[Author's note: this blog plunks into the middle of a situation not explained before. I was almost hired by WorkForce one to work on their database. Me, a civil servant! But a hiring freeze put a stop to that idea. And here's the little duckies again, to spice of this ten year old post.]
The staff knows him and say he works on their computers and fixes network problems. That, to me, is very good news, because he mentioned that he is dismayed by the low quality of people with designations who apply for jobs. Now it is making sense, he could hardly not be unaware that I severely criticized one of the top Florida schools for doing just that. The school that, in fact, turns out graduates with the degree but no practical experience (they don't even have a lab) – PC Professor. I e-mailed a slight cover letter explaining that I had troubleshooting experience with the phone company. Don’t worry, I properly qualified that by including that I had never actually myself fixed any broken networks. Ah, but that is where he comes in. This also means it will be his idea. 100%. I mean, it is not like I applied for the job or anything. He called me after reading my work and was impressed enough to quote it back to me. He mistakenly considers it a lot of work, but you know I don’t mind writing at all, my friends. If, in the process it shows my enemies how stupid they really are, that is okay, too.
I haven’t mentioned the London Subway bombing. It may have the effect of unifying hatred of these terrorist groups by down-toning the anti-Americanism aspect. (That isn't clear, what I meant was the concept that the terrorists were only against America was false, this bombing in England showed that they are against the entire Western way of life.) Mind you, the whole affair typifies again the nature of the problem, the Arabs don't fight fair. The Arab is an inherent coward and will not attack any party if there is any chance they will defend themselves. This is not 100%, but 99% is good enough for us. In fact, the one shining exception, the Yom Kipper War, was lead by that singularly most un-Arab group of all – junior officers of the Egyptian Army.
It is now after 6:00 and John has not called. He forgot, so I left him a message that later this evening is okay. The odds are I will go to B&N to read more HTML. The small booklet I bought is done, that is, I’ve learned everything in it and gone on to more complex studies. That book, “Creating a Web Page with HTML” by Elizabeth Castro is fine but not for beginners. It walks you through the process of getting things to display, but she never explains many important points. For example, how to open your work off-line with a browser. This gives the reader the impression that you have to load the thing on to the Internet to debug the code. That alone is a tremendous disincentive to the novice.
She also fails to explain how the exercises she uses fit into the big picture, often leaving you with the “what am I doing this for” feeling. At one juncture, she creates two stylesheets, then proceeds without telling you which sheet she is referring to. I guess everyone is supposed to know that you can edit the code with Notepad for it is never mentioned. She skips things, like what to do when your computer asks a strange question about saving an HTML file, and how to change your directory listing to include all files when you try to find your work later. (Or your work seems to disappear.)
Many Windows lists, in another brilliant Bill Gates move, do not display the file extension, even in detail mode. In things like that, I just do not understand what those MicroSoft people are thinking. Some of the missing material is computer stuff, but it is stuff you need to know to follow her instructions. On the positive side, she knows how to cover mistakes. She double tags most images, so if the image does not load, the space and alternative text appears. Without saying it, she has also demonstrated what the cascade part means. (The
To check again if I’m lucky or smart, I’m spending the next hour designing a furniture web page for the Thrifts. It helps that I have pictures of Jerry’s and Thom’s operations. Otherwise, remember that the listings won’t necessarily get updated rapidly enough to match sales. That part is not something I’ve figured out yet. How they could log-on and update what gets sold. The sheer presence of the page is more important for now, I think, and I just remembered I forgot to look at the page for American Thrift to see what they have done. How about we consider American Thrift’s page as the standard to beat. The guy is totally raised around computers and is half my age. Let’s see how the sites compare. I must also learn the process of uploading the files to the host computer, and I see there are some extra lines of overhead that were not in existence in 1997.
True.com is a singles chat service. By that, I definitely mean single, and I like it. The home page tells married people to get lost, and contains a warning that marrieds claiming to be single are guilty of fraud and could potentially spend five years in the slammer. If it is strongly enforced, then it is about time. It shows that the problem was serious. Everybody I know that ever went on the chat lines lied severely about something to make themselves appear more attractive. I think the law did not go far enough, meaning if they were going to crack down, they should really have done it good. People who lie about their age and weight need a kick in the teeth. People who are divorced and shacked up should be set in their places. If they are going to regulate lying, they should go the entire distance. My pet peeve in the dating world? Women with children who claim to be single. They are also the ones who defend the lie by pointing out they are not married. Now, is that even stupider or what?
