Toby's Log page 108

congress and president money

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Here are several ideas about money relating to the president and congressmen. They are not all directly releted, and some may negate others.

– these officials are paid the average salary of the people in the territory they represent. This will give them more reasonable wages. It will give them much more insentive to produce economic results.
– Alternativily, they are all paid the average salary of the entire United States. This would prevent them from supporting items that only benifit the area they represent.
– They are paid a fixed multiple of this average salary. Thus, they will still make a lot of money, but will also have the economic insentive to improve the economy

– they are paid no salary. They are already wealthy, and almost always have income coming in from elsewhere. It is government money that could be put to better use elsewhere.

– they may recieve no campaign funds. campaigns are set up and run in a fixed format for all candidates, payed for with tax dollars. Additional campaigning is up to them, or perhaps not allowed except for travelling and meeting people. This reduces peoples ability to influence the candidates with money.
– no one may give financial or other gifts to these people whatsoever. They may endorse them only. They may not run media adverts about them, but may be mentioned as endorsers by the candidates themselves.

mac drive troubles; now using ubuntu

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A few weeks ago, I came home and my iBook crashed. One app after another gave me the spinning beachball of death, until I could do nothing but move the beachball. I restarted, and no startup disk was recognized. I restarted several times to no avail. Finally I shut down and then started it up. It booted, but then all the apps quickly started crashing again.

I booted using a Techtool 4.0.1 disk. It was ridiculously slow. The volume structes test took 8 hours, and told me I had a problem and needed to rebuild the structures. I told it to do its thing. It took another 8 hours. Rebooting after that, my disk was no longer found again. I gave up on the problem then, and decided to install linux so I could get my server up and running as quickly as possible (see below).

Later, I got a new version of Techtool from my mom that was on a thumb drive. It allowed me to do much more, such as run disk utility and a terminal window. Disk utility could not fix the disk though and I couldn’t access it with terminal. I ran its test of the volume structures. It was crazily faster than the other one, taking perhaps 10 minutes for the test. It went so fast I felt hopeful it could fix it. It said there was a problem. I fixed it and ran the test again, but unfortunately it said there was the same problem as before, a directory node missing or something like that. I tried fixing and retesting a couple more times, but it gave the same problem every time.

I can access the files from linux, but have had no luck writing to the drive. I imagine the old version of Techtool, as it was from the early days of OS X, did not know how to properly handle the current volume structures, so it messed them up. I think I will need to reformat the drive and reinstall everything. Luckily, after my previous drive problems, I have been backing up most everything weekly. I shouldn’t lose anything, though I do want to look through the drive before I erase it just to make sure. I also want to try to find a way to only reformat the partition affected, so I don’t lose my linux setup or any of its data. I’m not sure how to do that for HFS+ without buying another utility.

Linux

I had burned a Gentoo and Ubuntu CD a couple of years back to mess around with. I never got either installed then, but this time it was more necessary. I tried installing the Gentoo. The installation is not directly guided at all; I had to open up a webpage (luckily the internet was no problem to get working) in one terminal window (no gui) and carry out the steps from the instructions in another. I was going along alright, but some of the choices were a little confusing. I came to the point where I had to compile my kernel, and decided I was spending too much time with Gentoo. Ubuntu was supposed to be quick and easy to install, and this was only to be temporary anyway.

Ubuntu provided a guided, GUI install that was fairly easy. The only problem I had was choosing the (prebuilt) kernel, as the default one didn’t work. I got that up and running, and it started up easily with a GUI and the internet working just fine. It was the desktop version, though, so no server stuff was installed. I was able to install apache2 with the package manager, but could not find php 5. I had converted all of my site stuff to mysqli, so I needed php 5: I certainly wasn’t going to go through my files and change all the pertinent lines for a temporary server. Searching the web, I found php 5 available for the Edgy and some other versions of Ubuntu. I was confused as to what those different versions were, at first thinking each one was of a progressively more unstable branch. I changed my repositories that I was getting packages from to one that had php 5, after figuring out how to do that. It wouldn’t let me install because it said there were some dependency problems. By this time I figured the different word versions of the OS were actually newer and newer revisions, like Jaguar and Tiger for OS X. So I figured if I installed the entire new version with the package manager, then all the dependencies should be met. It took quite some time to download and install all those files, and it gave some errors before completing. At that point, things like the GUI started breaking. I tried hard to fix the problem, including manually removing some package files, but it kept giving me errors.

I got the GUI back up and running just so I could burn another CD of a new version of the OS. I figured that then all the dependencies should be met no problem. I downloaded not quite the newest version though, as the newest couple of versions didn’t seem to mention the need mysqli in their depository (I now think mysqli is installed automatically with the mysql php extension in these versions). I downloaded the server version so that I could hopefully have a server running right from install. It took me some time to find a program that would let me burn a CD, but I finally got it burned.

