Month: December 2003

Was in my car today at lunch listening to NPR, and the subject was PBS children’s shows. They were talking about the guy who wrote the “Schoolhouse Rock” series of multiplication table songs. “Three is a Magic Number” and so on. They didn’t mention my favorite, “Little Twelve Toes“. Here’s a chunk of it:

Now, if man
Had been born with six fingers on each hand,
He'd also have twelve toes,
Or so the theory goes...

Well, with twelve digits, I mean fingers,
He probably would've invented two more digits
When he invented his number system.
Then, if he'd saved the zero for the end,
He could count and multiply by 12's,
Just as easily as you and I do by 10's.

Now, if man
Had been born with six fingers on each hand,
He's probably count: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, dek, el, do.
Dek and el being two entirely new signs meaning 10 and 11 - single digits.
And his 12, do, would've been written: one - zero.
Get it?
That'd be swell, to multiply by 12.

They were teaching base-12 numbering, to elementary schoolkids! We don’t normally use base 12, although it would be somewhat practical, being more easily divisible (2, 3, 4, 6) than ten (2,5); of course it’s used in the major numbers of clocks and calendars (but not the minor numbers, or it would now be 14:2L on the 26th of December). We use base 2 (binary – 0=0 1=1 10=2 11=3 100=4), base 8 (octal – 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 10=8 11=9), and base 16 (hexidecimal – 0…9 A=10 B=11 C=12 D=13 E=14 F=15 10=16) in the computer, but mainly because that’s what’s easy for binary computers to understand.

By the way, I also learned that Mr. Rogers’ mom knitted all of his sweaters, one per year for Christmas. And was reminded that “King Friday the 13th” celebrated his birthday every Friday the 13th. Which I think is a good idea, maybe I’ll switch to that, as well as base 12. (Or maybe base 13?) I know I’ve decided to go personally off daylight savings time. So I’ll be an hour ahead (or is it behind, I can never be sure) all you daylight-savings-time-observing luddites. Perhaps I truly am ahead of my time.

Like everyone, I suppose, I surround myself with a hell of my own making. In my case it’s the hell where handheld and other devices go when they die. Die in this case being figurative – they all still appear to work, as long as you set your expectations low enough.

Perhaps this was brought on by watching too much Star Trek (TOS, for you dweebs) when I was a kid. I’m told that when the series first ran, my Grandfather used to watch it every week. Or maybe it’s just a petty power trip. Could be I’m just a crow fascinated with petty baubles.

I’m here at work, and I’ve got three computers around me, waiting to crankily refuse to do my bidding. The Mac here, I use most often and the least for actual work but I find it’s usually most cooperative when it comes to getting things done. Though the iSight camera on top is nice but I have no clue why I needed it since noone else I know uses one so I can’t videoconference, which is what it’s good at. Then I’ve got the PC I bought because the one they had here was neither fast- nor portable- enough for my “needs”. And of course there’s the Mac server. My Mac laptop is in my bag since I’m headed to El Centro for the weekend (couldn’t be without it, could I?)

The iPod is filling up with songs for the trip down; I’ve got the GPS filled with geocache points that I most likely won’t get to. And now the Palm is being loaded with Topo maps for some reason unbeknownst even to me. I take that back, the palm isn’t docking. It often fails and requires reinstallation of the software in order to work – for no explicable reason – on Mac or Windows.

Of course in the bag I’ve got the camera, schlepp it (and the wide lens) everywhere and rarely find anything worth shooting. And the damned cellphone – suppose I would be sync’ing its data now if it could actually do that. I hear ( http://www.macsprintusers.com ) there’s a new cable that will make this one work as an internet connection (the cable for my old phone fits but does not work). I’ve also got not one but two radio transmitters for the iPod – neither of which seems to work all that well in my car; one requires batteries, the other doesn’t but may not transmit as strongly.

Then of course there’s the Newton at home. I still keep wanting to go back to the Newton. Sync doesn’t work that much better on the Palm (if at all) and though the Newt keyboard is bigger (for when I do articles or journals) it’s nicer to use, and the screen is better. (sigh).

I keep wondering if it’s better to try to combine these devices, or to have them work really well on their own. The phone, for example – doesn’t really work well as a phone. It has a camera, and a color screen, and polyphonic ringtones (no crying baby, unfortunately), games and a calculator – but the battery doesn’t last all that long, and the reception isn’t that great, and I have no way to sync my phone numbers. So at least, you need good connectivity.

