This week the combination of learning something about the elements of HTML or at least enough to post a rudimentary web page with an internal link to an embedded image and hyper links to external sites while also setting up, pinging and configuring a LAN was a tall order. Not sure if I did it all according to Hoyle or even Fulton but it all seemed to work which surprised the heck out of me.
More than once I thought the ship was lost only to find a solution here and there either among the readings or from a haphazard if sometimes desperate investigation of other web sites. One glitch that almost had me down for the count was saving a file with the txt extension using Notepad. Since I wanted to ultimately save the file as a .html document rather than as a .txt this turned out to be surprisingly difficult. With the benefit of doing Assignment 6 "provide Name Resolution via your HOSTS files" I now know that the Notepad app has some quirks that require a bit of knowledge to resolve. Running Notepad as an administrator and using it to edit hidden system files like the etc/hosts file was a first for me. This issue almost got the better of me as I tried to save my HTML work within Notepad as an html document and then send it sFTP to the U of A public web site server. Eventually I learned from a web site named “www.thesitewizard.com” about a nasty eccentricity of Notepad's and a way to work around it.
According to the Wizard “Notepad has the practice of adding a “.txt” extension to your files even when you don't specify it. So if you give your file a name of “blahblahblah.html”, Notepad will change the name to 'blahblahblah.txt” without informing you. Compounding this problem is Windows Explorer's policy of not telling you the fullname of your files. Hence if you use Explorer to check the file, it will only show “blahblahblah.html”.
The solution to this problem involved going into Tools inside Windows Explorer and unchecking the hide file extensions box. I also learned that if you want to force Notepad to save a file without the txt extension it is necessary to put the full file name inside “quotation marks” in the Save As dialog box.
Not sure if others had this problem but it seemed to be a moment of enlightenment on my journey to the illuminating light of the LAMP.
I also had a world of difficulty getting my image file to load in my web page. Apparently the code I was writing wasn't pointing to the location of the img src file although I was able to load the image when working on it off line on my desktop. After using WinSCP to sFTP the files to my Arizona U-System account I failed to see my image load. A website entitled www.amailsender.com revealed that a common reason for this failure was not including the web site address in front of the file name.
I'm pretty sure this is not the “right” way to do this because I think it violates the best practice of linking to a relative location rather than to a fully qualified url and an absolute location, but it worked.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Unit 5 Learning styles and the networked environment
Unit 5 Blog Assignment Learning Styles the Networked Environment
I found this week's readings to be very difficult. The number of links seemed endless and the amout of reading was very challenging. The material was also pretty opaque to me filled as it is with numerous references to acronyms, standards, formats and layers. Despite the videos I am having a hard time understanding many of the concepts. I do now understand, agree with and appreciate the pedagogical caution that was attached to a number of the references in the lecture that “it gets a bit geeky but give it a read and get what you can” and find that advice somewhat reassuring. I'll try rereading some of the text articles and reviewing the videos and maybe it will make more sense, perhaps the light will go on? The whole subnet mask thing still baffles me so if somebody can break it down for me I'm ready to listen.
Not sure what kind of learner I am,(reflective,active ?) perhaps because like everybody else I am a mixture of learning styles rather than one type or another. I must confess that I find myself jumping into things like setting up and configuring hardware and peripherals often with not much prior attention paid to the manual. This usually leads me into problems and then I have to take a step back and rethink and redo the whole process. (Or maybe just read the instructions and then try it?) Patience is something I need to embrace more often but time is always limited and generally there is so much to do.
I understand that the complex nature of the material motivated our instructor to give us a number of different formats and avenues to explore while learning about networking. Maybe I just need to go back over things a second time and with hindsight and a new perspective something will click and I'll have a Eureka moment.
I found this week's readings to be very difficult. The number of links seemed endless and the amout of reading was very challenging. The material was also pretty opaque to me filled as it is with numerous references to acronyms, standards, formats and layers. Despite the videos I am having a hard time understanding many of the concepts. I do now understand, agree with and appreciate the pedagogical caution that was attached to a number of the references in the lecture that “it gets a bit geeky but give it a read and get what you can” and find that advice somewhat reassuring. I'll try rereading some of the text articles and reviewing the videos and maybe it will make more sense, perhaps the light will go on? The whole subnet mask thing still baffles me so if somebody can break it down for me I'm ready to listen.