A news item on TV says the schools want to ban a video of popular children’s puppets singing “We Are Family”, on the basis that it is produced by a homosexual organization. The objection is that such videos are an attempt to get into schools to portray a homosexual lifestyle as normal. The homo spokesman says he cannot imagine why anyone would think it could lead to that, what a shit-head. Let’s see, I’m on the side of the school. Whether or not it ever leads to homosexuals influencing children is not as important as letting homosexuals know that it will be fought all the way. Face it, once they get in, they claim any criticism of their activity, no matter how bad, as homophobic. Like I told you about the library, if you can’t find anything searching “giraffe” put “gay giraffe” and you’ll find something right away. The spokesman went on to say they are trying to teach tolerance, but failed to mention it is their insistence on being so visible that is causing most of the intolerance, and maybe that is where they should start.
Okay, it is 7:00 PM. Can I produce a working web page by 9:00? Away we go. There are eight inner pages, living room, dining room, bedroom, kitchen, chests/luggage, outdoor and major appliances. These are easy to photograph. Later. It worked again, but with a few glitches. Otherwise, folks, I did it again. Now these are not difficult pages, just a basic home page that links to a bunch of things for sale. Yet, did I not just describe a whole chunk of what is out there on the web? Have we not heard horror stories about prices people have paid for these pages? I’ll buy a tech manual soon; the point here is that the pages I’ve designed are perfectly ready to go out there and make money. They are also, due to the inherent simplicity I have no choice in right now, very easy to maintain. Just keep track of where you save your anchors and anyone should be able to update the listings and write their own ad copy.
[Author's note (2014): that was pretty optimistic. I had not yet learned how much difficulty the average person had uploading pictures. Also, the Thrift staff generally did not possess the skill or organization to keep the pictures and descriptions current and tempting. But then again, this was a long time ago.]
I switched from the simple layout to include many of the suggestions in the HTML book. It looks better, the main improvement being to stagger the listings left and right down the page. Breaks it up better and makes it easy to know where a new item begins. Thank you Elizabeth Castro. She chose a weird topic to illustrate her example, weird at least in my world. It is a page that sells postcards inspired by a trip to Europe. Do people really ponder such things before buying a postcard? Elizabeth sure thinks so, but honestly, when I buy a postcard it is not part of a collection (of postcards). My decision is based on what the recipient will think when they receive it. I have never bought a postcard for myself. This example suggests that you should go out and buy the entire set for $12.99 and impress people. Am I missing the whole point here? Anyway, I used her ideas since that is why she sold me the book.
Don called after 11:30 PM. As usual, our quick talk turned into over an hour. There is that much to discuss, and that took over directly from school. That is, at least the amount of time we would normally have spent in lectures is now covered by a few phone calls. There is no measurable progress from his courses and I wonder why, now that the school has been exposed, anyone would spend more money there. Over here, there is plenty of progress. We now know more about network protocols than the textbooks assigned to read. At each of our houses, we have computers to network and we are getting closer to success at a rate that is fantastic compared to PC Professor--who drag everything out and bore me to death. This is also costing less than the gas to drive to that school.
I must add some technical parts here, but it is good reading even for non-programmers. We talked about http, and where it fits into the puzzle. This makes good exercise because the text books tend to present protocol (a list of computer standards) in lists which the student is expected to memorize. That is a poor way to learn that topic, maybe the poorest. Instead, we (I should say I) have taken the most common protocol, http, and dissected the role it plays. How it actually works does not concern us as much as what it does. Turns out, it is only used on the internet. That may seem obvious, but in fact, not one author helped us out here. The implication was that to have two computers communicate a web page, you had to use http. The experiment on my kitchen table last weekend proved this not to be.
