Computers

I've just found out that Hotmail also thinks my messages are spam. I am now switching to a new tactic. Whenever I send mail to a new person, I'll use my Gmail account and ask them to put my thinkulum address in their contacts. I have also just discovered that in Hotmail if you reply to a message in your junk mail folder and the other person replies back from the same address, their reply isn't marked as junk mail, though their future, unrelated messages are still put in your junk folder, if you haven't put them in your contacts or safe list. So the Gmail-first method is more reliable.

I've had two friends who use Gmail tell me that my e-mails were put in their spam folders. So a few minutes ago I tried sending myself a message from my thinkulum accounts to my Gmail account, and it happened to me too. ... Yes, I send myself spam. Not that I expected it to behave any differently, though I thought I had sent myself e-mails like that before without a problem. Maybe Gmail changed its mind about my domain recently. It's probably because of my e-mail updates, which could be mistaken for spam, since it's a mailing list, and perhaps Gmail generalized its conclusion to the whole thinkulum domain.

Fortunately they have these nice buttons, "Report Spam" for your inbox and "Not Spam" for your spam folder, that you can use to educate their spam filter. I used them on my test messages. I don't know if it will apply to messages I send from those accounts to other people.

Version 1.1, 5-1-05

I grew up on computers. My dad is an electrical engineer, so we've had at least one computer in the house since I was little. The first family computer we had was an Osborne 1. Yes, I know, you've never heard of it. To me it was the best thing since sliced bread, which I had only discovered a few years earlier. My dad taught me how to program in BASIC, and for a while that was my major pastime. My brother Michael is the one who really picked it up, however. He is one of my chief sources of computer information, so his name will probably make frequent appearances in this section.

I dropped programming in junior high for other things, and I regret it in some ways. The tech world is very interesting to me, and I have some friends in that sphere, but the learning curve for being conversant in computer science is pretty steep and I haven't kept up with it, so I'm sort of at a disadvantage. But oh well, you can't do everything. I keep up with programming and computer technology in my own small way, and it's usually enough for me.

After not having programmed for about ten years, I started learning Perl at my brother's recommendation. It is not an easy language to learn because it can be very cryptic. But I rediscovered what I love about programming. It boils down to two things: puzzles and power. Power because when you know how to program, you can get the computer to do what you want it to do. You're not limited to what other people's programs will allow you to do. And puzzles because programming is a process of problem solving, and it can be surprisingly engrossing. I can sit there for hours, totally absorbed in working out the right code to achieve my goal.

But I do have limits. I don't naturally think like a computer, and contorting my mind into those patterns is taxing. So as with everything else but more so in this case, my attention to the subject comes and goes in phases.

There are many other things about the world of computers that interest me, from artificial intelligence to the open source movement to the OS wars. I am fascinated, too, by the philosophical and methodological insights that can be drawn from computer science and applied to other areas.

As for hardware, I bought a laptop in 1996, my freshman year of college. It was a Toshiba Satellite 205CDS, a P100 that had about 780M of hard drive space, an 11.5" screen, and 24M of RAM. This was fine for a few years, but it took a noticeable dive in performance as the software I was trying to run began to surpass it. I also had to clear off hard drive space all the time to have room for my puttering. Eventually I'd had enough and started saving for a new laptop, this time one that would hopefully stay ahead of the software for a while longer. It took me two years to save for it, but finally I got a Sager 5690 at 3.2GHz with a 60GB hard drive, a gigabyte of RAM, and a 15" screen. That's a bit better than my old computer. In fact, so much better that it's way more than I need, so I named it after my favorite overpowered starship Petey, the Tausennigan Thunderhead Superfortress from the webcomic Schlock Mercenary! I partitioned the hard drive down the middle so I could dual boot with Windows XP and Linux. So that is what I am currently operating off of, just to give you a frame of reference.

Now, about this math, science, and technology section. I'm following the pattern I started when I stuffed the rest of the social sciences into a corner of the psychology page. Basically these are side interests of mine that I needed a place to put, and the computer page seemed the most natural place.

My dad is an electrical engineer. I would never be an electrical engineer. But his interest in things technical extends into related fields like physics, math, and astronomy, and that is one thing I did pick up from him. In fact, in junior high I thought I might want to be a scientist when I grew up. Then one year I worked in a lab for a science fair project, and I was cured. But my interest remains. What I like about science is that it amazes me, and I like to be amazed. The natural world is a strange and incredible place. Mainly I'm into the astronomical-physical end of the science spectrum, since that's what up with I grew.

And when you apply science to practical problems, you get technology. I like to be impressed by people's engineering creativity and the power we can wield over the physical world. That's one of the main reasons I like Star Trek. As Arthur C. Clarke pointed out, technology is like magic. So every once in a while I'll point you to some new bit of technological wizardry I've been gaping at.

Math I flirt with occasionally, and I do mean occasionally. It was always my weakest subject in school, but it still intrigues me in some ways. It's good training for logical thinking, and the philosophy of mathematics asks some interesting questions. So I'll dip into math here every once in a while too.

