Blender User Interface Tutorial

Wanting to add a little spice to a talk I have to give I decided I'd investigate Blender, the Python 3D rendering application. The idea was to see how easy it would be to create a modest 3D animation. Blender has a reputation for quirky interface so I was intrigued to see how quickly I could get started and expected something in the way of frustration.

I'll ignore download and installation as I'd done it some time ago, and I suspect it must have been easy because I don't remember any problems. I'd played with the program a couple of times and given up because its behaviour seemed so counter-intuitive, so this time I decided to work through Bart Veldhuien's Blender User Interface tutorial, two clicks away from the web page that came up from the Help menu ("can't be that counter-intuitive if I can find the tutorial," I thought).

I noticed that at the bottom of the page it said "This page does not have a maintainer. If you would like to help, please read 'Getting Involved'" and if you've already followed that link and it hasn't changed you will know that a charitable instinct is rewarded with the news that "We have received many offers for help lately and we need some time first to get everyone going." followed by an invitation to join up for the website editors list. Maybe later, I thought. For now I'm just going to critique each section of the tutorial as I work through it.

Introduction explains the motivation behind the creation of the document - apparently Bart was himself intimidated by Blender at first and took several weeks to to discover the basic princiles behind Blender's interface. Well, I'm certainly all in favour of saving several weeks, so I ploughed on.

What am I looking at? is a walk throught he empty blender scene, explaining that the stripe across the top of the window is called the info window. This has the 3D window underneath it with objects representing the standard plane (whatever that may be), the camera and the lamp with a 3D cursor. At the bottom is the buttons window, apparently used for changing scene characteristics. I read that each window has a header, and that the header of the 3D window is at the bottom. I'm not sure I need to know how to reposition these headers at this stage, but I learn that. I am told that the Icon slider button can be used to select a window type, and wonder why it isn't called the window type selector button. There's a lot of that kind of stuff going on.

Configuring the screen your way tells me how to change the size of the windows, and to split windows (thereby creating new ones) using the middle button (which, since I only have two buttons, I fortunately know how to emulate by chording the right and left buttons). I accidentally activate the "No Header" feature of one of my new windows, and in trying to put the header back I remove the header on the window next to it. This makes it difficult to use the information that the window having the focus is displayed with a lighter-coloured header. I manage to get the headers back, and use CTRL/up-arrow to "make the current window full screen" (which actually makes the current window occupy the whole of the Blender window - couldn't they have chosen another name for their "windows"?) and return the view to multi-window. So now I have four 3D windows described as "the traditional four-view window" (so are windows really views?), though unlike the illustration my 3D views are all showing pretty much the same thing.

The Toolbox - Adding a sphere explains that Blender functions can be accessed by either keyboard or mouse, and that the toolbox appears if I hit space or click on "the toolbar icon at the top right of the Blender screen" (so am I dealing with views inside windows or windows inside screens - I wish the terminology were more consistent here). Unfortunately there's no picture of the icon, and a three-minute hunt where I click on almost everything doesn't reveal it, so in the end I just hit the space key. I'll find that darned icon later. I discover that the space key only works when a 3D view or window has the focus. I am told to select Add, then Mesh from the menu that appears, then UVSphere from the final menu. I do this and then apparently move the mouse too far, because the resulting popup, which is supposed to allow me to select the number of segments in the sphere, disappears before I can use it. Now for some reason my toolbox "Add" item no longer shows "Mesh" as an option, the Mesh item appears in the toolbar but the shapes I can create are hanging off the "Add" item. Boldly ignoring this menu transmogrification I finally manage to insert a sphere into my 3D window, and it gratifyingly appears in all four views.

About Edit Mode explains that you can operate on an object as a whole, or on the individual vertices of an object. My newly-created shpere appears to have about four hundred closely-spaced vertices, and I wonder how to select just one or two of them. It mentions in passing that the G, R and S keys translate, rotate and scale respectively. I guess there must be some really important other operation that begins with T. Undaunted, I attempt to G, R and S my new sphere into something I can work with. I learn by experimentation that rotation is a two-phase operation where you first rotate in one plane and then in another. I realise that am wrong, and that rotation actually appears to be much more complicated than I had thought. My sphere is now at least large enough that there is space between the vertices. I fail to learn how to select individual vertices, but this may not be a bad thing.

