's more than I really need. And, I wound up with a 2GB card anyway.
I also got some advice about how to handle the card: I was told not to delete images manually, from the camera directly or through the computer connection, but to occasionally reformat the card. I can only wonder why this is a superior method. Limited read/write cycles? Fragmentation? Are SD cards the same as flash memory or a little different?
After that, I had enough of walking. At one point I thought I was getting drops of water from a sprinkler system. It turned out to be sweat dripping off my head. I bought metro fare in the subway station (which wasn't very cool that day. Maybe there was no money in the budget for A/C...), and then I returned home on a phantom 42 bus - I ran to catch it, then thought it was out of service because the computerized signs were all blank. The driver told me it was a computer malfunction.
Later on at home, after cooling down for a while, I noticed that Jo had updated her Facebook status to say that she was riding her bike to Sticky Fingers. That's just up the way, so I gave her a call. But it was false advertising. She answered the call while riding through the tunnel on the Crescent Trail. Yes, we were cut off at one point. She decided to go to Baked/Wired in Georgetown instead. Not quite so close to my house. But I decided I would give it a shot. If the bus was cooperative, I could get there pretty fast. And, they are one of the few places that serves a decent espresso in this town.
Despite the heat, I managed to get to Georgetown quite quickly. An L2 bus showed up instantly. I had to run to cross the street and catch it in time. After that, speed was less important. I don't spend a lot of time downtown these days, and it felt odd that several people stopped me to ask directions. I love the easy questions, Q: "Am I walking in the right direction to get to Georgetown?" A: "Yes. It's not far.", but then there are the puzzles, Q: "Ritz? All I know is '3131'" A: "You know more about it than I do, but it has to be vaguely over there somewhere..."
At Baked/Wired, Jo and I sat out front. Bicycle parking on Jefferson is terrible. There are only a few street signs, (were there still normal parking meters?), and people were being creative with the metal bits surrounding the tree boxes. Not so easy to do with every style of bike lock.
One young woman locked her bike to the painted pink bicycle that serves as an advertisement for the coffee shop. (Maybe you're supposed to lock your bike to it...) Jo was perplexed by this girl's model. It was an oldish racing bike with a patchwork quality about it. Somebody had painted something in Hindi along the steering column. The rear wheel was a fixed gear, but there were clearly two different sprockets on the pedals. Soon enough she came out of the shop to ride away. So we asked.
It was built from miscellaneous parts. She works at Phoenix Bikes in Arlington. Or just volunteers, maybe. She didn't know what the Hindi stuff meant.
From there, we walked along the canal. Jo wanted to check out the floral department at Dean & Deluca. When I worked in Georgetown, I used to enjoy going there on my lunch breaks and looking at all the good stuff I couldn't afford to buy. She was unimpressed by the flowers.
Out on the canal it looked like a storm was brewing. It looked like a good time to split. In my opinion, there was little danger of getting rained on right away - we looked to be on the edge of a storm in the south. But, you never know... Rain could come soon. Storms don't always move strictly west to east around here. Those clouds made the light a little eerie, so a tried a few pictures along the canal. I spotted one of those cloud formations that often accompanies tornadoes. Only today did I see something to remind me of their name: mamatus clouds.
Defrost My Refrigerator
10:45 AM 6/1/2009
I have one of those antique refrigerators... By a process of dead reckoning, and no real research on the physical artifact - I do see a plate with a serial number on it - I date my refrigerator to the 1960's. It reminds me of only one other refrigerator I have seen in person: A spare in my grandmother's basement that was probably new with the house in the early 40's. Every other working refrigerator I have encountered has had a somewhat more modern design.
Well, technically that was true the day I moved in to this apartment. I have definitely seen similar refrigerators since then... Like the one in my neighbor Paul's apartment.
At some point in our technological history, mankind decided that a container to freeze foods enclosed entirely within a larger container to chill foods was an idea worth abandoning. Some genius inventor drew out a system of separate containers with independent access doors, and this is the system as we know it today. Sometimes the freezer is above the refrigerator, sometimes to the side. Once, I even saw one with the freezer on the bottom. What will they think up next?
