Toby's Log page 113

schooling: variable length course duration

in

timeless schooling
a person takes a class to learn a certain set of tasks or pile of knowledge. they want this whether they find it to come easy or hard. It is the teachers charge to teach it to all of them. For this reason, a course should not have a defined length, but instead be the length for each student that it takes that student to learn the knowledge. People to whom it comes easily can finish the course quickly and move on to the next, while people to whom it comes hard might take quite some time completing it. No grades shall be given: the person takes the course until up to the proficiency standards the course requires, or fails and gives up. Completing a course should suggest the student has learned certain things, not pushed through it and been given a letter representing their success at learning those things.

Cost – as teacher time is a costly resource, and students in this system could make a lot of use of it, the payments for the course would have to be based on time taking it. Students already proficient in the course matter, thus those who don’t really need the course anyway, could breeze through and pay little. Students who need the most help would have to pay for it.

Handling Different Paces – obviously handling multiple students running at different paces as well as coming in and going from the classes at random times would cause a significant challenge to some teaching methods, while others, particularly the sorts that are currently more independent as is, would lend themselves well to this method.
– Lectures certainly wouldn’t work if every student was at a different point in learning the material. So, I think, lectures would probably be given as learning material for courses but would not be specifically part of them. Each lecture would be a single event given on a specific subject, and students would come to whichever lectures they desire based on the content and where they are in their learning. A course geared heavily toward lecture might require certain lectures to be attended at least once (more times for students who do not get what they need to out of it), while others (probably more than not) would only have lectures available to aid in, or perhaps further, or even differentiate, the learning in the courses, for those who desire those sort of things. These one-off lectures would have the very nice side benefit of allowing students not in these course but interested in the subject to take in the bits of it they are most interested in, and perhaps incite them to take the related course at a later time. It also would provide fine learning opportunities for folks who want to learn something but not become full-fledged students.
– Labs should work out well. Teachers would give each student, or group of students if necessary, their labwork assignments based on their current development in the class and what they think will most help the specific students learn the course material. Then they will watch the students and help whenever it is needed, or give helpful or insightful pointers when needed. This will give the teachers a lot of flexibility in tailoring their assignments to the students. It will likely require relatively small lab sizes, or/and probably more preferably, several teachers per class to be able to watch sufficiently the students activities. More teachers may work better than smaller individual class sizes, as the greater number of eyes simultaneously sweeping the room, as well as the differing perspectives, should see more even with a large class size.

>console is back

in

Hey hey, it’s back. For quite some time I would boot OS X into ‘console’ only when not in need of GUI type stuff. At some point in the OS updates, around perhaps 10.4.3, this stopped working, I believe because of a security risk related to it. Once installing that update, I haven’t used that capability, until just recently. I don’t know when it happened, but I currently have 10.4.9, and it works perfectly. I hadn’t noticed before, but doing this leaves all windowserver related processes turned off, so all of that memory is freed. To get back to the GUI, typing exit will bring you to the normal login window. I am quite happy. I am posting this from in >console right now, with lynx. Unfortunately, lynx isn’t very nice for posting in wordpress. I may have to clean up this post later with a GUI.

Ideas: mail to person, not address

in

Mail ‘addressed’ to a person or business, not a physical address. The intended receiver is not a building, but a person or entity of some sort at that building. Each person and business would probably be assigned an id number and that is what is written on the address field of envelopes. The post office keeps track of the physical address associated with each person or business, and sends letters to that person or business at the currently specified address. When someone moves, they inform the post office, and all mail is automatically sent to the new address, without need to inform the sender. With a computer database, the system would be easy to implement and utilize with database of addresses that probably already exists. Changes to addresses associated with people would be quick and simple, and could perhaps even be done for the short term, such as while on a vacation. Of course, the current address method would need to be supported for a long time to come; it would take years for people to learn the ids of everyone, especially those they infrequently communicate with. One problem would be sending to families, though perhaps a method could be set up to designate a letter sent to a person to be meant for the whole family, such as ‘family of’ written before the number or something.