Installing was about as easy as with the Desktop version, save for one screen where I had to manually select to install the web server, which I skipped the first two times through. To my delight, after the install, not only was an apache 2 server up and running, but so was a MySQL server, and PHP 5 with mysqli was already installed. After figuring out how to mount UFS (that took some time as well), I copied my site files over to the linux partition and easily got my site running.

Unfortunately, the server version wasn’t set up out of the box for my own regular use. It had no GUI at all. I used the package manager to install KDE, as KDE seems to have more applications that come with it. It took a good bit of time to set that up so it would actually work. It didn’t just work like it had when the desktop version was installed; it took some messing around with configuration files. When I finally got that working, it still was not working fully properly; I still have a desktop that is bigger than my actual screen, so I have to drag the mouse to the sides and move it to see the rest. This is very annoying to work with. I also have no sound. Other than that, though, it works just fine.

Linux seems to work quite nicely. It has plenty of good applications available, of course for free. I was able to work with all my important Excel files in OpenOffice with the only problem being that if I made changes, I had to save them in the OpenOffice format. I was surprised that the Control-enter functions worked. After downloading several extensions, I’ve been able to get firefox to work mostly the way I want for browsing. Safari still works better in some ways as I had it set up, but there are a lot of cool things that can be done with firefox extensions that can’t be done in Safari. Kate is a very nice text editor, though unfortunately I’ve not been able to find anything with live PHP previews like Taco Edit. It of course has desktop paging, which I never got working nicely in OS X. App launching has been a problem though. I’m used to Butler. Linux has Katapult, but it is not nearly as good and is very slow. File browsing is quite nice for the most part. The image browsing capabilities of Konquerer far exceed those of the Finder. I miss the Next-like columns view though.

Workgroup Manager

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For a long time I had wanted to be able to manage the groups on my *nix OS so that I could better manage access to files. The functionality is very limited in the OS X gui, and I couldn’t find command line stuff that worked. Finally, I found out that some of Apple’s server utilities are available for download for free, and work with a regular install of OS X. One of the utilities is called workgroup manager. It allows you to create groups and add users to them. So I can now create groups for specific projects or purposes, add the users involved to the related group, and make all related files owned by that group so the users have proper access to those files.

Schooling: focus on life

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Schools are very focused on ‘academic’ stuff; they need to give better focus to things important to people, things to help them get jobs and to live their lives. If given an easy path into the job they want, many people will take it. The easier that path is, the better. Many things are expected to be taught at home, but they aren’t always, and most people will be missing bits and pieces of it even if parents and family do teach it.

Finance
People are finding themselves in financial strife very often these days, especially the people currently entering the work force. They are using credit cards and going into debt so much that some call them Generation Debt (or something like that). Schools provide little to no information about how to handle personal finances to the vast majority of students. The basics of finance could be taught in a very short time, yet have a huge impact on students understanding of handling their money. Much of it is fairly simple stuff, but it isn’t always easy to figure out on your own when you have so much else to worry about. Discussions should be had about debt, how to manage it, when to use it; how to save money for expensive things, childrens education, retirement; budgeting and deciding what is important; banks and stock brokers and how those work relative to a student using them; bill paying. Students should learn how to balance a checkbook.

Homestead
Home economics classes briefly go into some of the things a person needs to know about running a home, seeming to focus though on sewing and cooking. There is a lot involved in running a home. There should be at least discussion of all that is done to run a typical home. They should learn how to budget their time, in the more and more hectic lifestyles they will likely be living, to be able to handle cleaning and making food.

Nutrition and Lifestyle
The United States is having somewhat of a crisis with health problems, particularly ones related to high fat, high sugar diets and sedentary lifestyles. Students should be taught basic nutrition, how certain foods can reduce their risk of certain diseases, and how to create meals that are both healthy and taste good. They should go through physical education courses, as they already do, and taught how excercise can reduce risk of disease and increase the duration of the livable portion of their life. They should be taught how and where to excercise after they leave school in ways that might suit them best: they might prefer workouts at gyms, organized sports organizations, walking at work, jogging in the mornings, etc. They should be taught how gyms and sports organizations work and can be found.

Sex and children
Sex needs to be better taught about; it is covered only briefly and somewhat danced about currently. Students should see how it works, learn (directly) how to put condoms on, learn how to time a womans ovulation to know when she can and cannot get pregnant, learn about the diseases. They should learn about the signs of a woman becoming pregnant, about what needs to be done if she becomes pregnant as far as nutrition for her and what should be done with her doctor, and how to prepare for having the childe. Basic parenting skill should be taught.

Health and Biology
Students should learn how their bodies work and how to deal with them. Human biology is a lot more important in everyday life to most than more general biology. Basic first aid is important. Students should also learn how the health care system works and about health insurance.

Job finding skills
Anybody should be able to find and land a job they want and enjoy. They can, but they need to know how. They need to learn both how to figure out what that job might be for them and how to obtain it. They should be given a brief description of ‘all’ general job fields and interests they relate to, and slowly from an early age be directed towards the ones that best match their personal interests, capabilities, and desires. They should be taught the best ways to find jobs in their areas of interest.

