Saturday, September 27, 2003

Yessir, I've been working. Readjusting to daily life out among people. Actually supporting someone else's computer. Having to be careful not to break things while fixing other things. A lot of adjusting to be done.

Many things are coming back via associative memory, which is good. A few of the harsher lessons I'm getting to learn over again. (I'm just talking about procedures to use to ensure that I don't make things worse.)

On the big plus side is that one of the senior sysadmins is making a habit of handing me the stuff that he's having trouble with or just not having the time to do. So far, with only the exception of a hardware failure, I've handled them all, which is a good sign for me.

I took advantage of having the CDs to SuSE 8.2 available to upgrade my home machine. Why, why, why does that have to be so painful? So many things broke during the upgrade. I've got about 50 lines in my “problems” file, all of which I've taken care of with the exception of printing.

(It's been almost 3 weeks-- shows how much I need to have printing available to me. Well, at least when I have a job. It was pretty vital when I was looking for a job.)

Saturday, August 16, 2003

Much has happened in the intervening time. It's not that I didn't have thought during this time, just that many of them were bleak. But the bleakness is lifting and good thoughts are flowing and the bad thoughts don't seem too bleak to mention and mentioning them doesn't raise the bleakness level.

Bleakness first. You are not reading this note right now because my web page isn't online. I'm assuming that you are reading this several weeks later at the very least.

The reason is that my ISP merged with another ISP. And the new people suck. They've forgotten (or never knew) what the 'S' in ISP means. Everything that I want to do (and did at my last ISP) makes me, in their eyes, a 'business' level customer who should be paying 10 times what my last ISP charged. $300 per month because I want to receive my own email as opposed to using their address?

I'm leaving them just as quickly as I can. (And you won't be reading this until I get the change made.)

The good news is that I get to go back to the mostly unrestricted life of using the University as my ISP. They hook you up and get out of the way. Oh, they have acceptable use policies, but they don't impose blanket restrictions to enforce those policies. They seem to understand that there are acceptable uses for running personal servers on an Internet connection. Like receiving email directly, or running a simple Web server to provide personal thoughts, family pix, yada, yada.

And how does this miracle of geniality on the part of the University come about? They don't let just anyone sign up, you know.

It comes about because I got a job.

2 years and 10 months. Who could have predicted the tech bubble would pop? Or that the crater left in the bubbling mud of industry would be quite so deep?

Oh, yeah. I also wrote a program based on gquiz to do flash cards on Linux. I call it gquizleit, because it is obviously inspired by gquiz, even though it shares no code from the original, just the idea. And it is totally Leitner based flash cards. And, like gquiz, it uses external programs to present both tests and reviews. And I thought it was mildly amusing to call it a "lite" version when it actually does more than the original.

Gquizleit is slightly more than marginally interesting and has more than served the original purpose for which I created it. I'm debating whether to clean up the code, add a GUI interface and release it to the unsuspecting world. (After talking to the author of gquiz to see if s/he'd object to a similar named project.)

Saturday, March 1, 2003

I rememebered a dream last night. That doesn't happen very often with me, so it can sometimes be an important event. In this case it wasn't the dream itself, but rather it's ending.

(Skip to ending.)

I'm a passenger in a car, back seat. We are driving on a winding mountain road in a sudden snow storm. Naturally, the driver loses control and we go over the side and plunge down toward the trees far below.

"Now would be a good time to put my seatbelt back on," I think in the dream. But I can't move because the acceleration has me pinned in my seat.

Ooops. My physics training kicks in. "I should be in free fall."

So I look down at myself to see why I'm pinned. I actually seem to be on my side...

On my side in bed...

On my side in bed and my eyes are closed...

At this point, the dream imagery, which is still mountainside and trees rushing at me, sort of moves back a bit and fades to black. But I still have that scared, anticipatory feeling of the impending impact with the trees, even though I'm pretty sure now what is really going on.

I feel confident that if I let myself go back to sleep, I'll finish that plunge into the trees, still un-belted. But I also still can't move.

I understand that I'm probably just going through sleep paralysis, so I don't struggle to move. I lay there a moment and think about the situation. Then I roll over onto my back without even thinking about trying to.

The anticipatory feeling fades away now, but it's 5 in the morning, I have a full bladder and a raging pain in my neck from having watched TV in bed last night. A trip to the bathroom relieves the first, provides Advil for the second and unfortunately, completes the waking up process. It took me more than an hour to get back to sleep.

But at least I didn't finish crashing into the trees. Or if I did-- I slept right through it.

Tuesday, January 21, 2003

Rote memorization. What a sucky thing. But it turns out there is a whole science to the process of using flash cards to memorize things. What's more, the process seems ideal for computerized mediation. In fact, the scientific process would fairly suck if you were doing it by hand with genuine paper flash cards.

Ok, so what's the science? It comes from a guy name Sebastian Leitner. According to Leitner, you should separate your flash cards into boxes which you review and test yourself on at different times. The first box is for cards you don't know at all. Higher boxes are for cards that you remembered, for example, from yesterday, or last week, or every time you've tested yourself. So when you are testing yourself on the cards in a box, if you get the card right, you put that card into the next higher box. If you get it wrong, the card goes back to the first box.

Seems easy and not that much trouble to do with real flash cards, except for the process of making the cards and the boxes and ...

But computers are a real aid for this sort of thing. A program can keep track of the cards and boxes, and it can tell you when you should review and when to test and select the cards for each, and it can handle present the cards for review or testing in a variety of formats.

That is, if anyone had written a program that does all that.

Oh, there are programs out there. Hundreds of them. Perhaps many hundreds of them. There is even a web site devoted just to reviewing the various flash card programs in existence.

Ok, here's where I get picky. I use Linux. BZZZT. There go hundreds of the programs reviewed on that web site. The vast majority of them are Windows based.

Additionally, I want to learn the Japanese Kana and maybe Kanji. (I don't have a good reason-- I just do.) Therefore, I also want a program that allows images on the cards and can also test based on the images.

And I insist on being able to create my own flash cards and want to create them easily. If it even takes click, type, type, click to create a single card, chances are good that I won't be doing much of that. I'd far rather create a list in a text editor, then import that list, creating many cards at once. (More Unix heritage showing here, I guess.)

So far, I've not found anything that fits my bill: Linux, Leitner, images, import to create cards. There are a few programs that survive all but the Linux cut, though even they feel a little cumbersome while creating the flash cards. That combined with the fact that I rarely boot into Windows on my home machine and the point of flash card study is not to spend a lot of time studying, but to do so frequently, means that it would take an outstanding program under Windows to actually encourage me to reboot daily for reviewing or testing.

So what am I doing about it? Writing the ultimate flash card program of my dreams in Python on Linux? Ha! I'm not that good a programmer in general nor in Object Oriented Programming in particular. I can see the general shape of such a program, but the details are not occurring to me. And it is complicated enough that every start I've made has sucked so badly that I've abandoned all hope, ye who enter. (For the moment. Again.)

Currently, I am trying to use qvocab for the straight text vocabulary learning. It is Leitner based and can import (and export) from text files for easy flash card creation. It has no support for images. (Grrr!)

I am also using a program called gquiz for learning the Kana. This is a strange little program much in keeping with the ideals of Unix. It does one portion of the job. It reads a set of "questions" which are really just files in a directory, then calls an external program to present you with a "test" of that question. You have to tell gquiz yourself how you did, then gquiz will present you with another question. It is not Leitner based, but by calling external programs for the questions and using individual files for the questions it is very flexible on what it can test you on. I begin to have dreams of making a Leitner based program variation on this theme.