This same database could perhaps be extended to include phone numbers. Just dial some prefix (so as to allow phone dialing as normal to work) and then the persons id number and it will call their current phone. Phone numbers are already becoming crazy with cell phones, people with home and work numbers, all that stuff. This could of course create problems with which number to route through to get to the person. Perhaps each person could list multiple numbers for different locations they might be. The caller would be presented a list of these with the number to press for each (you are calling Josie Haberdash. Press 1 to call her home phone, press 2 to call her work phone). Of course, this would create privacy problems: giving out your work number would also mean giving out your home number. Perhaps the list could, if the person desired, give out only certain options, and others would require a certain, perhaps 4 digit pin or something, to be dialed in. That sounds a little too complicated though and few people would be able to remember a bunch of peoples numbers plus their pin.

Even email might benefit from this. The .name domain already has something like this, but it is not widely used, only allows for one person with each name in the world, and is a pay for service instead of a government managed system.

car running much better; distributor cap

in

My car had been missing and in general running quite poorly. It was bad enough that I always had to give myself lots of room when pulling out into traffic and had trouble getting up to speed on onramps. Up hills, I sometimes had to slow down to 25 mph in second gear to make it up.

A while back, I had looked at my distributor cap to see if it could be the problem. The points in it were rather rusty, they they still looked like they’d work. I bought a new cap anyway, especially since it came with new spark plug cables and boots. My old boots were feeling rather loose on the plugs, and I wasn’t sure how old the wires were. I planned to install that, but didn’t. I decided I oughta install the rotor at the same time, so the old rotor wouldn’t mess up the new cap (though I’m really not sure if this is possible, I wanted to be safe), and hadn’t bought one with the cap.

Finally, just recently, I bought a rotor and installed the cap. It was one of the easiest things I’ve ever done on the car. Three easy bolts plus the boots on the wires held the cap on, and the rotor just pulled right off. The old rotor actually looked better than I remembered, but I replaced it anyway. After replacing, it started right up and I took it for a test drive. It seemed to be running better, but I couldn’t tell for sure.

After several days of driving, though, I was sure the car was running much better. It hasn’t missed once since then, runs smoother, and accelerates much faster. Hills are where the biggest difference is: I can now drive up and even accelerate with no problems. It is great. It feels like a new car (as long as I don’t look at it). If I had known such a simple fix would have such a great effect, I would have done this long ago.

emac died; back to the old server

in

On Friday, the eMac being used as my server suddenly died. It was running fine at maybe 1400, and I had remotely accessed the drive around then. But I noticed the fan noise was strangely missing at maybe 1800. The power button did nothing at all. Reading online, it seemed a dead PRAM battery could cause some all-in-one macs of that era to not boot. So I bought a new battery from radio shack on Saturday. It ran a ridiculous $15 for a 1/2 AA Lithium battery, but I figured it was worth a try to get the server up again. Unfortunately, after putting it in and resetting the power management unit several times, the best I got was the fan to get power for less then a second before shutting off. After some more reading, I found the power supply board is probably bad. On those computers, the power supply is built into a special board for only those computers that contains the graphics and audio stuff as well. So it’s probably not worth it to get a new board for the thing to fix it.

I bought myself an external drive enclosure for 3.5″ disks (I already had one for 2.5″) to get the data from the eMac. I had backed up nearly a month before, and had made several important changes since then, so I wanted the data before I got the server up again. The drive was quite a pain to get to. I had to dissassemble much of the emac to get to the drive. Everything in there is very tightly packed together and crazy, very proprietary looking parts for much of it. When I took out the drive, I was a little worried. It had been a while since I had worked with anything but 2.5″ drives. The thing looked so big compared to them that I was worried it might be and old 5.25″. But of course those went by the wayside long before this computer was made. The enclosure I got (an acomdata) works nicely and is very speedy. It’s also quiet, with no fan, but still doesn’t get hot it seems. It cost more than others, but it got very good reviews, much better than the only other one that I could find locally.

