Centauri's Thoughts

We started eons ago as separate beings with separate thoughts, completely isolated.

Through the advent of language, we got better at communicating with each other, but this was still a long ways from truly understanding anothers thoughts. We are a sea of of islands, each completely distinct in thoughts.

As time went on, we got better at communicating with each other. Not only in spoken word, but with the written word as well. Writing also allowed people to speak across time, for once something was written, it could be read at any time, whether that was ten minutes later, or ten years, or ten centuries!

In the past ten years, our level of communications has gone up yet another level. Our written word is not just a daily newspaper or a letter. We went from e-mail, to web pages, to blogs, to chat, twitter and IM.

Communication now is almost instantaneous amongst so many of us, and the connectedness of us is starting to resemble the kind of connection in a large brain. Each of us has many contacts, and each of those contacts has many more, and not all of them overlap. the concept of a “meme” spreading over the global community is somewhat like a “thought” becoming known to the whole.

The concept of the Borg in StarTrek: The Next Generation was a bunch of beings tied together at the thought level. We are working our way towards this, although we have a long ways to go. for one thing, we dont (as of yet) have a chip implant to be always connected to the centralized system (thats coming!). There is also the question of being able to turn it off (the Borg didnt have this choice).

The way we can currently get legions of computers to work together on a problem (via the SETI distributed method, or parallel processors) could prove very interesting when this is applied to human minds. Imagine if solving a problem suitable for human could be sent to 100 or a 1,000 minds to each ponder and resolve all or a part of it, together.

IF we dont blow ourselves up, I feel this last point will not be a question of if – but when

I have been a programmer for many years, and when I was first learning computer languages, I thought I could solve all the worlds problems in this language I was working in. After all, I was proficient in it, and could see many uses for it.

After some time and few more languages, I began to learn that each language has its strengths and weaknesses. Although I can make most any language I am familiar with, do what I need it do to (with some coaxing), I lost those magical goggles that said any one language was perfect for all things.

That brings me to the power of scripting and pipelining. lets say you have something like this:

grep mystring Myfile | sort | cut -f1 > newfile

grep could be a C program, and sort could be a ruby script and cut could be a perl program. Of course, in this example, they would most likely ALL be C, but the point is they don't have to be.

Its a matter of using the best tool for the job. Some are good at string processing, some are tooled for the math, some can deal in arrays and hashes extremely well. The point is to understand the strengths (and weaknesses) of each language, and make the best decisions you can on this (given that you understand each language sufficiently well).

I suppose this is why I explore so many different languages, and try to do my standard program project in each one to learn the basics of the language (my standard project is to make a rolodex, which incorporates the entry and edit of name, address, city, state and zip, phone number into a collection of records, with full add, edit, update and delete abilities)

You know its really an abuse of all of our time and effort when we have to develop a system like CAPTCHA.

The term CAPTCHA (for Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford of Carnegie Mellon University. At the time, they developed the first CAPTCHA to be used by Yahoo. reference

Spammers have no ethics, morals or respect of other peoples time. They are lazy and greedy, and want the world to provide them a free ride.

We have to spend a lot of time making sure our own software cant be abused by them. e-mail, blogs, forums, comments. anywhere that data can be entered is potentially at risk.

I know I shut down my OWN forums and blogs a few times because of spam.

I have CAPTCHAs now, but this war is far from over.

Since the system rebuild, I had a chance to start some things over, and one of those was getting java and eclipse (using apache tomcat) working on my machine.

This is only the beginning, of course, I have a long ways to go. Luckily, I can learn a lot only by studying code and practicing (as I did to learn C).

Its frustrating to wake up one day, find your PC locked up, only to discover that something is seriously wrong and it wont boot up.

After searching for a way to recover the system (in vain), I took the hit and re-installed linux and re-compiled my apps. One and a half days later I am back with almost ALL the functionality I had before.

This is actually faster than I remember considering the number of apps that were NOT in the install distro.

*sigh*

Today I made a copy of the php program and coverted it to perl. I can now pass in an array, with the first element being the pixel height of the graph. The width is then determined by the number of elements, and the data itself is scaled based on the largest data element.
This program can output directly and make a graph on the screen, or generate a PNG file.

I've been toying with a few options for makings bar charts and graphs on a web page.
The first and easiest is using a one pixel graphic and specifying the height and width image tags to make that color any size I wish. The limitations are that its forced to be the color of the pixel (although I can generate lots of those).

Then I found a program called fly that can generate a whole PNG file from drawing primitives.

Finally, I found out that I can generate the graphics directly inside PHP, and that is the path I am taking so far. If I cant pass parameters into it, then its back to fly for generating the picture, but at least I have interactively figured out the needed drawing commands.

Looked at the QT GUI builder tonight. A lot of drag and drop, and frame dragging resizes of objects.
In the past I have coded a few things by hand in pythons tkinter lib. The majority of the work there was "guessing" at a window layout, and tweaking til it was right.
It looks like not only does it output the widget placement, but also any data list associated, and some class methods.
This would free me from that part of the design, once I understood how to plug into it. Ah the toys and joys of programming.
I'll have to ponder a project for this, besides the one i NEED this for.

Been reading up today (again) on Cascading Style Sheets, And managed to get the colors in the newer B2evolution back to more the colors of my liking (I had customized the old one somewhat).


Having a small sample page for color testing is definitely better than messing around with the main custom.css and re-uploading many times. Especially when there are about 4 or 5 shades of color combinations to test out.


Its looking more to my liking now, at least.

I finally got my beta developer status at ning and my first app is published as SpaceTravOne


I hope to do some more in the coming months, as tonight was a test. They also have an IRC chat space, which I was in for hours tonight!


I think this has a lot of potential, but like all things, it needs a programmer-base, a user-base, and something that attracts both!