Loading and saving your work optimistically begins "By now you have probablky created a Blender scene", which I suppose I have even though it only has a single sphere in it. It suggests I might like to save my work, or take a look at some of the files that come on the CD that comes with the book (which is annoying, because of course web pages don;t have attached CDs).

Loading a Blender File tells me how I can load up a new file. There isn't anything that I cna see to load, but it's obvious from the dialog that Blender's approach to opening files is just as quirky as everything else appears to be. I discover by accidentally selecting Quit that Blender isn't one of those applications that will warn you about unsaved work before quitting, and lose everything I've done so far. I restart Blender to see what I can remember. I see that Blender has forgotten about that nice four-pane view it took me so much trouble to create, and wonder whether that would have been saved with the file, had I realised that the next section is ...

Saving a Blender File which tells me, only a few minutes too late, that saving works pretty much like loading. I try to create the scene I had before, with rather limited success, but I do manage to create a scene and save it. Then I modify it and, in opening up the previous scene I learn that the cavalier attitude to current work is repeated when loading files. I curse Blender, and wonder when I will start to learn how to use it properly. I curse again because this is the end of the user interface tutorial.

Well, that was interesting. Fortunately there's a whole host of other material available, as indicated in the sidebar of the web tutorial I've just been working from, and some of it at least looks quite helpful. Having had to work with CAD programs in the past I'm well used to complex interfaces, and resigned to the fact that a certain complexity is inevitable. I have to question the wisdom of providing application-specific file load and save dialogs, however, when most GUI toolkits give the programmer ready access to the platform's standard dialogs.

It's definitely not helpful that there doesn't appear to be any standard terminology surrounding Blender (e.g. the tutorial describes the Info Window, but this is actually selected in the program's menus as User Preferences - how is this supposed to help?) and overall the beginner gets the impression of a professional-grade program with amateur documentation. The usual qualifications apply, of course. Since this is open source, nobody is forced to write manuals for the software, and anyone who's spent the time to find out how to use Blender would probably rather play with Blender than write documentation.

I am also surprised that Blender doesn't by default open up with a four-pane view of the scenes, since later experience shows that this makes manipulation of the objects in the scene much more precise and much less counter-intuitive. It's particularly galling that the four-pane (top/fron/side/camera) view of a scene isn't stored with the scene, so it had to be re-established each time.

Now of course it may be that these complaints are in fact invalid, and that it would be possible to make Blender behave in what I, at least, would find a more natural way. If this is the case, though, there is even more of a crying need for adequate documentation. So far I haven't even learned how to select objects in the scene, let alone use the many buttons in the buttons window. Overall I'd advise against picking up Blender if you're in a hurry to produce some impressive graphics for that important presentation. It will take time and patience to master this software, possibly more of each than I currently have.

Firedrop2 Revisited

My initial experiences with Firedrop2 were recorded as Open Source Frustrations. I'm happy to say that the initial problems in running the software were eventually traced to an error in the installation of the wax GUI package. At the time it looked like everything was copacetic, (making my remarks at the time about how trouble-free the installation was quite ironic) but alas needed sub-packages weren't installed by wax's distutils setup, so it was only after I did a manual install that Firedrop2 finally started to run.

As a result of all this Hans Nowak, to whom I reported the problem like a good open source citizen, has decided to stop using distutils. My own experiences with distutils have also been less than entirely happy, and I wonder whether in the long term we might not end up using something more like setuptools. While its developers acknowledge that it still isn't perfect I am sure they will be valuable enhancements to the distutils before their developers are finished.

The Firedrop2 tests are still completely broken, and they should be removed until they are worth running. Tests that fail when software is correctly installed and functioning are worse than useless, and give an incorrect impression about the software. In this case I suspect that they were vestigial when the software was handed from one developer to another, and that they haven't received any attention since.

