Calculus: Or How I learned to stop worrying and love the Derivative.

Posted on January 19, 2011 by Daniel Cooper

Creative Commons

It has been a little while since I last updated, and during that period I decided it was finally time to return to school and finish my A.S. Degree at Jefferson State. I have completed 74 SH of credit, but I lack only Calculus before completing the requirements for my degree before transferring to the University of Alabama. It has been almost 2 years since I first attempted Calculus, but at the time I was also taking Business Statistics II, Accounting II, and going through a messy divorce, so my mind wasn’t exactly in it.

I finally decided that it was ridiculous to leave a degree hanging with only the one class remaining, so on impulse I re-applied to Jefferson State and registered for the class, which I take Monday and Wednesday nights. I also purchased Calculus For Dummies so I’m all set!

What I’ve learned now that my mind is able to focus on it, and since I’ve spent a lot of the intervening time brushing up on Algebra techniques (specifically factoring), is that Calculus isn’t so scary. It also isn’t easy – but it is something that has a certain amount of logic to it. Although I’ll never be an Engineer more than likely, I do see the benefit of having some exposure to the class. I find it easy to set aside time in the afternoons to do homework, and I think it is better for me to have a goal to focus on, and for the first time in a couple of years I feel good about where I’m heading.

The important thing for me, is that I’m doing something with my time that I believe is beneficial. Although it is a class I don’t really “like” I wouldn’t have that feeling without taking it, which actually makes it easier to work through.

Well, I figure I will end this post without rambling too much further, but will close with a quote from Oscar Wilde that sums up what I’ve learned by returning to school:

“Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.”

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Building blocks of a webpage: HTML and CSS

Posted on December 6, 2010 by Daniel Cooper

Interested in starting web design? There are a few basic building blocks of which you should be aware, and here are a few tips to get you started:

HTML

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<head>
 <title>Template</title>
 <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="template.css" />
</head>

<body>

</body>

</html>

Everything listed above is a basic starting point for an html (Hypertext Markup Language) document, more commonly referred to as a webpage. The language is interpreted by your browser; Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Operate, etc. and displayed as defined in the text.

The first, most important, part of the document is the <!DOCTYPE declaration. Many browser quirks, oddities, and other annoyances when developing a website can be attributed to either not having, or having an invalid declaration. There are about 9 different declarations you can use, each with slightly different rules on how the source is interpreted by the browser.

You can read more about the reasoning behind them here.

The actual content of your page will go between the <body></body> tags, but before you think about that you should learn more about Cascading Style Sheets.

CSS

html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe,
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre,
a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code,
del, dfn, em, font, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp,
small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var,
dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li,
fieldset, form, label, legend,
table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td {
 margin: 0;
 padding: 0;
 border: 0;
 outline: 0;
 font-weight: inherit;
 font-style: inherit;
 font-size: 100%;
 font-family: inherit;
 vertical-align: baseline;
}
/* remember to define focus styles! */
:focus {
 outline: 0;
}
body {
 line-height: 1;
 color: black;
 background: white;
}
ol, ul {
 list-style: none;
}
/* tables still need 'cellspacing="0"' in the markup */
table {
 border-collapse: separate;
 border-spacing: 0;
}
caption, th, td {
 text-align: left;
 font-weight: normal;
}
blockquote:before, blockquote:after,
q:before, q:after {
 content: "";
}
blockquote, q {
 quotes: "" "";
}

The above example is from Eric Meyer’s CSS Reset trick. HTML defines the content of your page, and CSS is a way of defining the appearance of your page. For instance, when you use the paragraph <p> tag to define a paragraph, the font, line spacing, breaks, margins, etc. can be defined via CSS.

If you look at the <head> attribute of my HTML source above, you will see that I reference the style sheet from an external link. That way, I can import my definitions from the CSS file into the web page, so that it will use the new styles instead of the default ones the browser uses – so that web pages can look pretty.

To learn more about HTML and CSS, please visit W3Schools for in-depth tutorials.

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Install LAMP with 1 command in Ubuntu 10.10

Posted on December 3, 2010 by Daniel Cooper

“Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”

- Murphy’s Law

So it is said. I have spent the better part of the afternoon attempting to get Ubuntu 10.10 fully installed. The problems I’ve been having do not have one specific cause, it just seems as though everything I’ve been working on has hit some sort of speed-bump.

