The Coding Humanist

A rather strange place to find something like this, but I found on the Get Rich Slowly site links to two nice resources.

First is online copies of material from the Foreign Service Institute for learning foreign languages. The site is apparently not run by them, but the material is said to be in the public domain. I'm trying out the modern Greek stuff. I can't comment on the textbook yet, but the audio recordings (in mp3 format) aren't bad.

The other is a site dedicated to learning foreign languages and is called how-to-learn-any-language.com. Haven't had much chance to look over it yet, but I bet it has at least some useful information.

Just put up version 0.2 of the software, Pylus. Still a little rough around some of the edges, but progress is being made.

Posts can now be viewed by topic. It's all broken down for you on the left side. You can also see posts by month and year.

If you happened to show up today during the short window where the upgrade was happening...I'm sorry :)

Being a Battlestar Galactica fan, I got a big chuckle out of this one:

http://maxkhesin.googlepages.com/ms_cylons1.JPG

Thanks to meta-douglasp for this one.

Today I got a rather annoying and unhelpful error. I was trying to skin a custom control using an ASP.NET 2.0 .skin file. I got this error:

Literal content ('<control:AControl Color="White" />') is not allowed within a 'skin file'.

And then it proceeded to highlight the control declaration in the skin file:

Line 1: <%@ Register Assembly="Controls" Namespace="Controls" TagPrefix="control" %>
Line 2:
Line 3: <control:AControl Color="White" />

Solution? The control doesn't have a runat="server" attribute. Not the best error message...

Does this mean I am old?

I had my birthday supper last night. We went to Saltgrass, of course. I got an extra big slice of prime rib so I could have some leftovers this morning. Steak for breakfast...yummmmmm...

When you poke around the ASP.NET Ajax javascript files you can find some pretty interesting stuff. This one might come in handy. It's used in a number of the animations. It and the animations can be found in PreviewGlitz.js.

Let's say you have two points, 100 and 30, and want to know the point that is 85% of the way from 100 to 30. Call the interpolate method.

Sys.Preview.UI.Effects.Glitz.interpolate(100, 30, 85);

The first value is the start point, the second the end point, and the latter the percentage. The result in this case is 40.5. At 90% it is 37. At 95% it is 33.5. You get the point.

So if you need it...now you know it's there.

This is a test post. So my blog is being syndicated through the NDDNUG site. Normally my posts show up. For some reason, one I did on ASP.NET Ajax fade animations did not (the original post is here). This is sorta ironic, since that's the only post I've done since the syndication began that actually included code. Will this post show up? We'll have to see...

So I got my first birthday present of the year. This one if from my mom. I've been wanting "The Pessimist's Mug" for a while. Right now I'm drinking hot chocolate from it. Thanks mom! If you're not familiar with the mug, check it out.

So I think I mentioned before that I've been playing around with the new Ajax bits from Microsoft. Currently we're up to beta 2. Get it here.

Want to know how to use the fade animation? It's pretty easy. Here's the javascript:

//Instantiate a control with the div to animate
//'faderDiv' is the id of the control to fade
var target = new Sys.UI.Control($get('faderDiv'));

var fadeAnimation = new Sys.Preview.UI.Effects.FadeAnimation();
//The control-wrapped element to fade
fadeAnimation.set_target(target); 
//The duration that the animation will last, in seconds                
fadeAnimation.set_duration(1); 
//The frames-per-second for the animation
fadeAnimation.set_fps(25); 
//Fade in or fade out? Set it here
fadeAnimation.set_effect(Sys.Preview.UI.Effects.FadeEffect.FadeOut); 
//Execute the animation
fadeAnimation.play(); 

The javascript actually pretty straightforward, as you can see.

This functionality is not in beta 2, but the somewhat confusing value-add ctp. You'll need to download that as well as the beta to do this.

You reference the javascript resources in the ScriptManager on the page. Like this:

<asp:ScriptManager ID="ScriptManager1" runat="server">
  <Scripts>
    <asp:ScriptReference
      Assembly="Microsoft.Web.Preview"
      Name="Microsoft.Web.Resources.ScriptLibrary.PreviewScript.js" />
    <asp:ScriptReference
      Assembly="Microsoft.Web.Preview"
      Name="Microsoft.Web.Resources.ScriptLibrary.PreviewGlitz.js" />
  </Scripts>
</asp:ScriptManager>

Other stuff to keep in mind. First, don't forget to modify your web.config. You'll definitely need the following in your handlers section (If you get 'Sys is not defined', this is probably why).

<add verb="GET"
     path="ScriptResource.axd"
     type="Microsoft.Web.Handlers.ScriptResourceHandler"
     validate="false"/>

Of course, check the documentation and samples on the ajax.asp.net site for more info.

So I've got some stuff on my DVR that I would like to copy off to my computer for burning to dvd. Unfortunately, I've not been very successful yet. I have one of my techie friends over to help, and he made more progress than I did, but we're still stumped.

Using Nmap we found out all the ip's on my network (the dvr happens to be 192.168.1.102. I wonder if that is standard.) and the open ports on the DVR (21303 and 21306).

Also according to Nmap it is running, in its words, Microsoft IIS SSL. Hmmmm...I'm a little surprised to see windows on there. Maybe I could run a website off my DVR! Just kidding.