Not sure what kind of learner I am,(reflective,active ?) perhaps because like everybody else I am a mixture of learning styles rather than one type or another. I must confess that I find myself jumping into things like setting up and configuring hardware and peripherals often with not much prior attention paid to the manual. This usually leads me into problems and then I have to take a step back and rethink and redo the whole process. (Or maybe just read the instructions and then try it?) Patience is something I need to embrace more often but time is always limited and generally there is so much to do.
I understand that the complex nature of the material motivated our instructor to give us a number of different formats and avenues to explore while learning about networking. Maybe I just need to go back over things a second time and with hindsight and a new perspective something will click and I'll have a Eureka moment.
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Unit 4 Users and Groups
Unit 4 Users and Groups
The installation routines went surprisingly well this week. Installing Webmin was the most complicated and time consuming assignment but the instructions were so precise and I was lucky enough to avoid any typos or miss including a line of commands that might otherwise have left me hanging out there. Perhaps it would have been a learning opportunity to have gone off on a detour, but everything is challenging enough. I did spend a lot of time studying the readings and reviewing the Griffith tutorials so I think that helped a lot. I find myself waiting until Saturday to confront the linux exercises, my old brain is just too sleep deprived during the week to handle the linux syntax.
Of course, I haven't started the optional practice computer work yet. I plan on trying it out tomorrow. I hope things go as smoothly tomorrow as they did today. I'm reluctant to share any tips for fear of jinxing things. But I've found that if I start early in the morning after a good night's sleep and with a strong cup of Joe nearby that things go well enough. Would never, never, never have been able to figure out how to install Webmin without the step by step instructions.
The command line “add a user” process went the smoothest of all the ways I experimented with to add a user. I did kind of run around the Maypole a little bit while using the Gnome Desktop Adm Utilities. The mouse arrow gets a little lost visually on the remote desktop so that was shaky. Remembered that the sudo password was available on the course home page, so that was helpful. Got a little lost looking for the three tabs [account, user privileges and advanced] but managed to figure it out. The lag between striking a key on my laptop and seeing the response on the remote desktop isn't as disconcerting as it might be othewise. My IT guy set me up with a version of VNC years ago so that I could troubleshoot public PC's at our remote branch library, so I sort of knew what to expect from that. However, I find that the VNC connections do break down over time. I recall he said it was principally due to registery problems, not sure if that's true but even if it is, my knowledge of the registry system is the article we read earlier in this course.
Well thanks for reading this week's blog entry. Until next time...
The installation routines went surprisingly well this week. Installing Webmin was the most complicated and time consuming assignment but the instructions were so precise and I was lucky enough to avoid any typos or miss including a line of commands that might otherwise have left me hanging out there. Perhaps it would have been a learning opportunity to have gone off on a detour, but everything is challenging enough. I did spend a lot of time studying the readings and reviewing the Griffith tutorials so I think that helped a lot. I find myself waiting until Saturday to confront the linux exercises, my old brain is just too sleep deprived during the week to handle the linux syntax.
Of course, I haven't started the optional practice computer work yet. I plan on trying it out tomorrow. I hope things go as smoothly tomorrow as they did today. I'm reluctant to share any tips for fear of jinxing things. But I've found that if I start early in the morning after a good night's sleep and with a strong cup of Joe nearby that things go well enough. Would never, never, never have been able to figure out how to install Webmin without the step by step instructions.
The command line “add a user” process went the smoothest of all the ways I experimented with to add a user. I did kind of run around the Maypole a little bit while using the Gnome Desktop Adm Utilities. The mouse arrow gets a little lost visually on the remote desktop so that was shaky. Remembered that the sudo password was available on the course home page, so that was helpful. Got a little lost looking for the three tabs [account, user privileges and advanced] but managed to figure it out. The lag between striking a key on my laptop and seeing the response on the remote desktop isn't as disconcerting as it might be othewise. My IT guy set me up with a version of VNC years ago so that I could troubleshoot public PC's at our remote branch library, so I sort of knew what to expect from that. However, I find that the VNC connections do break down over time. I recall he said it was principally due to registery problems, not sure if that's true but even if it is, my knowledge of the registry system is the article we read earlier in this course.