It's also clear that the software hasn't yet been engineered for general use: simple problems like a missing configuration file result in a Python traceback window that would be excessively confusing to a non-Python user. After a few such errors, however, I realised that I needed to create a blog configuration before anything else would work. Once I'd done that, and edited the configuration to taste, things did start to work.

The function of some of the buttons remains far from clear, but the basic entry creation, editing and publication functions do seem to work.

President Spy

From the point of view of public morale, the US response to the 11 September airliner attacks was probably the worst choice of the many that President Bush could have made. Why not instead try to persuade the American people that the best response was to demonstrate that those atrocities would not change the American way of life?

It appears that it suited the foreign policy agenda, though, to undertake an unwinnable war on an abstract enemy without any definition of "success" that could be used as a decision point to cease hostilities. Broad powers were accepted in haste by a panicked Senate and Congress, and those powers can effectively be used against anyone who is perceived to be dangerous.

We now learn that under Bush's "control" the NSA has felt free to ride a coach and horses through what few protections were left to American citizens by the PATRIOT act. The Electronic Freedom Foundation asks the question: "what good is legislative reform if the Administration considers itself above the law?"

Of course the Guantanamo Bay imprisonments have already made it clear that Bush is prepared to redefine the parameters of acceptability to gain his own ends. Along with his repeatedly revealed contempt for domestic law, he feels that international law is insufficient to cope with terrorists. This reveals a disdain for the rule of law that casts doubt on Bush's suitability as the leader of the free world, should further doubt be necessary.

The tally of American dead "supporting operation Iraqi Freedom" continues to rise, and is now higher than the number killed by the 9/11 attacks. If America were invaded and occupied in the same way that Iraq has been the resistance to the invaders would be immense. Yet the power of the media and its collusion with the administration is such that the average American still believes that freedom is something that can be imposed by invasion and coercion. How much better it would be if America looked to its laurels and put its own house in order, thereby lucidly demonstrating the advantages of freedom and democracy in a practical way.

If democracy means that the security services can breach citizens' constitutional freedoms with impunity, how is it better than an arbitrary dictatorship?

Open Source Frustrations

This is a tale of how a simple attempt to use a piece of open source software descended into a frustrating and unpleasnt experience. Although specific sites are mentioned herein the lessons, if any, are intended to be generic. I have come across other sites pointing to the same absent download.

A recent search for Python blogging clients took me to the Voidspace web site and thence to the Voidspace Firedrop2 page. About two screens down the enthusiastic puffery I found what purported to be a link to Firedrop's home page, but was actually Hansje Novak's open source projects page.

This did contain some material on Firedrop including a number of links to pages showing a download link, which sadly contained not a trace of firedrop2. A search for "Firedrop2 download" revealed that the package was now maintained by the author of the first link, but the only download available was a link to the Subversion repository with the rather off-putting comment "There is a public repository of the bleeding edge version, which I try not to break. ... The version in SVN is slightly more up to date than the released version. New release to follow soon !" No links to the mythical "released version", though.

OK, I've now been poking around for this tool for five minutes and so I guess I should try Firedrop. So I fire up Tortoise (the easy way to interact with Subversion repositories) and find that there's a firedrop2 branch, but nothing I can spot in the trunk (which is where stable versions normally live).

So, I figure I've now invested ten minutes in locating this frigging software, why not take a look at it. I create an empty directory and download the firedrop2 branch contents into it. Oops, no README or anything else that purports to be documentation. So, back to the web page, where I find a section on "Installing" that begins with the useful warning "Currently Firedrop2 doesn't work out of the box. You must follow these instructions. I will address this issue soon." Better than no warning at all, I suppose, and it appears that all that's required is to drop the software into a directory on the Python path, but a little less than satisfactory.

Before I go any further I scan back up the web page I've been using and spot this tip: "Firedrop2 is written in Python and uses Wax for the GUI ...". So I follow the Wax link, end up on Sourceforge and download Wax. This, it appears, uses a standard Python distutils installation, which I can handle quite easily. So, fifteen minutes after I start, I think I'm in a position to install Firedrop2. At least I can import wax from Python.