Connecting directly to the ip and port using http did little good. You get back, according to Firefox, and "application/octet-stream". Saving that and opening it in a hex editor (I've got a liking for XVI32) you see 15 03 01 00 02 01 00, which doesn't really mean anything to me. If you use https, you don't get anything.

Of course, I tried to connect to it with IIS manager. Nope. Didn't work.

So, no progress yet. Anybody have any ideas?

So I was flipping through my plethora of new stations last night and saw a pretty good show. It was on Alexander the Great and his conquests.

As far as content was concerned, it was pretty nicely done. Quite entertaining. If they were accurate, Alexander was indeed a brilliant tactician. Lots of interesting information on their tactics and weapons.

As far presentation was concerned, I would give it a 'C'. The program's info could have been boiled down to about 20 minutes. Apparently they had to fill an hour. There were a good number of commercials, and they spent several minutes repeating scenes from earlier segments after every commercial. Review is good when teaching, but this was way excessive.

If you're interested in this sortof thing, I recommend it. Good show.

Of course, if you record it with your DVR, you can wait until part of it is recorded to start watching it so you can fast forward through the commercials, even while it's recording ahead of you. Such a sweet feature...

I just got a good chuckly. I was looking at my referrer logs and found a search from www.dogpile.com, a search engine I had never heard of. As it turns out the search used was "'sense of entitlement' programmer", and there I was, number 17 on the list. I feel so...pompous :)

No, before you say it, that search engine does not search based on character flaws, finding me to have a "sense of entitlement". Maybe when they come out with one of those I'll be in trouble... The text found was in this post, where I use the phrase.

Okay, go ahead. Jab away :)

My friend Xander had a msn handle today that made me chuckle, and is appropriate given the recent election.

"We all know where 'voting' got the Galactic Republic."

Thanks for the chuckle.

So I was at Half Price Books with the mum and the aunt this last weekend. I picked up a book entitled The Story of Decipherment: From Egyptian Heiroglyphs to Maya Script by Maurice Pope (amazon - though I got it for only $8 at Half Price Books). I read most of it that Saturday, and finished it up the other day. Overall, great book if you're into this sorta thing.

Subject Matter: How did the braniacs of the world figure out how to translate some of those old, seemingly very obscure, dead languages? How did someone figure out how Egyptian Hieroglyphs work? Or Cunieform? Or Linear B? This book tells the story of those languages, and several more (also including the Cypriot Syllabary, Luvian Hieroglyphic, Carian, and Mayan). The story is told very well and the level of detail is sufficient, though not overbearing. It is a fairly easy read in terms of content. Some knowledge of ancient near-eastern history is helpful, but not necessary.

Make sure you get the revised edition. It contains more languages that the one published a few decades ago.

As far as the materials go, it's nice. It is softcover and has a nice picture on the front. The paper is very heavy and high quality, and there are a lot of good pictures. This book would not have been nearly as good without them. Great asset.

So, which languages did this make me want to learn? First, Linear B, which is mostly just an old Greek script. Then Egyptian Hieroglyphics. Not because I would find it particularly useful. I just think it would make me very cool. How many people do you know that can read glyphs, eh? Next, probably cuneiform.

But, those are going to have to battle it out with my desire to learn Khmer, rekindle Latin, rekindle German, Coptic, relearn Hebrew and Aramaic, and Syriac. Who's going to win? Who knows...

So I was going to get some work done tonight. I'm just about finished with version 0.2 of this thing. I was hoping to finish and get that up here tonight, but, alas, that will have to wait a few days. I ended up talking with my bro for a little over two hours. His blog is down but he's doing some writing for ThreatsWatch these days. Wish you would write more, Kirk... :)

I've got some stuff coming up that you guys might find useful. Right now there's nothing that says which posts have comments and which ones don't. That's a little annoying. And there's no way to view posts by category. Those are the significant changes that will be coming soon...

These aren't all of the pictures, but it's a start. There's quite a few left to upload of people, but this should be about all of my scenery, plant, and animal pics.

http://picasaweb.google.com/eric.sowell/

More will go up later, probably tonight. If you're interested, check back.

The geek can't have quite the life he's used to when he visits a third world country. But, I did notice some interesting things.

1. A newspaper I read, I think it was in Bangkok, had a tech section (about 8 pages long) called "Database". It was geekier than what I'm used to over here. It even had an article on the different types of sql joins...quite a surprise.
2. I was slightly bummed when I heard that Vista was slipping again in the above mentioned newspaper. I get here and find out that this isn't really happening. They're still planning on RTM'ing this month. I thought that was interesting.
3. Connections in internet cafes there are slooooooooooowwwww. But I guess that is to be expected. It took gmail several minutes to actually download and display. It was nice to see the "Windows Server System" poster on the wall. It was like a little bit of the homeland.
4. I even saw a sign advertising MCP training. I tried to get a picture. I think I missed. I'll have to look through my photos from my first day to see if I can find it.

I made it back. The top 5 things I missed the most:

1. Family
2. Hot water
3. Dr Pepper
4. Steak
5. Air conditioner


I had a great trip, but I'm glad to be back. I'll have lots o' pictures to post. I'll think I'll just use them as my medium to describe the trip.