Computers Introduction

Computers links

Internet

Programming

Software

Troubleshooting

Tech culture

Math, science, and technology

I figured out what was causing RssReader to eat up 50% of my CPU (which it was, by the way). It was my huge storage file, which it turned out was impossible even for metapad to open, which never happens. I don't know if it was the size or something in the file, but I deleted it and started over from scratch, and now the program runs perfectly. :) It still has some minor design annoyances, but those can be overlooked for now. I'm just so glad it's working because none of the other readers I was looking at did things the way I wanted them to. I am very lazy. I want my feed reader to give me one long page with all my unread articles, sorted by source. FeedReader kind of did that but didn't seem to want to sort them properly. Maybe it just didn't like my computer. Anyway, everyone get RssReader and keep up with the news and all your favorite sites (such as this one! :). And don't store your articles forever. Let them expire, or they'll eat up your CPU. That's not a threat; it's just a fact.

From an e-mail I wrote to my brother on Saturday:

I spent last night managing my computer. I've been wanting to write a proxy or something to customize TWeb, so first I needed to put a web server on my computer. I decided on IIS, since it would take less work than Apache. But my hard drive was getting cluttered, so before I installed anything else, I decided to clear some things off of it, and I uninstalled about 6 GB worth of programs (half of which were Baldur's Gate). Then I got rid of some kind of spyware that was masquerading as MSN Messenger and eating up half my CPU time and I think messing up my Internet connection. I also figured if I was going to put a server on my computer I might as well make it as secure as I could, so I decided to finally install Service Pack 2. But before I did that I needed to back things up, so I did that. And since I was paranoid that SP2 would break my computer, I decided to finally reset my root password in Linux, and I found some instructions for it on the web. It turned out I could use the install CD as a bootdisk. So that worked, but I was going to have to do some other complicated stuff to get DSL to work with Linux, so I said forget it and decided to just install SP2 and take the risk. Well, that worked with no problems, as I sort of expected since Windows doesn't really give me problems, and finally I installed IIS.

I think you have to already know all about networking to use IIS. The documentation is kind of anemic and not very helpful to a beginner. Plus most of it is in the form of a web page that you view in a browser rather than the normal help program. It was hard to find useful information on the web, too. I've gotten to the point where I can view a web page on localhost, but I don't know how to set up a proxy. I have a couple of perl scripts from the web to experiment with, but I don't know how to get Firefox to recognize it as a proxy. I've pointed to it in the proxy preferences. I'm guessing there's probably some setting in IIS that's the magic key to getting it to work, but the web hasn't been terribly helpful.

I'm so excited! Sometimes I get so excited I can hardly think, my mind is going in so many directions at once, and this is one of those times. I've just been told that programming is about to become most of my job instead of only just a little part of it! Now, I know you're saying, "Oh, how awful, I'm so sorry. ... Umm, aren't you an editorial assistant?" Yes! Isn't it great? :D At my job I'm not limited to my job! My employers like to match the skills and interests of their employees to the needs of the company, and right now they need me to program! And the kind of programming they want is related to the kinds of things I've been wanting to program for them anyway, and their instructions were very open ended. So they've pretty much given me permission to go crazy! :D At least that's the way I've decided to interpret it. ;) I'll be working with the production department. We're going to meet next week to start working out what we want to do.

Well, I've taken the plunge. I just switched completely over to Firefox from Netscape. I was already using Firefox at work, but I was still holding out at home. I have a tendency to hang on to things until they wear out. Netscape was still working with all the websites I wanted to visit, and my computer could run it just fine, and it still looked nice and modern, so why change? I felt almost wasteful about replacing it. But a few days ago I found out that my favorite web browser has been marginalized for several years without my knowledge. Apparently nobody uses Netscape. And I thought the browser wars were still going on! Boy, I'm out of touch.

So now the up and coming thing is Mozilla Firefox. Why does it appeal to me when Netscape works fine, despite being unpopular? Well, Netscape seems to be dying off. AOL owns it, and they're keeping it going, but they seem to be piggybacking off of Firefox (which makes sense, since Firefox grew out of Netscape to begin with), and their browser development department is apparently minimally staffed. Firefox, on the other hand, is open source and is supported by a thriving community. Open source to me means frequent updates and lots of fun add-ons. And since Firefox retains the aspect of Netscape that kept me devoted (the way it managed bookmarks) and already includes a few extra features I like, I decided the time had come for a change. I was planning to take it nice and slow, but right off the bat Firefox asked me if I wanted to import my bookmarks and settings from Netscape, and once it did that, I could literally pick up in my web browsing where I left off with Netscape.

Incidentally, for me, it goes without saying that I would not switch to Internet Explorer. I've never liked it for various reasons. First it was because it looked ugly and stored each "favorite" as an individual file, which seemed very unwieldy to me, especially since my bookmarks reached the thousands (I'm sort of a pack rat, but I like to think of myself as a web librarian). It was so much nicer to have all the bookmarks together in one HTML document that I could easily view in a web browser. Later I avoided IE because it was so notoriously insecure. If you use IE regularly, you may notice that your computer is bogged down by enormous amounts of pop-ups and spyware. These are allowed onto your computer by IE, I'm told. I do not have that problem, since I've been using Netscape all this time. In fact, I only use IE for three reasons: 1) on rare occasions (rarer now that in the past), a web page won't render properly in Netscape because it has been designed for IE; 2) certain other programs require IE (though I don't actually have to use it in those cases--the other programs run it in the background); and 3) it's needed for Windows updates.

</high horse>

Anyway, now I'm on Firefox. I think I'll wait a couple of days before uninstalling Netscape, just in case, or maybe I'll do it when I do my spring cleaning on the computer. I have a lot of bookmarks to sort and extra programs to uninstall. It's amazing how fast the gigabytes fill up!

As a side note, today I also switched to Trillian from the AIM client. Now I can be logged in to all kinds of things at once.