So now I have to drop Firedrop2's installation into a suitable directory and ... erm ... yes, some documentation would be useful here. Just to make sure everything's kosher it would seem sensible to try and run the tests in Firedrop's test directory (at least there are tests). The first test fails due to the absence of some file. The second fails because I've mistakenly installed the software as Firedrop2 instead of firedrop2. Ho, hum. After renaming the directory the second test succeeds, but the third fails with ValueError: too many values to unpack. This looks like pretty fundamental stuff to go wrong, and I've now spent over twenty minutes poking around in this stuff for zero net gain.

A further ten minutes poking around and I've managed to create a data file that passes the tests. Still ten further minutes and I've got the whole test rig working. However, I have to ask myself: if the tests are so crappy, how good is the software itself, and how do I get it to work without documentation and a properly working test suite. So. let me remind myself how I got here: a recommendation from someone who said:

• Firedrop2 - The Python Blog Client.

  This is a nice blog tool that runs client side. This means you can maintain your blog offline and migrate your blog to a new server with the minimum of fuss. It has some useful plugins like an emailer and spell checker.

Really? Finally, just to confirm my suspicion that the whole deal is hopelessly broken I go into the main directory and run wxfiredrop.py, which results in the traceback

   C:\Python24\Lib\site-packages\firedrop2>wxfiredrop.py
  Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Python24\Lib\site-packages\firedrop2\wxfiredrop.py", line 32, in ?
    from firedrop2.mainframe import MainFrame
  File "C:\Python24\lib\site-packages\firedrop2\mainframe.py", line 22, in ?
    from wax.tools.errordialog import ErrorDialog
  ImportError: No module named tools.errordialog

I presume someone, somewhere, is using Firedrop2, but after this experience it isn't going to be me without a solid indication that its current problems have been solved. Unfortunately this kind of thing is all too common in the open source world. I can't estimate the number of times something like this has happened to me, and I can't believe it doesn't happen to other people as well. Sometimes I roll up my sleeves and start to fix the problems, but other times I just mentally shrug my shoulders and write the wasted time off to poor release engineering. In this one case I decided I'd invest a little more time in documenting my frustration, to see whether this is a common occurrence.

I can quite understand how this situation comes about, and as long as individuals are maintaining software on their own dime and in their own time we probably won't be able to do much to address the problems. If we could find some way of avoiding this situation, though, I'd be really happy. Even just regular link checking might help. Perhaps that can be one of my missions for the New Year. I'm going to try a few Python project installs and document my experiences. Hopefully this will do at least a little to improve overall quality control - or at least let some others avoid similar time-wasting experiences.

It goes without saying that if you have a working copy of Firedrop2 I'd be interested in hearing from you!

Sloppy Thinking

Seth Godin published a blog entry bemoaning his neighborhood's clean firetrucks. He attempts to make the point that organisations spend too much time on busy work, concluding with this thought:

What a great way to describe a stuck but busy organization. "They sure have clean firetrucks."

But he misses the point. Firemen clean the truck when there's nothing else to do. Quite apart from the beneficial effects on morale and esprit de corps that such cleanliness engenders, you really don't want a fire service that's busy all the time.

Such a fire service can't afford a single idle moment: queueing theory tells us that a 100% busy resource inevitably falls behind, as it can never recover any slack time that it experiences. Given the urgency with which a fire service is required when it is required, I'd much rather see clean fire trucks (which, by the way, in the UK are called appliances) than have to wait when I need a fire put out.

I've enough respect for Godin that I'm prepared to overlook his stretching an analogy to make a point, but I'm sure a lot of people have given him hell for "badmouthing the fire service".

Blogging by email

Apparently now I can illuminate the world with my iridescent thoughts from any email client in the connected universe. I somehow doubt this is going to help the sum total of human knowledge, but it will be deucedly convenient for making sure those odd little observations don't get
overlooked.

Turns out that the emails appear as drafts in the blog, giving me a chance to polish the thoughts before they appear before an amazed public. Which is how this second paragraph got added.

