About 6 months before I graduated from college I was offered a job as an assembler programmer. If I had taken that job then, today I would likely be writing or designing code for operating systems (Windows, linux, etc.), device drivers (graphics or network adapters, printer drivers, etc.), or specialized hardware (mp3 players, cable or satellite set top boxes, robotics, etc.). I have written assembler code for process control type applications and used a bit of assemblier in DOS, but that’s pretty much it.

The job offer that I did accept about a week before I graduated was a close cousin to the assembly programmer. I became a systems programmer. My job was mostly spent keeping a small data centre and its network running. Most of the programming I did at the data centre was writing utilities, scripts and data conversion programs. Most of the utilities I wrote were for the express purpose of making my job easier. Or, as in this case, making it so that someone who wasn’t a programmer could do the routine parts of my job.

Initially the only operating system used in that data centre was VMS. Over the years I worked with MicroVMS, VMS, OpenVMS and OpenVMS AXP. OpenVMS can still be purchased on Itanium and Alpha systems from HP. Later other systems were added to the data centre including Novell Netware and variants of unix. Although it isn’t on my resume, I had a one year contract with Digital Equipment as a VMS consultant to work with 2 of their customers.

So, are you wondering what this has to do with Microsoft? Well, an engineer named Dave Cutler was one of the architects of VMS. He was also an architect of other operating systems including Windows NT. To anyone who has worked with both operating systems ‘under the hood’, the similarities are unmistakable.

Based on what I’ve said, it wouldn’t be unreasonable for someone to conclude that VMS has an associated third party industry of add-on security products like anti-virus software. But that isn’t the case. I won’t say that VMS never had any security issues. But, every version of Internet Explorer I’ve worked with has had far more security holes than VMS had in the 10+ years I worked with it. And, Windows NT (and derived versions) have had few security problems in the areas where the OS was/is similar to VMS.

About 20 years ago, I encountered a story/joke which is a bit crass, but illustrates a very valid point:

A woman was visiting her psychiatrist and says, “I’ve been married 3 times but I’m still a virgin.”
The psychiatrist asks her, “How is that possible?”
She says, “Well, my first fiance was in the military and got called to go overseas. We got married just before he left. He was killed in action before his first round of duty was up.
“My second husband was elderly. The wedding and reception put such a strain on him that he died of a heart attack on the way to the hotel.
“And, my third husband is in advertising. All he does is sit on the edge of the bed and tell me how good it’s going to be.”

IMO, the cornerstone of Microsoft’s success has not been writing good software, but in telling people how good it’s going to be. And, when compared to the promised and actual features of every other OS I’ve worked with, they have done an abysmal job delivering. I don’t suppose I’m really looking justify my opinion. Over the years I’ve met alot of programmers. Most of them had an unwritten priority of writing good software. Some were more skilled than others in doing that. What I think bothers me most about getting rich from bug ridden software is not the getting rich part (money is not the most important thing in the world), but in the stain said bug ridden software has on the reputation of the profession and those who practice the craft.

Once I have that problem sorted out, I’ll tell you how the techy stuff is going.

1. I’ve made a few more changes to the Spam Karma auto purge plugin. This weekend I should be able to test it. If it performs as expected, I will release it into the wild next week. I’m going to make a second version for WordPress MU which will have a feature not required in a stand-alone WP install.
2. I’ve been running gentoo linux on this computer for the last 7 months or so. I’ve decided to switch to Fedora Core 6. Hopefully, this weekend I’ll be able download the 6 cd images needed. If that goes as planned, you won’t see alot of me next week.
3. Last week I went to an official Vista launch day. For all the neat things they have done, I was quite underwhelmed. I know eventually I will be working with it. But, you can count on it never getting installed on any computer I own. More than once in the course of the day, I silently wondered how many people in the audience were familiar with the innovation of the Open Source and GNU communities. For example, Windows Vista has a sidebar on the desktop. For the sidebar you write gadgets using javascript. Extensions for Firefox which have been around for quite a while are written in javascript. I saw little innovation in which one could say the idea was original.
4. For the last couple months, signups have been disabled at Homeschool Journal. We did that because we had reached our account’s capacity. The work that I’ve done with Spam Karma has extended the window in which we had to plan what to do next. Sometime in 1-2 months we will be moving Homeschool Journal to another provider where our account will give us a bigger slice of the server. Bigger accounts cost more and we will eventually have to look at ways of funding the site.
5. After we have the account but before we move Homeschool Journal, I will be working on optimizing the code and implementing a few other features. So, for a while I may be throwing a few techy accomplishment posts at you.