So i got the old data and put it back on my iBook, the computer I use most of the time. I had set up a server for testing stuff on it, so I just copied the old site folders and the important mysql files and got it up fairly easily. The new server has MySQL 5, so it is a little more up to date. It still only has Apache 1 though.

Whenever I get my new computer, which will hopefully be in June, when Mac OS 10.5 is released, the iBook will become the server full time. So it worked out alright really. Except that I’m not sure what to do with the dead eMac. It is currently disassembled in my living room. I don’t really know how to sell it, nor to fix it.

finder views saving

in

The list view of the finder is good for looking at information about files. I use the column view for browsing, as it shows the hierarchy better and is faster to use, but for information I list. I find myself frequently changing the view settings of a window in list view depending on the information I am interested in. I might want to calculate folder sizes and sort by folder size to see where all my disk space is used. I might want to look at the comments field to see what I’ve said about the files. I don’t always want the processing power usage to calculate folder sizes or the screen real estate of all these columns viewable at once. It’s a pain to set these list views up each time. The dsStore files will save the settings for a single folder, but in general I’d want these settings the same for all folders. All folders contain files and folders, and I have similar information to view about all of them.

I think one should be able to save a view setup that can be applied to any window. Setting a window to the view should be simple, such as with a submenu off the list view menu item, a small menu icon somewhere on the window, and/or a contextual menu. They’d simply have user designated names preferably describing their function. This all would become much more relevant if the list view could have columns with other metadata, such as author, status, or owner.

automatic 3rd party software update

in

The OS would have a standard system for developers to implement an auto-update feature for their 3rd party apps, making it easy for them, consistant, and simple to ensure all apps are up to date for the user.

Each installed app would register its name, .app path, current version, url for update information, etc. For all apps released prior to this OS and library feature, much of this info would have to be added manually by the user. New apps could possibly add themselves on first launch, asking the registry on launch if they are registered. This would not allow currently existing software to register, so these apps would have to be registered by some other means. Probably a better solution that would support both new and old apps, as well as not need a specific call to be added in the apps code, would be to have the registry check for the name of the app every time an app is launched. If it is not in the database, it could ask the application for the information. Current apps wouldn’t provide this, so it would have to bring up a dialog alert window in which the user would enter as much of it as known. It could be updated by the user later. Since some people download apps just to try them, then delete them, these apps should be removed from the database. This could be implemented to be done automatically. On each update check, if no .app is at the path specified, then the app was probably deleted and can be removed from the registry. Also, the user could specify an interval after which dormant apps could be removed from the list, something like a month or so. If either of these remove apps that are still desired by the user, they will be re-added to the registry on next launch, and will then be checked on next check anyway.

The developer would use a standard method, perhaps one of several, to post the current version and the files for download on their website. The url would be provided by the app, as stated above. The information at the url would have to be standardized so that the updater could parse it to get the information needed. It might contain just the current version in a tab delimited text file, listing version number, url to file parts or perhaps script to get them, update history (in case the user wants to review the update before doing it), etc. It might also be a list of all versions with this information, each version seperated by a new line appended to the file. Some developers would add the new line to a text file by hand, while others could have a script update it, or a script serve it. The file parts would have to be in a standard format as well, so that the updater app could handle them easily. It could be simply a .pkg, with all modified files stored in their destination paths inside.

The funcionality would probably be added to the software update application already used for the OS vendors software. The third party stuff would be kept somewhat seperate, to ensure things like security updates to the OS were given greater precedence and what not. The user would have seperate preferences to set for handling 3rd party apps, including whether to maintain a database at all, whether to update automatically or ask permission first, seperate update interval (could be ‘same as system updates’ though). The user would be able to view a table of all registered apps with information on them such as current version, if installed version is current, and an editable list of the app name, path, and update url. Clicking on each line item would provide additional information provided from the server, such as a revision history. All information would be stored in a database to save on disk space and be faster than a collection of files for each app.

homesteading wiki

in

The contents of this wiki would be a guide to do basically everything you need to do around the home, with all those tips you frequently hear about aggregated in one easy to find location. Will try to find the best way to do things. Acknowledging that different people have different needs for the same home tasks, sections will provide all the best methods for different situations and reasons why that method would be chosen over another.

