The Future is Not What It Used to Be

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A funny short-short story by Paul Di Filippo set in the near future after the collapse of the Internet:

I HAD TO run a few errands downtown, but I hesitated to go.

What if I ran into bloggers?

Ever since the total, irretrievable collapse of the Internet in a chaos of viruses, worms, spam, terrorism and busts by the FBI anti-porn squad, that archaic species of human had become a bigger street menace than mimes, Jehovah’s Witnesses, or panhandlers ever were.

[…] I had almost gained the security of the lobby of my bank when my luck ran out, and I was accosted with no easy means of escape by a wild-eyed figure.

Backed into an embrasure by the advancing apparition who had been cleverly lying in wait for prey, I was startled to recognize — beneath the grime, elf-locked hair, tattered clothing, and unkempt beard — a man I had known from his earlier life.

[…] The recognition was plainly one way. Doctorow’s crazed eyes betrayed no familiarity with my face. I was only another potential flesh-and-blood “hit” for his “site.”

Doctorow carried a mud-splattered messenger’s satchel over one shoulder. From this bag he now removed an old-fashioned wirebound spiral notebook and pen. He made a tick mark on paper, recording my “visit.” Then he launched into his spiel.

“Welcome to a directory of wonderful things, my friend! Get ready to be amazed, thrilled and astounded! I’m going to show you stuff you never believed existed, stuff that will brighten your life, enhance your senses and enlighten your consciousness! For instance — ”

(via — no, no irony here — Boing Boing)

iTunes “Future is Not What it Used to Be, The” by Parallax1 from the album Parallax1 (1996, 5:46).

Plato’s a Putz

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No, no — not Plato. Plato Learning, Inc. They’re the company that provides the online program that we’re using in my math class.

It’s not that the program is bad — in fact, it seems to be simple enough (I’ve only gone through the introductory “this is how it works” section so far), and their website lists a number of success stories and awards for the program. It’s simply that after going through the first section and poking around at the CDs, I can’t find any good reason why the software is Windows-specific.

Basically, the entire setup is HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PDF, and Flash, with a Windows shell that it runs inside. To start a session, you go to the PIM site, choose your school, and then you’re presented with the options to do a lesson or check your progress. When you choose to do a lesson, a small nscc.iss file is downloaded. That file is actually a minimal text file with five small variables:

[Site Info]
Site=NSCC
SID=SD1
externalserver=isswebdb.academic.com
Server=isswebdb.academic.com
PORT=1521

Windows has .iss files registered to the shell program, which then connects to their servers using the information passed on inside the .iss file. After a quick logon/password check, the shell program then proceeds to run the courses off of the provided course CDs.

As best I can tell, the shell program needs to do four things:

  1. Read the data in the .iss file,
  2. Connect to the Plato servers to perform a login/password check,
  3. Connect to the Plato servers to transmit scores and progress status,
  4. Act as a mini-browser to display the HTML, JavaScript, and Flash files stored locally (I’m guessing PDF files are passed off to Acrobat Reader, though I’m not entirely sure yet).

In other words, absolutely nothing that requires Windows. The only thing preventing them from being able to offer the home-based services to Mac users as well as Windows users is the lack of a Mac-based shell. While I’m no programmer, I really have to wonder about just how complex something like that really would be…I’m guessing not terribly. Certainly something a major educational software company should be able to handle hiring a Mac programmer to do.

Ah, well. Macs are still the minority, so things like this aren’t exactly a surprise. Annoying and frustrating, yes — but not a surprise.

Amusingly, figuring all this out gained me a small “star moment” in class today. While about half the computers in the classroom were handling the nscc.iss file correctly (downloading it and triggering the launch of the shell), the other half apparently didn’t have .iss registered as a known file type under Windows. For those students, clicking the ‘do a lesson’ link resulted in nothing but a standard Windows “I don’t know what this file is. Open it or save it?” dialog box. Saving it, of course, did nothing, and trying to open it just presented the “pick a program” dialog box. Neither the students nor Ms. DeSoto had any clue what was going wrong, or how to get around it.

