I believe this is officially the first day of hurricane season. Compared to the two flat tires I got on my bike, who cares? I spent two hours with a former student, completely going over the details of sending and receiving email attachments. I talked to JP, and unless the weather clears up considerably, Ocean Reef may not happen this year. We had an entire day of Seattle drizzle to remind me of home.
A week or two back, I showed a picture of a mystery machine. It looked like a piano keyboard attached to a sewing machine. For those who have patiently awaited the answer, it is a telegraph machine. The keys were for sending Morse Code. Your trivia for today is that Sam Morse did not invent Morse Code. He merely perfected a method of using it. by inventing the telegraph. (His original system had to be modified yet again due to certain unavoidable pattern errors. The result, called International Morse Code, is not perfect either. For example, never say anyone is “bad” because the code for “b” can easily be mistaken for “de”.Dickens cut the hours short at the Thrift because of the rain. The plan is to go over there for a few hours at mid-day tomorrow. I need the money due to the slowest month in two years over here. Mind you, for me less work often means more progress and I spent half the day reviewing PHP, the programming language.
Steve, the cancer guy, should be back soon. We are all speculating what he looks like after gaining the 60 pounds in jail. Purely by coincidence, I was looking at on-line software for investigating criminal records. It seems, public records or not, there is no free source for this information. You have to subscribe to one of the on-line companies that apparently have special permission to access these records.
That is something I am against – private companies making private profit off public records. If the records are public, there should also be a public record of who uses the information and what for. Everyone who keeps a “public” record should have to annually inform the party whom the information concerns. Private citizens should be the ones who decide what is public. It could be argued that such rules would make it so expensive to keep these records that nobody would do it without a good reason. Exactly.
I did note that, including the spelling mistake I always use in my name, every address where I ever had a telephone has been published on the Internet, and it is available for $19.95. So, property that originated from me for a totally different purpose is being sold without paying me a share. Of course, I am against it right there.
Another item was that it is illegal for non-Americans to enter [this country] if you have a criminal record in any other country. This will likely surprise many Canadians who’ve been coming here for years. The reason is that people don’t realize if you have ever been arrested (even if not convicted) in Canada you have a criminal record. It does not matter if you were found innocent, an arrest record in Canada is a criminal record and it persists forever. If they ever get stopped in America, they will instantly have an American criminal record as well, which totally sucks. That’s why I like English law, where they have to prove a motive.
Don’t think the law is bad just on the Yankee side. Canada, if you have any criminal record in another country which is also a crime in Canada, they will try you a second time for the same crime. Canada has also abolished statues of limitation and have enacted retroactive laws. (Those are laws that can prosecute you today for something you did while it was legal in the past, even a lifetime ago.) People should think carefully about the definition of freedom in such countries.
All that is nice, but really, the day and evening were spent at the computer. I see there is a triad of components for Internet databases, and it is called AMP. Apache, MySQL and PHP. One thing I can state, is that these may be new computer “languages” but they are not modern. They have the worst parts of everything that went before, almost as if they intentionally did things wrong. For example, I do not rate a computer language as progressive if it requires more keystrokes than what it replaces, or if it does not ensure the most common commands are easy to type.
This is what I learned today. The Internet traffic is HTML but that is not part of the formula. You embed the PHP commands in HTML code and it is extracted by the Server running Apache. Apache then uses the PHP code to find your information in a database using MySQL. This process is reversed to send back a reply. Plainly some maniac came up with that concept. I thought the phone company was bad for each department doing their own work the easy way.
I took a look at some of the typical coding. What a bastard rat nightmare! There are some commands that have five punctuation marks in a row. This is not progress, you eggheads. The coding seems to be at least a dozen times more complicated than it has to be, if only these people had picked up the phone and talked to each other. The AMP combination also lacks diversity, hence all PHP based material will begin to look similar.
There is no quick way for me to learn all this. I see now that most web charts, bulletin boards and shopping carts use this exact setup, so there is no doubt I will learn it eventually. It is so sad to see 150 lines of code trying to do what 15 lines of good old 1970 BASIC could accomplish. By that, I mean I have yet to see a new computer command since I was 18. All “new” languages have the exact same set of operator commands at the core.
ADDENDUM
I did not have time to practice music. My heart was set on it; music is so simple compared to programming that I needed the break. Instead, I was another three hours at the bookstore. I gave a listen to the 12 tunes on Cowboy Mike’s disk when I got home. It is all blues, hardly challenging. If it gets me out on weekends, I’ll take it. I’ll just chart the tunes and play off that, since I can’t tell boring tunes apart. Another 12 like those draggy things and we’ll be ready to go (they average almost five minutes each).
What did I see that was new? An article on a new computer mouse that fits on your finger, like a ring. You just point to what you want on the monitor. If it replaces those horrid IBM touchpads and clown-noses, I’ll be the first to buy one. There is also a compressed air car now available, if you live in India. You charge up a 4,300 pound tank of air for around $2 and the thing will do 60 mph for 125 miles. The claim is zero emissions but in true automotive fashion, nobody explains what is burned to compress the air. The car is “held together with glue”.