First of all, I needed to back up a handful of personal files which were still located on my laptop. “No problem” I thought, as I had previously networked my laptop to my home network using samba. Of course, in between doing that and my current project, I had made some changes to my home network by installing an HP Mediasmart Home Server and several Windows Updates which apparently broke compatibility with the version of samba I had installed.

Once solving that issue, I was met with the relatively minor inconvenience of my first Ubuntu disk being corrupted during the burning process. No problem as I was able to simply create another disk, which required about 15 minutes to check and verify that nothing was broken or corrupted.

Lastly, I’ve run into the minor annoyance of having to download and install 200MB+ worth of updates to Ubuntu which are required before I get started on installing the Apache/MySQL/PHP portion of my LAMP server. While these updates are currently installing as I type this blog entry, I ran across a handy guide which details the use of a command which was native in Ubuntu 10.04 which will allow me to automate the remainder of my server installation without having to configure each specific component.

How to install LAMP using tasksel

Since tasksel is not included by default in the Ubuntu 10.10 package, you first have to open a terminal window and install it using the following command:

sudo apt-get install tasksel

Once installed, type the following command:

sudo tasksel
LAMP Server Selection

Press 'space' to select the LAMP server

Select “LAMP Server” in the selection window. During the installation you will be asked to provide the password to the MySQL database.

MySQL Password

Default username is 'root'

To verify that PHP is working properly, create a new document ‘info.php’ in the var/www/ directory by using your text editor, or the following command:

sudo gedit

Enter the following text and save/exit:

<?php
   phpinfo();
?>


Restart apache:


sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Open the webbrowser and type http://localhost/info.php into the address bar.

PHP Info results

Be sure to sudo your text editor to save to the webserver directory

To manage MySQL install phpMyAdmin by typing the following command, and be careful to select the apache2 webserver for configuration during the setup:

sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin

You may access phpMyAdmin by typing http://localhost/phpmyadmin into your address bar of the web browser.

PhpMyAdmin configuration

Default user is 'root' and password is what you entered earlier.

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Learning PHP – Day One

Posted on December 3, 2010 by Daniel Cooper
PHP Programming with Attitude

I approve this message.

Today I am starting on my journey of learning a new way to program dynamic websites. Most of my professional career thus far has revolved around the Microsoft alternative ASP and ASP.Net, and I have become interested in the free/open-source alternatives which have taken hold among Enterprise class hosting services. Namely, PHP and MySQL.

My initial step this afternoon will revolve around setting up a test system running Ubuntu Linux 10.10 and Apache web-server (Although PHP and MySQL are both cross-platform and will run on Windows). The setup I am going for is colloquially known as a LAMP server, i.e. Linux Apache MySQL PHP server.

Once I have configured the initial test machine, I will begin by utilizing the documentation on the PHP website along with the W3Schools  PHP tutorial, which incidentally is hosted on a Microsoft server using ASP.

If you find Operating Installation exciting, just check back later when I live-blog my installation of Ubuntu onto my laptop.

<html>
<body>
<?php
     echo "Hello World";
?>
</body>
</html>

Hello World!

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Preventing Auto-Reboot after Windows Update

Posted on December 2, 2010 by Daniel Cooper

As someone who uses their computer to schedule a waking alarm, I am usually caught off guard by “Patch Tuesday” which is the second Tuesday of each month where Microsoft Windows Update installs the latest updates automatically – and in cases of the latest versions of Windows – automatically reboots your computer regardless of what you have running.

Windows Update Notification

I like to pop up when you are asleep...

More than once this has resulted in me waking later than usual – no small feat – on certain Wednesdays. Thanks to the Windows Registry however, there is a solution to disable this “functionality.”

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU]
"NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers"=dword:00000001

Copy and paste the above text into a text file and save it as “NoAutoReboot.reg” without the quotes. Double-click the file you saved, and approve the execution with any prompt that Windows throws at you. No more waking up to your computer staring back at you with a log on screen and all unsaved work lost.

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Hello world!

Posted on December 2, 2010 by Daniel Cooper

The tradition of using the phrase “Hello world!” as a test message was influenced by an example program in the seminal book The C Programming Language. The example program from that book prints “hello, world” and was inherited from a 1974 Bell Laboratories internal memorandum by Brian Kernighan, Programming in C: A Tutorial, which contains the first known version:

main(){
     printf("hello, world");
}

I guess what I’m really trying to say, is that I just set up my new WordPress Blog and I needed to make sure that everything was set up properly by using a test post for a functionality check.

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