While my computer had worked as it should, I was watching the guy next to me fumble his way through trying to get things to work correctly. When the “pick a program” dialog popped up he started scrolling through it, and I noticed a program called issstub.exe pass by. Figuring that there was a good chance that issstub might handle .iss files, I told him to give that one a try — and as soon as he chose that one, the shell program opened right up, connected, and was ready to go. I pointed this out to another couple students who were having the same problem wile Ms. DeSoto watched, and then she passed the process on to the rest of the class. Success!

As the hour ended, I was packing up my bag when she walked by and patted me on the shoulder. “Thanks so much for finding that — you saved my day!”

Hey. Day number two, and I’m already sucking up to the teachers. ;)

iTunes “I Was Born to Love You” by Queen from the album Made In Heaven (1995, 4:49).

First Day of School

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Well, okay, so there wasn’t any big yellow school bus for me today.

And no, there wasn’t a short bus either, smartasses. ;)

Still and all, it was my first day in school in fifteen years, so I figured I had to mark the occasion in some form.

While this was the first day, so everything was just introductions, syllabi, and getting things started, it was a decent enough start. First up was ENG101, taught by JC Clapp, who Prairie had recommended to me. We spent the first half of the hour going over the syllabus, then had the second half to write a brief “who are you and why are you in this class” bit (not really an essay, more of a short scrawled letter).

Next was MAT097, with Jennifer DeSoto. While I’d chosen that particular class because it fit well schedule-wise, it will be interesting to see how I fare. Rather than being a traditional lecture/assignment style course, it’s very self-driven and done nearly entirely online — the teachers are closer to being tutors, and the class hours are there for us to use the school’s computers to connect to the online course. Technically, it’s possible to do all the online work from home…if you have a Windows based PC. “ Ah, well…looks like I won’t have an excuse for skipping out of the classroom sessions. ;) On the bright side, if the numbers make a bit more sense to me this time around, it was mentioned that there have been students who’ve completed two or three courses in the space of one quarter. I don’t expect I’ll be one of those, but….

So, we’re off to a good start. And on we go from here!

Tag Intersections

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A little bit more work on improving the tags.app implementation here.

By default, tags.app’s results page from performing a tag search is very sparse — simply a bulleted list of post titles, presented ten at a time. One of the first things I did when tweaking my install was to enhance the page a bit by adding post excerpts, author, and time/datestamps to each entry. I also added a list of ‘related tags’ in the sidebar of the results page.

While tinkering around with adding the tag search field tonight, I realized that it shouldn’t be hard at all for me to add easy tag intersection searches to the tag results page. A few tweaks later, and it’s done: when a search on a tag is performed, the list of related tags now includes a small ‘[+]‘ symbol before each tag. Clicking on the tag itself will start a new search for that tag alone — but clicking on the [+] will add that tag to the search (and narrow down the ‘related tags’ list dramatically). I’ve been playing with this, and it’s making it very easy to drill down through the thousands of entries on the site very quickly.

Code snippets follow.

Read more

This is a test…

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…this is only a test.

Update: And it’s a test that worked — my favorite kind!

Last month, I added tag support to the site, courtesy of tags.app. While it’s been working quite well, I’d occasionally want to look for a tag that wasn’t displayed as a clickable link on whatever page I was on. I’d been getting around this by clicking on any tag to perform a search and then editing the URL in the browser’s address bar to get to the search I really wanted. Obviously, not a very user-friendly solution.

With a little simple form editing, things are much simpler now. In the sidebar there are now two search fields available. The first is the standard full-text search that comes standard with every Movable Type installation. The second (or the one at the top of this post, for that matter) ties into tags.app’s search capability, so you can now search for arbitrary tags. You can even search for tag intersections by entering multiple tags separated by spaces.

Quick, simple, and easy to use. Some days you’d almost think I knew what I was doing around here.

For the record, here’s the code I inserted just below the div that the standard search field lives in:

<div>
 <form method="get">mt-tags.cgi"&gt;
  " /&gt;
  <label for="tagsearch">Tag Search:<br />
   (Separate multiple tags with spaces)</label><br />


 </form>
</div>

iTunes “She’s Hot” by Sheep on Drugs from the album One for the Money (1997, 3:50).

Distorted Tunes Test

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According to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders‘ Distorted Tunes Test…

You correctly identified 26 tunes (out of 26) on the Distorted Tunes Test. Congratulations! You have a fine sense of pitch.