I even took a couple hours out tonight to play games

Overlooking the hurdles I had in getting it running, I’m quite impressed. Installing software and keeping it current is exceptionally easy. Builds that are going on in one window do not affect the performance elsewhere in the system

After I finished with the drum sander this afternoon I was ready for a break from the last couple weeks. It took about 1/2 hour to find, settle on and manipulate (with GIMP) the image I would use for a banner. It took about an hour to choose (from the image) and implement the colours in the theme. Note that I used a copy of Atypical Christmas and most of the work was just adjusting the colours on all the various elements on the page. And then I spent about 1/2 adding theme options and widgeting the theme. I’m not going to immediately offer the theme for public consumption but I will be making it available on homeschool journal.

If you are coming in via RSS, come on over and have a look.

In my little world, I’ve been working on getting Gentoo up and running. It does not come with an installer and it is preconfigured with a minimal configuration. It is bringing back memories from 15 years ago when I first started working with unix. I’ve been using up my evening mental energy on that. I took last night off (mostly) and went on a 2 hour drive to explore the countryside. Tonight I’m trying to catch up.

Next week I will be away from the internet for the week. I’m getting on a plane very early Monday morning and flying to Toronto. I will be there all week. I’m hoping to meet up with at least one homeschooling family while there.

Anyway, here is the original panel where you would write an entry in WP 2.0:

And here is the new version: (It’s worth noting that I only changed the stylesheet.)

Unofficial poll: Which one is easier on the eyes?

1. The first thing to do is disable the plugin in your template. To do this you look under Presentation->Theme Editor in the admin panel. The list of links on the right hand side of the page is the list of files included in the site. If the plugin adds something to your sidebar, then the file you need to edit is likely your Sidebar Template. The call to the plugin will be found between a <?php tag and a ?> tag. For example, <?php get_most_commented(); ?> produces the most commented info. If you change it to look like this: <?php /* get_most_commented(); */ ?>, then the plugin will not get called (and whatever changes you make through steps 2 to 4 will not affect what visitors to your site will see).
2. Next, deactivate the plugin through the admin panel: Plugins->Plugins.
3. Make your planned changes to the plugin and save your changes. I was upgrading a plugin to a more recent version.
4. Activate the plugin. If the admin panel gives error messages when it does this, go back to step #2.
5. Remove the /* and */ from your template and save.
6. Use the View Site link to verify that the plugin is working ok. If it is not then go back to step #1.

Starting at step #3 doesn’t always work out the way you had hoped

This tutorial is all about making a simple web page with text and graphic links to places that you, your younger siblings (if you are a HEK) or your children (if you’re a HEP) frequently visit. It is also known as a portal page.

Step 1: Building the framework of the page.

On your computer, open up Notepad or a similar text editor. I like to use Notepad because I can better control exactly what gets stuck in the page behind the scenes. First, we have to tell the browser that this is an HTML document, so we type this:

<html>

Almost every HTML tag has a matching closing tag, so skip down a few spaces and type this:

</html>

Now when a web browser looks at this file, it knows that everything between these tags will be displayed in a special manner. But even better, everything that you want to be displayed in the main body of your webpage goes between two matching tags called (you guessed it) BODY.