Ah... To Be Young Again
My roommate still didn't get it after I tried explaining the process a few times: You turn it off, leave the door open, and the block of ice melts in about twelve hours. But, you can't just walk away, because the water would run all over the kitchen floor, probably damaging it. He (just trying to get out of helping, probably...) made a lot of silly suggestions about how we might melt the ice really fast. Most of these suggestions sounded like a good way to damage the metal tubes carrying the coolant around the freezer. His best idea involved a hair dryer. Which neither of us own.
I find it really interesting that my roommate is very opinionated. About factual information. He apparently gets into arguments with a lot of people who are too stupid to know they are wrong. I usually just demure and hope he'll get tired of trying to rile me.
My position is a little different. I'm more Socratic. In my accumulating age (let's call it Wisdom, Jr. - kind of like the Whopper), I have come to understand that so many things are up for argument because there is no right answer. History is full of right answers that became wrong as soon as somebody tried to widen the discussion. And where human relations are concerned, it is often a matter of changing needs; shifting criteria. If you can compute the result, it probably needs a sell-by date printed on it.
I wouldn't try to say that there is no universal truth. What I do say is that we concern ourselves with situations that are not universal to begin with. So if you're right, you are probably only right within the confines of your own local context. Good on ya.
Did I Forget To Mention?
I better go back to the kitchen and deal with all that melting ice. I also explained to my roommate that if he wanted to be spared the trouble of participating, he needed to eat his food or throw it out. I gave him some warning... Although I figured that the trouble closing the freezer door might tip him off after a while.
I'm getting a bad impression of 20-somethings - Always claiming how right they are, but completely missing the cries for help from the refrigerators they rely so heavily upon. I'm reminded of "The Garbage Man" song from the Simpson's...
Can't Someone Else Do It?!
That someone else is me. I gotta go now. There's that half-gallon of cherry ice cream melting on the kitchen table, too. Mmmmm... Real Cherries.
My Camera Killed Another Memory Card
9:01 PM 5/29/2009
I should have learned my lesson last time. On the other hand, my camera is supposed to warn me about low battery and turn itself off.
But I found out how to push it
My concern here was to squeeze as much out of the batteries as I could. (The irony here was the case of fresh batteries in my bag.) I was taking pictures in Meridian Hill park. Botanical close-ups. Some interesting plants were in bloom. After the first low battery warning, I turned off the camera to let it rest. Batteries usually rebound a little, letting me take a few more pictures later. I was still relying on another warning, though.
At some point, I took those pictures. Just a few. I wasn't being greedy.
When I turned the camera off again, it threw a fit. It takes power to retract the lens, and it decided that it didn't have that much power. It went into an infinite loop, making the bell sound it makes powering on, then clicking and tweaking the lens mechanism. It takes power just to turn off. It won't just give up.
So what could I do?
Pop out the batteries. Maybe I should have taken out the memory card, but I wasn't expecting to fry it. When I put new batteries in, the camera was back to normal... Except, it asked me if it should format the memory card.
Well... No.
I believe throwing the fit must have screwed up the card. So that's two that I've killed. I don't have any spares. On the bright side, they probably cost less now than they did two years ago.
We'll Have Fun, Fun, Fun...
7:51 PM 5/5/2009
Whoops, I meant to post these pictures on April 19th...
This was one of those days I could ride twelve miles without a second thought because Jo lent me a bike. I was lazy about getting my bike fixed while I had hers. That was a pleasant time. A pastoral utopia...
Now my bike is fixed. Sort of. If we can ever get the cable to anchor properly on the rear shifter, I'll have more than two gears again. And the seat always leaves me sore. I get a great workout riding it a few blocks, but I'm not likely to take another all-day joy ride anytime soon.
You should also see the "Arboretum" set from the same day on my Photo Gallery Page - I promise to add a bunch more photo sets to that page soon.
The Subject Matter...