Http, or hypertext transfer protocol, is an accurate computer term, which is very rare. I’ll explain, but it really does mean a system to transfer hypertext – but what is hypertext? It is the computer language used to program web pages, and that language is called HTML for hypertext markup language. Therefore if you want a web page, you program it in HTML. When you want to communicate between computers over the Internet, your equipment must use http. What nobody told us was that if there was no Internet present, you don’t need http. Two computers hooked together with a proper cable should be able to use a browser to read documents written in http. I tried it, and it works great. These are the web pages I’ve been talking about most of the last week. The result is that Don and I have a clear focus on what has to happen next. We’ve narrowed down a confusing step.
We were on the phone over an hour [until 12:35 AM], though both were bagged. The inspiration is the incredible learning rate compared to the school we are attending. There is no hesitation to stop over one dumb thing at a time for we have independently have derived where each dumb thing fits, something a lot of computer schools fail to impart. (That's confusing. We had both noticed the school teaches to a deadline and won't stop to explain things--yet we felt those explanations was what we paid for.)
We know that a side-trip learning HTML is not off the subject at all, for we now have something to transmit over our potential network that is truly interactive. (The school only talked about these transmissions, like the class was supposed to know what they meant.) No doubt learning HTML will also be a useful skill. Don says he has never programmed. I believe he has the aptitude. On Thursday we plan to get him doing some code, and I can tell by a man’s behavior while debugging if he’ll ever make it. If debugging code bothers you, get the hell out of computer programming. I’m serious, I know people who only like to write code, not fix it.
This might be the point to tell you about last evening’s debug session. I completed the code by early evening, maybe 90 minutes work, including cropping the images [the term used for pictures in HTML]. Yet, the ‘paragraphs’ would not line up properly. The nature of HTML means that paragraphs can exist beside each other rather than stacked one after the other as you are used to. My web page was exhibiting this bug, and I spent four hours searching for the error. In fact, I re-read the text book four times, matching each line of code to the examples given. I re-ordered the style sheets to make sure which lines of code took precedent. In frustration, I even re-typed each line of code, saved, and ran the code again, in case there was an embedded typo. Nothing worked. You cannot see it, but each change involves opening the draft with notepad, saving the changes, them opening the browser and refreshing, a seemingly never-ending process that does go on.
Around 11:00 PM, I was certain the code was accurate, and I noticed that the image at the top of each listing (I have eight lists, living room, dining room, etc.) had an extra margin of roughly 4 pixels. Flipping between the pages, one list to a page, it was there in every instance. I reasoned that it should not be there as I had not programmed a margin. Aha, the problem was not in the cascading style sheet, but somewhere in the HTML code. That cut my search time in half. It turns out, my code was 100% accurate and had been all along. It was a logic error, one of the damned hardest things to find. One uses division markings to break the code up into logical areas. The listings were a logical area, but I did not go far enough. Each component of the listing had to be set off in a separate division. The bright side is I’ll never make that mistake again. The texts which fully defined divisions all fell short of the mark by not stating when they were needed. The divisions must be used in addition to paragraph markings before ‘clear’ and other tags will function properly.
Notepad. Windows comes with Notepad and most people never use it. Notepad makes one lousy word processor. It is sometimes useful in reading a text document you just cannot open with any other application. I found a use for it. Writing HTML code, which can be done in ordinary text, that is, HTML does not require (or have) a special editor (IDE) to create the code. You just type it in. Others have discovered this, because one of the options when you open an HTML document with a browser is to “Edit with Windows Notepad”. (This assumes you set that option.) Word processors suck when writing HTML, try it and see. Notepad is better when you get started. Careful, though, because some typical MicroSoft bureaucratic geek got at the Notepad application, so the Edit function is found under the file drop list, not the edit drop list.
So, I do not know what is out there. For $400 I’ll design you a web page that works. Like everyone else, if you want it to work fancy, now you are talking extras. It will look like most every other web page, which is not my problem. I’ve discovered some quirks that explain a lot of the messy pages you see on the web. Bad programming. Design your inner pages first. This gives them a consistent look and feel. Castrol talks about this process, but does not stress it. If you try to design the home page first, the maintenance becomes far more complicated. If you move anything, you destroy links. If another page or site to which you are linked moves, same thing. If you program backwards and design the cover or home page first, you will get all those error and non-displayable page messages. You have to go in and maintain the code to prevent those messages. If you have made your code hard to maintain, well, a quick tour of the web shows you the results of good intentions and bad follow ups.
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