I’d certainly hope so! Some of those samples were almost literally painful to listen to.

(Though I will admit that years of violin and voice training, being able to plunk melodies out on nearly any instrument I’m handed, and having a slightly musical family — we all sing, Kevin plays cello, upright bass and bass guitar; dad plays guitar, banjo, and some viola; mom plays violin, piano, and organ; at least half if not all four of my grandparents were music teachers at one time or another — might have some small thing to do with acing this test.)

(Maybe.)

(via Blankbaby)

iTunes “Dance to the Music” by Kickshaw from the album Superstar (1999, 4:04).

TypeKey broken?

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I’m not sure how I’ve managed to do this, but while disabling the OpenID Comment plugin (which was apparently causing issues with submitting comments, and wasn’t really being used anyway), I’ve managed to break the ability to log in via TypeKey for authentication. For the life of me, I can’t figure out what’s going wrong — all of my code looks like it should be doing what it’s supposed to — but for whatever reason, the link to log in to TypeKey isn’t showing up.

So no TypeKey until I figure out what I broke. Meh.

iTunes “Sweet Dreams” by Marilyn Manson from the album Smells Like Children (1995, 4:53).

Ten Years (roughly)

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I first started bouncing around the ‘net in the fall of 1991, when I made my first ill-fated attempt at being a college student (a half-semester at UAA that I pretty much just stopped going to). I had the user ID of ‘ASMDH’ — Anchorage, Student, Michael David Hanscom — and the sole remaining evidence of that first ‘net address is a comment by Royce from a few days ago, and a listing in the IRN FAQ, also courtesy of Royce. Digging through the IRN archives gives me an earliest confirmable ‘net presence of Thursday, the 17th of October, 1991 at 12:18:11 (entry #5 in IRN 1.5).

As I discovered about four years ago, the first definite evidence of my existence as a denizen of the ‘net outside of UAA comes from a Usenet post archived by Google Groups that dates to February 9th, 1994 at 5:49am. The post is to rec.music.industrial and concerns nine inch nails bootleg CDs. Heh. Sounds like me, alright. By then I had an account through Alaska.net, but there’s no web presence listed in my signature — which makes sense, as the web was still a brand new thing in 1994.

My first web page went up sometime in 1995, though I don’t know exactly when. The earliest archive I have dates back to February 27, 1996, but I’d been working with the space and teaching myself HTML for some time at that point. With a little poking around, however, you might stumble across the “these pages last updated” link at the bottom of that page. And what do you think you’ll find if you follow that link?

Time- and date-stamped entries in reverse chronological order (the most recent at the top) detailing little updates I’d made to the website and some personal bits here and there.

Sound familiar?

Going by the earliest entry on that page, I’ve been blogging in one form or another for ten years as of 3:13am (Alaska time), December 29, 2005.

That’s a long time. Honestly, I probably wouldn’t even have noticed this if I hadn’t decided to put all those early, hand-coded entries into my current Movable Type installation a while ago. It was kind of fun to see my archives page list posts all the way back to that earliest archived post!

I just wish I hadn’t lost a lot of pages from back when I was hand-coding my site. While my archives jump from early 1996 up to 2001, I was keeping a blog-like website during all that time…I was just hand-coding everything, and when the page got too long, I’d delete the oldest entries at the bottom. Ah, well…as often seems to be the case, it seemed to be a good idea at the time.

In any case, this post marks ten years of archived babbling and rambling — blogging, in today’s vernacular — for me. As I write this post, those ten years have created (and this doesn’t even factor in my LiveJournal account):

  • 3,614 entries.
  • 8,548 comments.
  • 1,228 trackbacks.
  • Four different management systems:
    1. Hand-coded
    2. NewsPro
    3. Movable Type
    4. TypePad
  • One lost job and subsequent Slashdotting.
  • Countless new contacts, friends, and interactions, some of which have spilled over into the “real world”, others of which have been entirely through the electrons of the ‘net.

Those of you who stop by from time to time, be you family, friend, anonymous stranger, or any other visitor — thanks for being around, dropping by and saying hi, and generally giving me a reason to keep this thing going.

And here’s to the next ten years.

iTunes “Anniversary” by Voltaire from the album Devil’s Bris, The (1998, 4:35).