Having finally bothered to discover how to put sensible titles on blog posts, I now find that Thunderbird displays the updated posts with the date they were edited rather than the original publication date. Ooops...

Happy New Year!

I decided that it would be good to get in touch with the larger Python environment, away from my usual newsgroup sources. I'm happy to say that there seems to be a very active community, with many Pythonistas commenting on what's going on.

The best overall site for this kind of information appears to be Unofficial Planet Python, which has a great selection of feeds. Maybe one day they'll add one of mine.

Last year's runaway success in the web world appeared to be Ruby on Rails, and the Python community's initial reaction was something like "it's all over, Ruby has won the web battle". I always thought this was a bit feeble, so it's been good to see Ian Bicking coming back with a reasoned response triggered by Peter Hunt's How Python Wins on the Web and a reminder that Python has many web successes behind it as well as not a few still to come.

I'm not really one for language battles (despite having been labelled on the python.org Wiki as a "language bigot". Programming languages are tools, and one should choose an appropriate tool for each task. Python's chief virtue from my point of view is the way it seamlessly welds together great facilities for both procedural and object-oriented programming. If someone finds PHP or Ruby a better language for a particular purpose I don't really see that detracting from Python.

If the energy that goes into hand-wringing went instead into producing better and more usable Python applications, this alone would help to redress the balance (if indeed it needs redressing).

Versioned Reviews Implemented

The post-PyCON goal of incorporating reStructuredText processing into the Holden Web production system as a practical way of investigating how the initial architecture can be extended has now been initially achieved. A sample page is linked from this article's title.

The whole site is static HTML generated from a database. The links under "Python Reviews" in the left-hand navigation feature of the linked page are the first example of a "non-front-page" section - all previous sections in the web have navigation links to this section on both the homepage and internal pages. Eventually each section will have its own potentially unique navigation structure, though at present all internal pages use the same link structure.

The new section is generated from a new VerReview table, keyed on product name and version number. Several versions of the same project can be reviewed, and all reviews of a given project are interlinked. At the time of writing this navigation feature is demonstrated by the reviews of "wxPython"; the other reviews are single-review projects. Only one review of any project appears in the navigation bar (currently the most recent).

The main new feature used to produce the reviews is this ability to generate web page images in two steps -- each row in the VerReview table claims its own row in the Pages table, and a separate module handles the generation of the Page rows (each of which is a page in the finished site) from the VerReview rows. So some of the content is now generated from a separate table, potentially with its own relationships. This architecture could relatively easily define a plug-in API for new tables and publishing components, although it does not yet do so.

Once the section's content has updated the site's main Pages table the normal content interlinking processes handle the integration of this new content in just the same way as always. [The existing design will not gracefully handle sections with a large number of items, but the potential is clear and aspects of the data like recency could be used to reduce section size where necessary].

A further first is the use of reStructuredText, the format developed by the docutils project, to generate web content. Note that reStructuredText-for-the-web does not exploit many of the web's more versatile (and sometimes therefore more dangerous) possibilities, in the interests of maintaining a uniform concept of "document" across as many media as possible.

It would be imprudent to treat this as anything but a database publishing demonstration. The limited hypertext that the docutils software does handle proved very useful in generating the inter-version links between the different reviews of a project, but this capability should no tbe pushed too far. Further iterations can, if deemed desirable, generate reStructuredText in tables similar to VerReview from yet further content in as-yet-unknown tables.

Holden Web is grateful to David Goodger for guidance in navigating the distutils architecture to arrive at a first attempt production system that uses no external processes. Thanks also to Dave Beaudoin of Samara Design and Tim Parkin of Pollenation Internet for assistance with look-and-feel abd graphical design. The production system originates with Holden Web.

docutils Install Review

This is the entire review for a docutils install I recently performed:

Very simple installation under Cygwin: literally unpack the tar file, change to the source directory and run

python setup.py install

No errors, docutils is now a site-package!