All people would be able to edit a talk page for each actual page, like a forum on that topic. The community will decide together what should go in the article, and the editor(s) will then commit them to the actual article.

Localized Patent Scope

in

Patents are not always taken out by large companies that produce their inventions or use their processes everywhere they would be desirable. Small companies may not have the resources to or interest in provide their wares to anywhere but a small market. Yet if they have a patent, they may choose to prevent other companies who are not even in their intended market from marketing that product. This can cause proliferation of good products to be slowed dramatically. Many companies also like to keep patented processes to themselves, even if they can be easily reproduced elsewhere. Again, this slows proliferation. Licensing fees for use of the patented material is a good method for allowing proliferation while giving the patenting company their “incentive” for creation. It seems, though, that in many cases the licenses aren’t offered or are at such a high fee as to prevent their use.

As the patent process is designed to give companies a temporary monopoly in their market, and marketing of the patented items outside of the companies market by others should not adversly effect the companies profitability, something should be done to ensure others can recieve the benifits of the advance in technology. Patents could only apply to goods produced within the area the company is actively marketing to, allowing companies outside of the area to produce without fear of legal problems. If the patenting company moves into the other companies market area, the company may choose to: stop marketing in that area, pay the companies license fee, or sell the related factories and equipment (if dedicated to that product) to the patenting company. The companies would come to an agreement through negotiation or use third party arbitration if this fails.

socialisms: government pays salary

in

the government pays the salary. Everyone recieves a salary from the government based from some determined number, perhaps $20,000 a year. This is everybody: every man, woman, and child. This base pay is modified up or down individually depending on what each person does.
-Children’s pay would be based upon their school attendance and grades. A C average grade with a decent attendance record would get the $20k. B and A average students would get more money. D and F students, and those with bad attendance records, would get less. The system would probably look at other factors as well.
-For employees, they would either need to achieve 40 hours a week to get the base $20k, or their productivity (perhaps based on a calculated independant contribution to GDP or something like that) level would determine their pay level, with some range of normal and acceptable outputs achieving the $20k base level.
-The level should not normally vary by more than perhaps +/- 50%.
-inventiveness and other such traits would reap monetary benefit. Inventors and discoverors would recieve short term spikes in thier salary based on contribition of the invention or discovery to society as a whole and their individual contribution to the project.
-Money given to children would start when they are born being split between money saved for education and their expected costs of living and small toy costs, which would be given to the parents. The money would slowly, as the children age, be given more and more directly to them.
-Other incentives and disincentives would also modify the base salary, in a similar way that they do on income tax returns now. For instance, purchase of energy efficient modifications to homes might increase salary. The children based incentives would not exist since the children make their own guarenteed money.
-There would no longer be an income tax, except on any moneys gained through other means than from the government. All government moneys would be raised from other areas.

-Businesses would pay the government employment taxes, which would provide the moneys for everyones salaries. These would probably be based on the number of employees, company productivity and/or contribution to society, and profitability, and be modified by incentives and discincentives similar to the salaries. The taxes should start out equaling approximately what companies are paying currently in wages and salaries to employees, and eventually take more and more into account the above paramaters.

-many of the non-wage or salary bearing money making methods should probably still be in existance. Entreprenuers could still start businesses and recieve profits for their effort and money invested. Money invested in stocks, bonds, or bank accounts could still earn people interest on their money and finance companies and individuals. People could still take out loans. These oppurtunities would provide the market based incentives available today. The government could possibly emulate these incentives and financial services, but probably wouldn’t be as effective.
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