My blog has moved! Redirecting…

You should be automatically redirected. If not, visit www.gangles.ca and update your bookmarks.

The Quixotic Engineer

Monday, January 28, 2008

My Latest Project

I came out of CUSEC last week filled to the brim with geeky creative energy and the desire to get my hands dirty with something new. While I usually have a few ongoing projects at any given time, my latest one, inspired by this fellow, has been use a nearly decade old unused computer to host a website. I'm curious to see how viably an old machine would work as a server for a low-traffic website, and how quickly it would load a Wordpress blog. While paying for a host is much more reliable and relatively inexpensive, I figured this would be a good chance to learn about Apache, PHP, Linux and the web in general.

My first step was to sort through the kipple that is my storage closet and find the old machine. Purchased in 1999, it has a 500 MHz Pentium III processor, 256 MB RAM and a 30 GB hard drive. I found a spot large enough to hook it up to the behemoth CRT monitor that's as deep as it is wide, and gave it a trial boot (I couldn't remember exactly why I had retired this old warhorse.) A corrupt Windows 98 sputtered at me, so I quickly went ahead and reformatted from a Linux CD.

I decided that Ubuntu Desktop edition would be my distro of choice for a number of reasons. While I would get better performance out of a server edition, as a Linux newbie I felt more comfortable having a GUI to fall back on when the mysteries of the command line eluded me. Secondly, one of my best friends recently moved her main computer over to Ubuntu, so hopefully she won't mind when I harass her with calls for help at all hours (thanks Malini!)

My next step was to install and configure Apache, PHP and MySQL, all necessary to set up Wordpress. While I've worked with Linux at school, this was my first time playing around with it. Needless to say I was pleasantly surprised when I managed to complete the installations with three commands:

sudo aptitude install apache2
sudo aptitude install php5 libapache2-mod-php5
sudo apt-get install mysql-server-5.0

I configured these programs with minimal difficulty, then moved on to the Wordpress installation. It's here, however, that I've run into a bit of a snag.

Step six in the Wordpress "Famous 5-Minute Install" is "Run the WordPress installation script by accessing wp-admin/install.php in your favorite web browser." The problem I'm having is that Firefox does not want to run PHP scripts. When I point my browser at install.php, it just asks me if I want to save the file to disk. This thread in the Ubuntu forums helped someone with a similar problem by suggesting that php5.conf might not be in /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/, but this is not the case on my machine. You can see my unanswered question sitting orphaned and alone at the bottom of the thread.

If you happen to be a Linux wizard (lizard?) and have a theory or two about how I can fix this frustrating problem, please drop me either a comment or an e-mail!

Labels: , ,

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Memento and External Memory

Memento

It had been in my movie backlog for ages, but I finally got around to seeing Memento this weekend (and absolutely loved it.) It's nearly a decade old, but here's a brief spoiler-free synopsis for the uninitiated: it's a story told chronologically backwards about Leonard Shelby, a man with short-term memory loss trying to avenge his murdered wife. To remember who people are, where he lives and what he's doing, he consults relevant notes and pictures in his pockets at all times, keeping the most vital information tattooed on his body.

While the character's handicap was extreme, I felt a strong empathy with his condition. I'm a forgetful person by nature and, like Leonard, am constantly relying on external memory to function. Text files, post-it notes, e-mails and address books have become my substitute for real memory. I hardly take the time to remember anything nowadays; birthdays, telephone numbers, assignment due dates and addresses are taking up less and less of my cerebral real estate.

It doesn't stop there; I am now reliant on the internet for information. I've hit ten Google searches and half a dozen Wikipedia articles in my twenty minutes of writing so far. My daily hits on both sites likely number in the hundreds, and twice as many when I'm programming. Having a wealth of information at your fingertips is a major boon, but my work is now dependant on it (as referenced by a recent xkcd strip.) When the internet goes down, I cringe at the idea of stooping to consulting the phone book, a real map, or my 40 year old Encyclopedia set.

While it's true that our grandparents' generation could dial a friend, get directions and long divide using brain power alone, is the relegation of our long term information storage and computation power to machines necessarily a bad thing? NY Times columnist David Brooks argues "no" in a recent article entitled "The Outsourced Brain."

Until that moment, I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants — silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves.

What do you think? How do you use computers and the internet as a brain-extension in your daily lives? Is "outsourcing" our brain power helpful, harmful, or inevitable?

Labels: , ,

Sunday, November 4, 2007

Three Days With a Mac

Apple

Earlier this week my laptop suffered a rather frustrating hard drive crash. I can't say that I didn't see it coming; I had a near-crash 2 months ago and my computer had been running exceptionally slowly lately. Fortunately for me I had backed everything up to my terrific 320GB external hard drive about a month ago, but I still lost a few dozen important files (including my copy of In Rainbows) that will require re-downloading.