Your web page bones should now look like this:

<html>
<body>

</body>
</html>

Step 2: Giving your page a title.

Every page needs a title so the reader knows what it is about. If you’re making this portal page for small children, a title helps their reading skills, too.

Right after the first BODY tag, place a heading tag like this:

<h1>

The h1 makes the letters nice and big and keeps them on their own line. Type in whatever you want for a title like “My Webpage” and add the matching end tag. It should now look like this:

<h1> My Webpage </h1>

If you want the letters slightly smaller, try using h2 or h3.

Step 3 and continuously: Saving your work.

This is probably a good time to save all your work to a file. Click “save” from the menu in Notepad, and call the file something meaningful, like “mywebpage”. Be sure to save this file with an HTML extension and not a .txt. It’s also handy to save it right onto your desktop. Now minimize the Notepad window by clicking on that little minus sign up in the top right corner. There should be a webpage icon right there on your desktop, with the words “mywebpage”. Clicking on it should open it up in your brower window, and you’ll see a broad expanse of white webpage with your title in big letters at the top.

Cool, huh?

Let’s switch back to our file in Notepad. Click on it down there on the status bar, and we’ll see what we’ve accomplished so far. It should look something like this:

<html>
<body>
<h1> My Webpage </h1>
</body>
</html>

Step 4: Adding some links.

A web page is just some text and wouldn’t be any fun without somewhere to click, so here’s how to make that magic. You’ll need two things; the URL and whatever title you want to give the link.

The code to make your text “clickable” looks like this:

<a href=”http://where-you-want-to-go.com”&gt; Click here on this text! </a>

Note this has a few parts: the beginning of the tag (the a href part), the URL of the page (close the tag), whatever text or the tile of the page to click, and the ending tag.

That is how you make a link. Put few links on one page, and now you have your very own portal page. If you have saved onto your desktop like described above, you have an easy, fast and relatively safer way to get to your (or your children’s) favorite Internet sites.

Step 5: Minor formatting.

Now, you don’t just want a whole string of links, you may want to add some descriptive text. How do you get to the next line? How do you make a paragraph? Sure, you can format it in Notepad, but we need to tell the browser what to do.

To get to a new line, you type the break tag. This is a self-contained tag, meaning it has no matching end tag, so the new rules are to make it self-closing. It looks like this:

<br />

Note the space then the closing bracket.

In action, it may looke like this:

This is my first line of text. <br />
I want this text on the next line. <br />

The browser makes it look like this:

This is my first line of text.
I want this text on the next line.

Let’s say we want a bit more space, say, between paragraphs of text. I’m glad you asked, because we’re up to the paragraph tag.

<p> This is a paragraph. It has many sentences. They usually follow the same train of thought, but mine tend to be a bit rambly. </p>

Looking under the hood at the web page we are building, it could look a lot like this:

<html>
<body>
<h1> My Webpage </h1>
<a href="http://atypicalhomeschool.net/">Best homeschooling blog ever</a>. <br />
Ron and Andrea sure are funny. And they have some interesting things to say about homeschooling. <br />
<p> Andrea has her own blog <a href="http://atypicalife.net/blog">here.</a>She writes funny stories about everyday life. Sometimes she makes me cry, though. </p>
</body>
</html>

You can probably imagine how that web page looks. That might be enough to get you started and I hope to encourage you to keep learning. In the next installment I’ll discuss images and making things look pretty, unless you figure out how to do that by then. Here’s a handy dandy HTML tag reference chart to get you going.

The only tool I used was The Gimp. I edited the Cascading Style Sheet using the WordPress admin panel and edited the theme ‘live’ (look under Presentation->Theme Editor->Stylesheet).

Step #1:

I chose the image. This is the what the original image looked like. If you would like to follow the tutorial, you can view the image in our gallery you should be able to save the image to your computer.