A few years ago, I rode the Red-line Metro several times a week. Basically, I watched 15-second slices of them constructing the Florida Avenue station. I tried to read, but more often I would rest and gaze out the window watching for trains. From Silver Spring to Union Station the Metro is above ground, parallel to the B&O. I would usually see a MARC train headed for West Virginia, but the freight trains were more interesting.
At the Florida Avenue Station, I noticed what looked like a bike path next to the tracks. There were bridges to take it over the cross streets. I remember thinking it must be a harbinger of uninterrupted trail, taking advantage of an existing right-of-way, like the Capital Crescent. Perhaps one day it would provide much bicycling enjoyment.
Recently, through my association with Jo, the radical bicyclist, I discovered that there were grandiose plans for such a continuous trail - car-free, fresh asphalt - probably stretching from Union Station out to the 'burbs. So I took a look...
Down there around First and L - by the bus stations - is a trail head: wooden steps from street level up to track level. Hand rail and enough ramp to roll your bike wheels. That neighborhood is in the process of getting every old burned-out empty lot replaced with a shiny new office block. Not all of those people are going to be crowding onto a subway train - there'll be too many of them. Some of them will ride a bike.
So I start rolling. How far will it go? How fast can I get there?
Not That Far...
At the north end of the Metro station, I notice there is some debris cluttering the path. A new hotel huddles up to the station, and there is a stairway to street level sheltered by this new building. So there's lots of access to this strip of pavement. It must have a great future, because in a few hundred feet, I realize it is currently the nicest driveway a colony of homeless men under a bridge have ever had. A shopping cart out in the sun was my first serious warning. I already knew about this particular camp - I've seen it from the subway train. Some of the blanket bundles probably contain a live human. I wasn't stopping to find out.
There is no more pavement beyond that. You can continue on a dirt track across the open field that once had yet more railroad sidings. I know the way. I might have continued on over Rhode Island Avenue and come out by Catholic U. Instead, I turned back to take photographs. Sometimes when a place betrays me, I take my revenge on it by taking its picture.
Too bad I didn't have a longer lens - I could have got one with the Capitol dome really looming over the shopping cart. The angles were there. Instead, I concentrated on bridge, fences, and overhead wires. I always liked that bit of iron suspended by the cables. You know, some of the cables are just structural - don't carry any electricity - I have no urge to prove it, though.
And this last picture of the tooth and dollar sign stencil?
Complete non-sequitir
Talkin' Philosophy Of Science
12:05 PM 4/23/2009
This morning I went out for a walk. The weather was nice, I wanted get my body moving (instead of just sitting at a desk for a few hours), and maybe buy a pound of coffee beans for my espresso machine.
At the coffeeshop I ordered my beans, but when I asked for the small coffee that they usually give you as a courtesy, they told me they didn't have that policy anymore - that was only with a coupon.
Still, they were nice enough to give me the cup of coffee along with the update. I only buy about one pound of beans every month... maybe even less, but my intention was to sit in the shop reading where I could enjoy the brilliant morning sunlight and not get in my roommate's way while he was waking up and getting ready to go to work - I don't really understand why he leaves himself so little margin: If I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth at the wrong moment, it would make him late for work. Oh, never mind...
As I was adding cream and sugar to my coffee at the condiment bar, I lifted up my backpack flap to put the beans inside. Then I heard somebody call my name.
It was Mitch, one of my dog-walker friends. "What's goin' on, Evan!?"
I lifted the bag of coffee to feature it like a game-show prize: "Just resupplying for my coffee machine at home!"
"Did you shoplift that!?"
--sproing!@#$ "No, I didn't shoplift it! I bought it!"... (Turning to the woman next to me a the condiment bar:) "If I did shoplift it, why would I want him to yell across the room about it?"
Things Settle Down
Mitch got his coffee, and another one for one of the homeless guys in the neighborhood. His had soy milk. Then he got the two cups mixed up. "Did you see which one I poured the cream into?"