One of the problems with setting up a website or especially a blog, is the guilt you give yourself over not writing more often. “It’s been a long time since I’ve written here…” I see it all over the place. There are even people who guilt themselves for not writing every day. Well, I’ve decided I’m just not going to worry about that. Instead I run my web statistics and check how many times people are looking at old entries. The one about W and Y is particularly popular for some strange reason.

I don’t have a lot of Christmas spirit this year; feeling very cynical. Mainly due to work, with the same perennial problem – working with people who are clueless when it comes to defining what they want out of an application. Sometimes I can invent stuff, other times I just can’t be bothered. And in this case working with ASP.NET and C# – despite whatever technical merits they might have they’re still Microsoft products, and now that I’ve started I actually don’t have a good reason to be using them; really should be writing this in PHP instead, but -I’ve already started and would have to go back and recreate; -would have to support UNIX server myself, and -Don’t intend to stick with it. Oh, and -might be useful to know some C# and ASP.NET just for comparison.

Some people have asked me for suggestions for GPS units to use for hiking, off-roading, and Geocaching. Here you go.

Here’s an idea I’ve been dwelling on for quite a while. Why not make a word processor that stores its files as html. Not an html editor, with the goal of making and posting web pages, but a word processor that uses only document tags that are acceptable in html. You could then post your documents as webpages just by dragging them to a server, if you wanted to. Style sheets would save as css. There could be some automated index creation tools.

Plus, you could also provide a web-based editor that worked the same way; I can log in and edit my word processing files from any web broswer (as long as the files were on an accessable server).

There are several ways to do this now, but all seem to be directed at web monkeys. Finally saw a web-based editor that could do the job but required Windows/IE.

I’ve always been frustrated with headphones. They’re uncomfortable and awkward. I’ve tried big clunky headsets, light foamy ones, over the ear and around the back of the head ones, and plenty of different in the ear ones. Have tried headsets for cellphones as well as music players, and standard telephones. Have yet to find one I can stand to use.

The biggest problem is the cord. It tethers you to the device you’re using, it dangles there annoyinly, it gets tangled up when you store it. So now we’ve got infrared and rf and even bluetooth, and either they aren’t built in to the device I want to use, or they’re bulky or line-of-sight. Can’t we just pick a decent standard and stick with it? Or make the base unit trancievers modular?

Then of course there are standards. I’d like to be able to use the same headset on my cellphone and my mp3 player and my work phone – preferably without switching anything. This of course means that it’s actually a headphone/headset combo, which shouldn’t be too tough. When I get a phonecall, mute the mp3 and let me answer the call – maybe even without be having to reach for the actual phone, as in my earlier idea, just saying “hello?” would answer it.

I continue to be frustrated by computers’ failure to do what I mean. This oft-discussed and seldom-implemented feature takes a lot of programmer skill and time to get right, but the better we do at it the more productive people will be when using machines.

One example of proper DWIM, is the command line tab-ahead in Unix (including OSX, of course!) If I type cd /Vol then hit the tab key, it tries to complete my instruction by finishing cd /Volumes (since that’s the only directory that matches).

Of course the end goal of this sort of technology would be to parse complex English commands into complex sequences of instructions; for example, if I could tell my computer (either by voice or from the command line) to “reinstall the web statistics package” and it would determine what I meant and try to do it, prompting me for assistance if necessary (“Do you want it installed for all websites, or only a specific one?” or better “I assume you meant for all websites; if you meant only a specific one say it now.”). I could also ask “What’s wrong with mysql?” and be told “It’s failing because the password was changed; please tell me the new password.”)

Instead what we get is the opposite. The other day I was trying to create a new user in Windows. I entered the new user name, and hit continue, and was told “The new user fred could not be created because the user fred does not exist.” Well, duh – I’m trying to create it. I still don’t know what was going wrong there. I guess this is one of the things that annoys me most about computers, when you get problems that are not covered in the manuals, and when the computers do things they’re not supposed to. Blind crashes (Blue Screen of Death) is the worst example, but every few days while checking my email I get failures for no apparent reason. Sometimes the reason is obvious but still frustrating – I was using webmail to compose a long letter to my dad, and when I got done and clicked save (briefly thinking after I’d clicked, I probably should have done a select all/copy first) it told me that I had waited too long and my session had timed out – and lost the letter I’d written, irretrivably. (It’s easy to imagine how to fix problems like that, but often more difficult to implement; what if I had walked away and someone else had finished the letter maliciously? I’d think the best solution would be to save it in drafts so I could review it when I returned)

By the way, one of the reasons I haven’t written lately is that this blog hasn’t been working properly since I upgraded my system – for some reason sort by date isn’t working properly. Which makes me too frustrated to write. Pfeh.