Now that PyCon is over I've had a little time to start tweaking a feature I've wanted to add to the Holden Web site for quite a while. I end up looking at, and frequently installing, a lot of open source software. The installation routines are of variable quality and sometimes I have to stumble my way through, sometimes I never get to the end.

So the new "Python Reviews" section (which may end up being renamed) is there to report on installation activity. It is also a test bed for my first significant use of reStructuredText (of which more later), so I suppose it's appropriate that this blog's title links to the install review for the docutils software that converts reStructuredText into HTML.

As with other non-production features the section isn't listed on the home page, but it should appear in the left-hand navigation bar of all body pages. The article format is still experimental, and decisions about whether it's worth keeping the source in a database rather than in files remain to be addressed.

The news feature is currently driven by analysing the results of a search for "Python" in O'Reilly's meerkat feed, but it isn't yet updating automagically on the new host, and other sources should ideally be included.

Is it me, or is it Zope?

Some software installations can make you feel really stupid, just by not providing specific instructions.

I was pleased to see that Zope 3 had been published, so I downloaded a copy of the Windows installer and went through the (very simple) installation. Fine. Then I began to wonder just how the heck I'm supposed to run this amazing new piece of software I've just downloaded.

netstat -a

doesn't appear to tell me anything, so I assume that Zope isn't running.

Funny, nothing on the Start menu, which is where you'd logically expect the new items to appear. Nothing new has appeared in the C:\Program Files directory (hardly surprising, since I wasn't asked where the stuff was supposed to be installed). So, over to C:\Python23\Lib\site-packages\zope, and lo! - there is everything that's been installed.

Only there isn't, as far as I can see, anything to run. There is a server directory, but nothing obvious to run. There are a few README files, none of which contain instructions for how to start the software. Clearly this is just me being incompetent, right?

Well, Google is your friend, so I run a search for "How to start Zope". This gives me a huge amount of stuff related to Zope 2.everything. Most of it obviously doesn't apply, and much of it contains dead links that are clearly not being spidered on a regular basis.

I've noticed in the past that Zope documentation tends to be less than complete. Should we say "confusing"? It's surprising that an industry can be spawned on the basis of something that is so far from intuitively obvious. How steep can a learning curve be?

Here's an example from Zope 2.7, which Zope enthusiasts have told me to stick with for a while. So I'm noodling around and I decide to try to create a bunch of pages whose content comes from a database. Seems like what I need is a "Zope SQL method". So I select "Zope SQL Method" in the management drop down and click the "Create" button, to be presented with the message "There are no SQL database connections. You need to add a Zope SQL database connection before you can create a Zope SQL Method."

Now, can anyone guess where to find the information about how to create a Zope SQL database connection? Can I find it in the Zope web site? Can I find it using Google? Does the Z SQL Methods FAQ tell me how to create a Zope SQL database connection? What gives with this software? Do I have to be psychic?

We are talking about one of the flagship products of the Python world, and while I may not be Superman I do have quite enough experience to be able to run a program. Come on, people, let's have a few simple instructions that will give me the basic satisfaction of seeing a Zope web page served from my machine. As I write this I am feeling disillusioned with Zope, even though I know that there's some superb stuff in there. If only I could unlock the magic. Instead I'm left feeling slightly stupid, not a good place for a new uiser to be.

Bush Steals it Again

For someone who claimed to want to unite the country, Bush has been an incredibly divisive president, as the election result predictions today clearly show. The most interesting demographic to date is that had the women been in charge we'd now be talking about President Kerry's first term, but the men preferred Bush by a significant majority.

As I write it looks like Bush will squeak in unless there are major surprises in the absentee and uncounted ballots. I just hope that all the poor male Bush voters hoping to get rich will remember the next four years. There is little doubt in my mind that Bush's second term will, to misquote former Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey, "squeeze the poor until the pips squeak". The American dream is about to become the American nightmare, since clearly Bush feels no necessity to act moderately despite the slimness of his majority.

This is feeling like a bad day for America and a bad day for the world. I just can't believe that anything but voter self-interest has given the Prez the support he needs to get re-elected, nor how people can delude themselves into thinking that Bush cares the hell about them. The best description I've heard from anyone was Ralph Nader's "He's a corporation disguised as a man". The next four years will be good for corporate profits and exceptionally bad for anyone without a high net worth.The American right, ably assisted by a media completely dominated by big business has long ago persuaded much of the world that "socialism" is a dirty world, and "liberal" is also teetering on the brink. It seems that The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists still has plenty to teach the world.

Why Do You Have to Know This Stuff?

Well, things are certainly changing in Blogdom, or whatever this strange "place" we all "inhabit" is called. I really like the way that blogging has taken off - it's almost becoming a new "killer app" layered on top of the web. For a while blogging was just something that a few random geeks did, but now we have journalists blogging, and bloggers journalising, and the boundaries between profession and spare-time occupation are rapidly blurring. This is indeed the way the information age was predicted, but it's interesting to see it become a reality.

Time was when the doctors would be bothered by people at parties: "I've got this pain in my knee, can you tell me what it is?" Nowadays computer knowledge, once safely obscure, has become a magnet for the general public, and I get people asking me questions about their computers that five years ago would have been impossibly abstruse. Many of them still should be outside the bounds of lay knowledge even today if computers would only work properly, but of course Microsoft's operating systems have historically been of such poor quality that every user has been forced to absorb the basics of computing simply to retain a little sanity.

This in itself is an interesting phenomenon from the point of view of someone like me, who's been fascinated by computers since 1967. Many times I have observed that I am incredibly lucky to be able to earn my living doing something I find so enjoyable. My early employment, in a television factory and as a bus conductor among other things, was enough to teach me that very few get this opportunity. Yet I am forced to the conclusion that many casual computer users must also find this technology fascinating, or they would simply refuse to use the bloody things. I can't for the life of me understand how the average computer user is prepared to learn as much as they do just to get a bit of wrod processing done. People will laugh in fifty years about the dicsussions we are currently having on "ease of use".

There have been several jokes along the lines of "if Microsoft built cars", but I really can't see the average car user being prepared to learn what went on under the hood simply to be able to have the pleasure of driving around. I imagine, however, that this would indeed have been the case in the 1920s, when the "early adopters" were able to fix their own breakdowns. Perhaps the 21st century has brought us to the Model T stage of computing, and in fact many of the people who drove around in early Fords hated their cars but couldn't face a return to the inconvenience of riding around on a horse.

Anyway, I thought that this blog might be a good place to start recording random notes and jottings once more. Artima.com is a more organized place, but seems to me better suited to essays and completed thoughts than my own little blog on a site that's pretty much under my control. So here it will be.

Maybe I'll start using Blogger again

Time I was a bit more communicative, I suppose.

Happy New Year to All My Reader

A recent thought on blogging generally (and this blog in particular). I list this as an "occasional weblog" because,
unlike many other bloggers, I use it only as an occasional output channel. Seems to me that it's less like a journal or a diary and more like a
DisplacementActivity sometimes. Why am I doing this? Who knows. Perhaps when I am dead the world will appreciate better what a wonderful person
I was. This seems rather unlikely on the basis of my ramblings so far, even to me. The blog certainly isn't at the level I achieved with
Python Web Programming, for example. I can write, but it's more effort than a solitary activity
like blogging truly deserves.

Anyway, Blogger.com seems to have got the archiving thing sorted out now, and indeed appears to have made the whole process a little more usable. I still
prefer Wikis to blogs, largely due to their more collaborative nature, I suspect. Ultimately either the information in these things has value to others (and I'm well aware that there are blog sites with content syndication from a thousand sources) or it can be classed as masturbatory. Most of the blogs I have read are tedious descriptions of the lives and thoughts of others at least as sad as me, which don't inspire me to greater achievements. While there's a whole world out there blogging, I can't escape a certain Groucho-ness about the whole thing: if it makes me a Blogger then I might not want to blog! Enough, already.

Bugger Blogger!

For some reason I have not yet been able to fathom, I was for quite a while completely unable to post blogs, and the last archive entry was a broken link.

All attempts to get any kind of support from the www.blogger.com team lead to either more error messages or an email black hole. What gives, guys?

All appears to be well now, but where have my archives gone? Guess this is just more WebFlakiness. Ah well, on to more interesting things. When can I blog in StructuredText?

WikiBrowser

Seems to me that what I need is a proxy between me and the web. What will it do? Scan each page for WikiWords, and when it finds one add dynamic menus offering links to the same
word in various other Wikis that I'm aware of. The advantages of this strange system? Well, mostly it would allow me to use WikiWikiWebs as a context for the various pieces of
information that come at me over the web, dynamically cross-referencing incoming information with what I already know, or know about.

Frameworks and Toolsets

I've been doing a lot of work with DreamWeaver - UltraDev mostly, though I have now dipped a toe into the MX waters - and have been impressed with its capabilities. Like most such tools, however, you sometimes end up having to stomp all over it to do what you want. It's good for some thing, but not others. This can be frustrating because after such changes the DW functionality doesn't work, or doesn't work as well. Typically DW will put a red exclamation mark next to something it no longer feels is correct, but usually this simply means "you're on your own from here on in, I can't parse this".

What I'd like is a framework that lets me do all the clever programmed things I want to do, but helps me rather than getting in my way. This might be a pipe dream (after all, it's expecting a bit much for a tool to parse arbitrary code it didn't write), but I'd like to investigate it. I suspect it will take a lot longer than I thought.

Travelling in Style

Well, travelling, anyway. California, Kentucky and Michigan all rear their heads for the coming month. Like you care ... this is a blog, after all, so what does it matter, there's OnlyMeReading. Anyway, time to work on the support infrastructure while I'm away from RealLife for a while. Ah, the joys of flying, room service and cable television (not) all at the same time. Despite my apparent tired cynicism I actually enjoy teaching very much. Otherwise why put up with the joys of ...

Minimalist experiments with DreamWeaver Ultradev persuade me that it's a useful tool. Do you want your own record in this four-page web? Easy, just think of a unique key ... but not index.html. It would be neat if there were a
Python backend as well as ASP, JSP, PHP and others. There are hooks ...

Blogging is Back

Well, blogging certainly hasn't been at the top of my priority list lately. This is probably not that surprising given the amazing amount of reorganization that's been taking place on the home front (moving bedroom furniture, working in the garden, etc).

There's also been a certain amount of network reorganization (because the basement has also had to be turned upside down), and the self-built Linux server, headrat, now has a 160 gigabytes of extra storage. This was added in the form of two Seagate Barracudas. I've used this series of drives for a long time, off and on, and have to say they are remarkably good value for money (I picked them up for $165 each at my local computer store). This will make it easier to back up the laptop, leaving me wondering what to do with the three 5" double-height SCSI drives that used to be my main storage system, They're even too heavy to ship anywhere!

I've been playing with the wxPython GUI a bit recently as it seems to support one of the more promising GUI-builder tools, Boa Constructor. The software is undergoing a lot of development right now, and it's great to see the new features coming in, but less great to have to modify my code to updates APIs. One of the problems with being at the bleeding edge, I suppose. It is finally becoming possible to build good-looking GUIs in a reasonable amount of time, though, which is nice. I think a really good RAD tool (like Delphi) would help increase Python's popularity a lot.

Teaching the Government to be Secure

This week I'm teaching a Unix and Linux security class for DISA, the Defense Intelligence Systems Agency. It's conventional, for some reason, to badmouth this Agency, but they have some incredibly smart people. As one friend said, "the longer you stand next to them, the dumber you feel".

So far we've covered the Unix basics and an overview of security. We spent this morning talking about TCP/IP security, a difficult subject to cover in a single morning, but Bob Cromwell, the course author, has done a great job of keeping the material at a high level but including useful references for those who want to understand in greater depth.

The new laptop is slowly getting fit to travel, though the DISA network doesn't seem to be as cooperative as it was the last time I was here, and that could be something to do with Internet settings. Certainly everything looks to be satisfactory. Not a matter needing urgent attention.