Step #2:

If you have a newer version of Windows, you should be able to right click on the image in Windows Explorer and Open With… gimp-win-remote. This will open the image in GIMP. If you do not have that option on your context menu, then you can open GIMP and open the image using Open on the File menu. Unless you have a monitor with a much larger resolution than mine, GIMP will set the zoom on the image to 50 or 66%. It will look something like this:

A quick note I’ll make here is that if you make a mistake in GIMP, it is no big deal. You can back out of any operation by pressing Ctrl-Z (or using undo on the Edit menu).

Step #3:

Notice that there is a low spot of the background in the top right of the red poinsetta and high point in the background where the poinsettas come together at the bottom. To maximize the area of the photo available to be included in the banner, it would be nice if we could crop a rectangle out of image on an angle. GIMP doesn’t allow us to do that. BUT, it does allow us to rotate the image. So, that’s what I did. I rotated a -10 degrees. You can find rotate under the Tools menu (Tools->Transform Tools->Rotate). The resultant image looked like this:

The checkerboard looking area in the top left corner is the area of the new image which is transparent. This is because the original image was rotated off of that area.

Step #4:

Chose the top left corner of the portion of the image that you want to be your banner image. The point I selected is shown with the white diamond in the red poinsetta in the image above. You can see it’s position in the bottom left corner of the screen shot. It was 220 pixels from the left of the picture and 400 from the top.

To make that point the top left of the image, I resized the image canvas under the Image menu (Image->Canvas Size…). Here you have to do a bit of math. The original canvas is 1600 pixels wide by 1200 high. I wanted to crop 400 off the top and 220 off the left. So, the new canvas width is 1600 – 220 = 1380 and the new height is 1200 – 400 = 800.

Once in the canvas size dialog, the first thing to do is click on the button that looks like it has 3 links of a chain on it. That button locks and unlocks the maintain aspect ratio option. The aspect ratio is the ratio of the width to the height. If the aspect ratio is locked then the new size of the canvas must have the same ratio as the original canvas size (4/3). Since the final size of the canvas from this operation is not going to be 4/3 then we have to unlock the ratio.

With the aspect ratio unlocked enter the new width in the X (1380) and Y (800). Below those 2 settings are the offset of the X and Y. You can use these to position the top left corner of the new canvas. To move into the image use negative values for the X and Y of the offset. Enter the new X (-220) and Y (-400) offset. The canvas size dialog has a preview area which will show the resulting canvas using a thin rectangular line.

Complete the operation by clicking the Resize button. The result looked something like this:

Step #5:

In the above image, there is the checked area in the bottom right of the image. It is transparent for the same reason as the top left was earlier in the tutorial.

If you look toward the right of the image, I’ve marked the bottom right corner of the area that I wanted to include in the banner with a black diamond. This time the canvas resize is much easier because I wanted the finished canvas to come from the top left of the image. As it turns out, the banner size is 1250 pixels wide and 250 high.

Go back into the canvas resize option, unlock the aspect ratio and enter the new canvas size X (1250) and Y(250). Do not enter anything in the offset X and Y. Just click the resize button.

The resultant image looked something like this:

Step #6:

The last thing I did with the image is resize it. I wanted the banner to be 200 pixels high. I found that option under the image menu (Image->Scale image). To produce the image below, I changed the Y size to 200 pixels. GIMP automatically changed the X to 1000 pixels (because the aspect ratio is locked). In the banner at the top of the page, I believe I unlocked the aspect ratio and just scaled the image in the Y direction to 200 pixels. This produced a longer banner image.

Step #7:

The last thing I did was choose colours to be applied to the style of the web page. I used GIMP to find those colours. GIMP has a colour picker tool. The button for it is shown here:

I’ve circled the areas of the image that I chose the colours from:

I spent 10 – 15 minutes picking colours until I found ones that I liked and went well together. The important thing to remember is that what brings a web page style together is to choose colours from the images that are shown on the page. If you have watched professionals in interior design shows, they almost always pick 2 or 3 items to choose their colour palette from.

That’s basically it.