While waiting for my new hard drive to arrive, I spent most of this week borrowing my dad's MacBook. My father is the kind of person that Apple has been aggressively marketing to these last few years: someone who is interested in what computers can do but doesn't have the inclination or the patience to learn the details of using them (the "I just want it to work" type). As such, this MacBook fits him like a glove; he hasn't even downloaded any new software for it, content to use first party applications such as iTunes, iPhoto, and Safari.

This week has been quite a learning experience; I know my way pretty well around Windows, but I have very little experience with OSX. While the two operating systems are almost identical in general terms, the little details often threw me off. For instance, it felt unusual to use the command key for shortcuts in lieu of Ctrl or Alt. The way in which OSX minimizes tasks took some getting used to as well. The biggest change by far was the single button mouse. A bit of Googling told me that OSX would recognize the two button mouse off my laptop, which was welcome relief. I understand Apple's logic; anyone who has tried to teach a loved one how to use a computer knows that they struggle with "which button do I press again?" troubles. A single button interface is much more accessible for beginners. However, it's ashame that Apple doesn't sell a first-party two button mouse, since their products are painstakingly colour-schemed and an ugly third party mouse destroys that.

I'll admit that I've toyed with the idea of switching to Mac. I've met enough OSX power users to know that Apple products aren't just for technophobes. I owe no particular loyalty to Windows, especially considering all the problems Vista is having. Furthermore, I could potentially use Bootcamp to dual boot XP should the need arise. Yet, all things considered, I just can't find any particularly compelling reasons to justify a change. Nothing on Apple's list of advantages, which should be enourmously biased in their favour, is that great. For instance:

  • "Awesome out of the box." That's sort of nice, but setting up a PC is a one-time hassle. Installing everything from scratch on my new hard drive has let me customize everything to my liking. In fact, the only program that had trouble with the hard drive jump was iTunes, which lost half of my album artwork.
  • "114,000 viruses? Not on a Mac." Using a combination of AVG Anti-virus, Spybot: Search & Destroy and Sygate Personal Firewall, which are all free and light on system resources, I'm essentially immune to spyware and viruses as long as I use common sense while downloading.
  • "Everything-ready." As I mentioned earlier, I could always dual boot XP for the programs that OSX can't run, but that seems like a hassle. I can count the number of times I've found software that doesn't work with XP on one hand. Many open-source and freeware applications are never ported over to Mac, not to mention most games.

For the moment, Apple has left me unconvinced. I think they make great products, and I'm glad that they've offered a gateway for people like my dad to get into computers, but it's just not for me. I'm quite content to milk Windows XP dry, then consider making the jump into Linux.

Labels: ,

Sunday, September 30, 2007

The Technical Challenges of Gaming

Developing Video Games

There's a fascinating article in the online version of Popular Science magazine entitled The Hard Science of Making Video Games. It details the technical challenges that high end video game developers face when pushing the envelope on next-gen features. Written in an very accessible way, it's a great read even for those with little computer knowledge. In case that link ever expires, the top challenges/limits are as follows:

  1. Processing Power
  2. Water
  3. Human Faces
  4. Artificial Intelligence
  5. Light and Shadows
  6. Fire
  7. Material Physics
  8. Realistic Movement
  9. True-to-Life Simulation
  10. Motion Capture

Labels: ,

Saturday, September 8, 2007

Segways are Awesome

Segway Police

You may or may not know that I've been a long-time of proponent of the Segway Personal Transporter. Why, you might ask, would I support these silly devices? I have two important personal reasons.

Firstly, they're a triumph of engineering. As vehicles that constantly appear to be in peril of falling over, they defy our expectations by remaining in perfect balance using a combination of computers and gyroscopes. Anything that harnesses the power of physics to do something counter-intuitive (see the levitating frog experiment) is alright in my books.

Secondly, it is literally impossible to look cool on a Segway. They're the dorkiest things imaginable, something out of a bad sci-fi film. In that sense, they're the antithesis of the modern trend of form over function. If buying an SUV is supposed to make you look sporty and tough, then a Segway gives you a vibe somewhere between a mad scientist and Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons. Therefore, riding one anyways is a giant "fuck you" to the modern fashion obsessed, cosmetic surgery, teeth whitening madness; I look like a huge nerd and I don't care!

Need further proof that Segways are awesome? How about the Chicago police officer who chased down a shooting suspect on his Segway. Cruising at 12.5 mph, the officer wore down the suspect to the point of exhaustion then jumped off and arrested him. As District Commander Kevin Ryan put it: "These don't wear down -- people do." What I wouldn't give to have seen THAT chase scene.

Would I actually buy a Segway? No, they cost upwards of 5000 USD and I'm already a big fan of walking and biking. Despite what some enthusiasts believe, I don't think that any able person can really justify personally owning a Segway. I do, however, see potential in the device for tourism, police patrols and post offices. They rent Segways in the Old Port of Montreal, and one of these days I'm going to make the time to give one a whirl.

[Thanks to Clive Thompson at Collision Detection for the Segway Policeman Story]

Labels: