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I haven't delved too much into the techniques for getting search engine hits for my web pages and blogs, and have been looking for ways to put my stuff out and get to peole who would be interested. One experiment I have been doing is to see if Face Book has enough tools for longer discussions of things I'd posted on my blogs and gotten little response. I conclude that Face Book is one way to do this but it is too ephmerable, stuff vanishes from your page after less than a month and the way people use it is more oriented to fleeting comments and topical occurances, more extended ideas are lost in the din of ancedotes and gossip. I am not criticizing this, it is clearly what Face Book is for and being able to see what my kids are doing is good, to get a glimpse of what is going on in their lives between the few times a year they speak to me directly.
I like what I am able to do on my hosted web site, but I don't see much in the way of hits, but I am able to write there and also to save what I write. I have saved stuff I've written on Face Book, but what can I do with it once it has vanished from there? Maybe it is archived, but I havn't seen what it takes to get at old posts, but I've heard that people who have the need to know can look at old posts, but I have saved the pages and would like to transform the content to be prehaps a web page on my hosted site, but I havn't decided on that yet because it would be quite a bit of work and even if I am able to re-present stuff from there or my blogs, it would have the effect of being not seen as if I wrote it on the hosted site in the first place. My attitude could be that I write for myself and I don't care about the hits, that rather than using an ordinary text editor or Word, I write in HTML for styling but for my own entertainment.
Maybe the Google web site is a viable solution. True, I don't have much control over style, but at least my stuff might get caught by their search engine without much effort.
TopI have played with Lisp off and on over the years and am especially interested in its use in music composition and analysis, but counting parentheses is hard. Still the idea of a functional language that can support mathematical assertions as a method of programming has basic interest. I have discovered a language whse name has appeared from time to time in sources I read, and even recenty in connection with a bug I had on my desktop system. The language is Haskell, named for Haskell Curry, the same person for which a term that applied to object programming applies to his last name, in conjunction with javascript programming. So I have investigated the language and done a tutorial and I am interested. What is really different about Haskell, which was antciapted by Lambda expressions in Lisp, is that the style of the language is predicated, no pun, on assertions, like mathematical set operations, over run-time enumerations, sets, arrays, more complex data structures, not the approach in procedural languages of defining data variables and functions first, whether object oriented or not, and then worrying about computablity after the fact. In Haskell the bounds to the data and the guards controlling the logic for dealing with the data come first. One can define variables, but one doesn't have to, and better, one can define the problem domain and the rules for dealing with it interactively and in a self-documenting fashion. This is like Lisp, but is easier to read and debug.
Haskell has the discipline taught by Dygstra and Wirth for writing safe programs in proceedural languages such as Pascal, but it is built in to the style and syntax of the langage just as Object Orientated discipline is built into Java and C++, although I think OOP is overrated because complexity is obfescated into how well object libraries are designed and learning prototypes is where the work for developers is taking place. The burden is shifted from programming discipline to documentation of prototypes, which is either not done or not complete. Using OOD is an act of immersion unless the object library is very well designed for which there is no guarentee.
TopThe main reason I got interested again in functional langurages was because programs that analyse and compose music were written in lisp, and now I have been able to find some programs written in Haskell that do the same things. Since music is really a closed group, it seems natural that these languages would be well suited as everything from music editing to analysis and composition. I want to hold off diving into this until I become more familiar with Haskell. I worked on a tutorial as recently as two day ago.
TopI plugged in the Dell Printer/Scanner that for years was plugged into the kids' PC. When they discarded that system a couple of years ago I got the flat panel monitor which is now attached to a Mac Power PC Mini and the printer. Just attaching it to the HP system caused Ubuntu 10.10 to go look for drivers. I installed the driver it recomended not knowing if it would truely work, and I recalled that the configuration and use with sane on the earlier system was tricky, but I was surprized with how straightforward it was to get a scan with the newer system. There is a simple program under the graphics menu that did the scan, allowed a crop and saved a JPG file. That is good enough for me as I know I can edit jpg's with gimp if I need to. So I scanned the program for my High School graduation in 1965 for the crowd on Face Book, and uploaded the cover scan, one of six, and asked if people want the rest. I can now also scan the pile of family photos Bobbi has and write us a DVD with annotations and image processing.
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