HTML review and setting up the practice machine

This week I found myself reviewing HTML once again. It's a case of use it or lose it, I suppose. I don't use HTML very much at present, and even when I built an HTML website last time (back in the early 2000's), I used Adobe GoLive, which at the time was pretty good, although I wish I had worked with DreamWeaver instead, since it is now the de facto standard for web creation software, or so I gather.

HTML isn't that hard, and once I get back into it, a lot of it comes back. I would like to spend time learning more about cascading style sheets or CSS, but just haven't had the time to really get into it. I also am interested in how to use some of the other technology that allows for better placement of graphics on pages. The w3schools. com site is fabulous for learning just about anything on the web, including HTML. I also used it last semester for learning about XML and DTD's. It really works well for me. I love being able to try things out right then and there and apply the lesson quickly so I can remember it better.

I finally got out and purchased a used Windoze machine this week. There's a great place for deals on used equipment called Arizona Liquidation Station, and it's located near Cox Communication, just south of the intersection of Broadway and Kino. I picked up a Dell Dimension 4600C for $84, including a monitor and keyboard. An LCD monitor would cost about $60 more, but I decided to just use a KVM switch to allow me to use one monitor for an old Mac and the Dell.

I had some trouble setting up the installer disk for Ubuntu. It had something to do with the format of the .iso disk image that I downloaded and burned to a CD. The Apple Disk Utilities disk burner did it right after I tried unsuccessfully to use Toast to burn the .iso disk for installing Ubuntu. Once that got going, it was pretty easy. I shut down the computer for the night to save energy and all was well - or so I thought. This morning when I got back to the computer and tried to boot, all I got was a black screen. Nothing on the monitor at all. Apparently no video signal coming from the Dell! I decided to re-install the Ubuntu system and all went well again. I haven't had time to shut down and try to restart again, but I guess I'll have to do it one of these days. I would feel a bit wasteful leaving the machine on all the time.

I look forward to getting that settled and installing Webmin and some other software packages on the Ubuntu server machine. It will be exciting to dig a little deeper into the world of Linux servers in the coming week.

Some observations about learning about learning

This is week five of the IRLS 672 summer 2010 course and the learning curve continues to be fairly steep. There was a lot of dense material to cover, and in addition to looking at the material on the "The Networked Environment," we were asked to take a look at our own learning style to see how we might be leverage the resources available. It's really a valuable question, given that we all have limited time and energy to expend on trying to learn. Learning take a lot of time and effort, so becoming more adept at finding better ways to learn material obviously offers important benefits.

The suggested reading "Learning Styles and Strategies" had some very familiar concepts to me. A lot of it seems to be based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), much of which is based on the work of Carl Jung, one of the 20th Century's great minds, in my opinion. Taking the MBTI has been a great help to me and countless others. It's well worth the time and minimal cost to take it.

It comes as no surprise to me that I am drawn to the video and other visual resources offered. Unfortunately, there weren't all that many, but compared to just a few years ago there is an explosion of audio-visual resources thanks to the topic we are studying - the NET! I especially appreciated the video about The Warriors of the Net. It is also interesting that the site is so clearly trying to find a way to pay for the much greater amount of time and energy required to produce even a relatively primitive computer generated animation such as this one. There will have to be a way to provide incentives to producing content like this. For me, it helps me understand TCP/IP much more easily. I'd be willing to participate in some sort of micropayment system to help keep this kind of thing going, but based on my experience, I may be in the minority when it comes to actually paying creative people for their work online.

I also want to check out the audio podcasts from Harvard University Extension. I briefly looked at the lecture series on Computing 101 and it sounded pretty good. I want to add some of those podcasts to my iPhone and see how well I do just listening to the information and not actually reading it or watching a video.

One thing I do like about Wikipedia is that it allows for non-linear access to information. I can skip around and move faster or slower when accessing content. There are many times when this is by far the most effecient way for me to learn. Video tends to lock one into a linear stream and since I have limited study time, I tend to be pretty choosy about which videos I'm going to watch. On the other had, if I'm really tired, I can watch a video at the end of the day a bit easier than trying to read about LANs, WANs or ARPANET!

Adding Users and Groups using CLI, Gnome and Webmin

This week was an exercise in comparing some different ways one could add Users and Groups in Ubuntu. As I worked through using the Command Line Interface to add Users and Groups, I appreciated getting the "feel of the road" from using CLI. I was right there doing the work and could rapidly check to see if I had added the user or group by checking the appropriate directories.

Installing Webmin was not overly challenging, but I did find myself stuck a couple of times and unsure whether or not the packages I needed had downloaded or if they had been installed. The CLI sometimes rolls by so quickly that it makes it difficult to check one's work to see what has actually happened - or not. At first, I neglected to enter the port number after the URL, which was an ssl address. Once I figured out the addressing problem, I was able to successfully log into Webmin and use it. Of the three interfaces, I liked Webmin the best. It even has a batch file capability, which I'm sure comes in handy for the hardy administrators out there who have a lot of users with which to deal.

Fun with vi vim nano and CLI

This week has been fairly challenging. I'm enjoying learning more about command-line interfaces and about the history of open source software such as Linux. "In the Beginning was the Command Line" is a sort of stream of consciousness rant combined with serious experiences with both Graphic User Interfaces (GUI) from both Apple and Microsoft. The CLI information is pretty useful and some of the perspective about American society and it's love of metaphors and media is quite interesting. Eric S Raymond wrote "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" about two of the main methods of software development. The Cathedral stands for the method of using a centralized person or core team to create software code for an application. This was the de facto standard for many years. The Bazaar stands for open source software development exemplified by how the kernal for Linux was developed - using all kinds of volunteers from anywhere an everywhere. One key concept for open source can be expressed with the truism that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." The idea of opening up software development to as many eyeballs as possible and then basically being a referee to determine when the best solution has been found is pretty revolutionary. Raymond things it is "subversive" and I think he likes that a lot!

As far as actual use of the CLI, I've had a few problems this week. I found out the hard way that you have to be careful when placing an exclamation point in the command. I needed it in there as part of the format of the command from vi to the shell, but when I placed it where the name was supposed to go, I had all kinds of weird behaviors coming out of my system. I got some expert help to solve the problem and I'm sure getting more careful about what I type after those prompts in Ubuntu! I look forward to more practice with using the various commands and tools in Linux. I'm sure that with some practice, things will be easier than they are now and I won't get stuck not knowing where I am or how to escape for hours at a time.