This weekend Mitch is taking his Praxis test so he can become a schoolteacher. I've seen his workbooks, and we talk about the material sometimes. Maybe it's just me, but it seems that you could get a passing score on the test without really knowing much about it. Questioning the foundations of knowledge comes naturally to me, so I've thought a lot about why the answers are what they are... Then again, I took a lot of those multiple-choice tests, and it's so easy to eliminate wrong answers. If we put a little more effort into learning the Why, we wouldn't have to trust our memory so much for the What and the How.
I showed off the book I brought - Rudolph Carnap's "An Introduction To The Philosophy Of Science". My idea of 'light reading', I guess. Back to those foundations again.
Just for laughs, I've also been reading "Statistics In A Nutshell" from O'Reilly. Not sure how many statistics textbooks I need, but I bought it after reading a good review. It has more space devoted to what data and measurement are, since these days a computer can do the calculations. That makes it an excellent resource - abstruse theoretical material has been available for decades, no doubt, but who could stand to read it? This book renders a lot of that material in a more readable format. Anyhow... I wanted to ask Mitch if he had ever dealt with that aspect of Stats: Did he land in the middle of the subject without ever treating the foundations, has he doubled back to explore, or has it just never come up? Chances are, when you start at the beginning, you don't see the significance right away, and most people seem to learn better from examples. The only problem is, those people may leave their vague understanding of the foundations at that.
'Nutshell', just like other serious textbooks, starts out talking about "Levels Of Measurement". I wasn't consciously seeking a comparison when I picked up the Carnap book, but there it is: "The concepts of science... may be conveniently divided into three main groups: classificatory, comparative, and quantitative." That maps well to the four levels of measurement: nominal, ordinal, interval, & ratio data. I wanted to know if Mitch was familiar with those labels. He wasn't... but he was familiar with the descriptions. Apparently, it's hard to come up with good examples of interval data. And, nominal data is often numbered (to save space in computer files, I imagine). But people often make the mistake of putting data into equations where it doesn't belong, and sometimes nobody even notices the mistake.
We sat in the sun, drank our coffee, and petted some of the passing dogs. I want Mitch to do well on his test, not get distracted by my favorite ideas.
Dreaming Of A New System
3:48 PM 4/22/2009
Ever since the troubles with Typo (The old content-management system I was using to blog), I've been dreaming of setting up my own system.
The main problem, as I see it, is that Ruby on Rails looks so difficult. I have read many testimonials to the contrary, so I suppose there must be a point where it starts to make sense. Like many instruction manuals, all the Rails documentation I have ever seen is... missing something. I clearly have an unexplained learning disability when it comes to computer tutorials.
As with my recent Photoshop manual encounter, every time I arrive at the relevant instructions, they either don't make any sense, or they don't explain enough.
Site Redesign
I'm planning to redesign this website. I've got some cosmetic details worked out, but there is no point in doing it unless I can come up with a new content-management system too.
My recent experiences with Facebook have clarified in my mind how this new system should function. But, I don't want everything I do to go on Facebook. If people care, they can come here to look - I don't feel comfortable pushing my updates at everybody I know. I can post a fraction of my stuff on Facebook, and give gentle reminders that I have a site people can visit if they choose.
So I'd do sort of what I do on FB: Add Photos, Links, & Writings. And, come up with my own eccentric organizing scheme. I have to design a database schema, which I know becomes a Rails application full of Ruby objects to represent Controllers, Models, & Views. Beyond that - to the practical issues setting it up on my server - I'm at a loss.
A Tutorial can be a wonderful thing. But, it can also prove useless in guiding the reader from simple contrived examples to real-world applications. So far, that's been a major obstacle for me. Rails has prepackaged scripts to build objects, but when I followed the instructions, I got long back-trace dumps (sorry, I should just say "errors") when the database wouldn't cooperate, and Rails saved every misstep I made along the way. I had to nuke the whole thing and start over - but I can't keep doing that as I get closer to building the thing. How am I supposed to progress from one step to the next?
Also, the tutorials don't mention the errors I'm getting. I want some diagnostic feedback!