Well thanks for reading this week's blog entry. Until next time...
Saturday, June 5, 2010
VIM tutors and my alias
The VIM tutorial was happily not too hard to follow. I found the assignment instructions for Unit 3 clearly spelled out and straightforward. In a sense the assignment instructions are a good case study for how Linux commands, options and arguments must be precisely constructed if good things are to happen. Each assignment this week builds on the preceding assignment, in much the same way that a Linux command line is fashioned from discrete simple elements and routines. When apparently simple Linux commands are attached to one another in the right order they can produce a very powerful but finely distilled computational expression that is extremely efficient. After going through the first vi/VIM lesson this week I also have a better appreciation for some of the issues described by Neal Stephenson in his essay “In the Beginning was the Command Line.” Stephenson describes vi as a minimalist text editor. No Baroque formatting, fonts or doodads allowed. The version of vi that we used this week is called VIM which stands for Vi IMproved. It was rolled out in the early 90's and is now the most popular text editor for Linux professionals. VIM adds a lot of features that are more user friendly like mouse support and more commands. But overall VIM is plainly Zen.
However, getting acquainted with the modal nature of VIM is not easy. If one is not careful, toggling between the VIM insert and command modes can quickly deteriorate into a ping pong match where it is easy to slide into disorientation and confusion. Somehow, sort of like learning to ride a bike, I found myself regrouping after each stumble and got the hang of it. At least enough to type out a simple paragraph of text. Hoorah! In our reading Stephenson explains that the text editor is how source code, which is only ASCII text, gets written. The source code talks through a compiler to the object code and the linker forges this input into an application. In other words, learning to use a text editor is fundamental to getting technology to do what you want it to do. Conceptually this sort of makes sense, I guess, but my journey to enlightenment will be long with lots of twists and turns ahead. Or at least until mid-August.
Switching between the functions of the I key from the insert function to a simple letter of text was my toughest challenge while using VIM. I liked the concept of using the alias command to make VIM commands easier to remember and more intuitive. And with so many new commands and functions to remember, learning to use VIM will be a heavy lift. Perhaps the alias feature will help.
Any time I've had to configure something on my PC either at work or at home it has always been a chore. I guess plug and play hasn't been my general experience. I've found uploading digital photos from my camera to my PC to be slow and cumbersome with lots of clicks and menus. Wondering if somebody hasn't written a line of Linux that could speed up the whole process and make it easily repeatable? Something to investigate. Until next time....
However, getting acquainted with the modal nature of VIM is not easy. If one is not careful, toggling between the VIM insert and command modes can quickly deteriorate into a ping pong match where it is easy to slide into disorientation and confusion. Somehow, sort of like learning to ride a bike, I found myself regrouping after each stumble and got the hang of it. At least enough to type out a simple paragraph of text. Hoorah! In our reading Stephenson explains that the text editor is how source code, which is only ASCII text, gets written. The source code talks through a compiler to the object code and the linker forges this input into an application. In other words, learning to use a text editor is fundamental to getting technology to do what you want it to do. Conceptually this sort of makes sense, I guess, but my journey to enlightenment will be long with lots of twists and turns ahead. Or at least until mid-August.
Switching between the functions of the I key from the insert function to a simple letter of text was my toughest challenge while using VIM. I liked the concept of using the alias command to make VIM commands easier to remember and more intuitive. And with so many new commands and functions to remember, learning to use VIM will be a heavy lift. Perhaps the alias feature will help.
Any time I've had to configure something on my PC either at work or at home it has always been a chore. I guess plug and play hasn't been my general experience. I've found uploading digital photos from my camera to my PC to be slow and cumbersome with lots of clicks and menus. Wondering if somebody hasn't written a line of Linux that could speed up the whole process and make it easily repeatable? Something to investigate. Until next time....
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