Psychology
Everyone should learn the basics of how their mind works and how people work (behaviorly/interacting with each other).

In Sum
I think schools should focus first on job hunting skills, nutrition, lifestyle, finance, health and biology, psychology, social skills, and managing a home. These are the things that most everyone will make use of in their lives, and would benefit from having a lot of knowledge in. I also feel some history to be very important, so people know how they came to be as they are; and some basic physical sciences, so people will know how the world works. Many of the more ‘academic’ subjects are used very little by most people after they finish school, and so are less useful. Schools should ensure that the above things are learned by everybody. They should not need to waste time with tests over these subjects; rather, they should slowly drill the information in over their entire school career.

The schools should follow students interests and very early on start to send students on paths towards the careers they like. The students interested in science would begin learning more about science, while students interested in art would be given more teaching about art. They would need to be followed closely and always taught their interests; they must never be trapped in one path, even if they keep changing paths and only learn a little from each. If their interests are broad, then they will best be served with knowledge that is broad. Individual schools might need to be more narrowly focused to better teach the areas of knowledge, so students might have to go to different schools based on the path they choose. They should be able to take students farther along in the path they choose, as the teachers in those areas would only be teaching students with interest in them.

And so schools should be there to prepare students for life and career.

government provides info

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Government needs to give info to the people, the people who need it, not just make it available in some document in a filing cabinet in a basement somewhere or posted on a cork board in a building few people go to. The more people given the information, the more people are liable to use it or follow its guidance. There is too much information the government has created for a person to be able to wade through it to find what applies to them, and this makes it far more difficult for people to do things.

Mailing Lists
Perhaps the government should provide one large list of the types of information they have in categories that people might be interested in them through, such as different occupations, types of residences, types of transportation. These lists would be available in townhalls or the like where people could easily access them (people should be made aware of where it is). People could go to this location and sign up for the ones they are interested, or remove themselves from ones they no longer are. They will then recieve mailings or emailings of all the laws, initiatives, and other relevant things the governemnt thinks would be of use to the people in that category. This should help people out tremendously in being informed, allow people to think about what their interests really are, and hopefully get people more involved with both the community and their field of interest.

Schools
School is a perfect place to begin providing information. They already do to some extent, but they really need to do a lot more. Schools are very focused on ‘academic’ stuff; they need to give better focus to things important to people, things to help them get jobs and to live their lives. As students grow older and make choices about what they want to do with their lives, schools should provide them with information related to their interests. Guidance counselers talk to students about what they want to do occupation wise and may provide a little insight into that occupation and into schools they may go to to learn about it; english classes have students research and write about these careers. Much more can be done. Guidance counselers should be able to provide students with a lot of helpful information on that career, perhaps packets. Libraries could have a career section with government prepared information on each of many categories of careers. Counselers should be able to point students in the direction of further resources.

Career/Government Information Libraries
Libraries and/or town halls could have a seperate libary with the government resources sorted into sections. New laws, initiatives, and other important things would be posted at a certain place in each section. People would be told where these libraries are and what resources are available for them there.

There are far too many laws, government services, and other government related things for a single person to know about even if they spend all their time researching these. One should not have to research them to find out about their existance. One should not have to fear being in violation of some small line in a giant law book somewhere without knowing it because they did not spend hours pouring over that book. One should not feel stuck in a crappy job and awful place because they don’t know that there are options available, including government help, to get them away from that. People given knowledge can use that knowledge to their advantage. If everybody is just given knowlege of how to succeed, without any effort on their part, then they will far more likely succeed than without it. They also must have the will and desire to succeed, but that is their own choice. If the government were to provide the keys to success to everyone, then everyone is a lot more likely to succeed.

finder desktop views

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similar to desktop paging type applications – these allow you to switch between several ‘desktops’ each with a set of windows or designated applications. This would be like the ability to save these desktops, but including the ability to include windows in a ‘desktop’ view that might be visible in other desktop views as well.

one would have a large collection of views, that, upon opening, would launch requisite applications and open windows, possibly moving them to certain positions, and possibly filling them with certain contents (such as a certain finder directory or the last edited project file), and hiding all other windows. One could quickly switch between these as in normal desktop paging. One could leave multiple open, or quit some. When quitting a view, all windows in it are closed, and the applications involved in that are quit if they are not open in another view (a la adding to and removing from a retain count).

due to the nature of these views, there will be many more to choose from than would be in a normal desktop paging system. Therefore, a different access method would be good. I’d propose a list accessible via button and keyboard shortcut. When opened, this menu would work like a normal menu, but all keypresses would enter into a search field and would work to narrow the list items via a search through it. All currently open view items would be highlighted in some way, and could be filtered into this list. One could also quit all open views. This would then open the default view, likely a finder one with windows or just a view of the desktop.

in using a computer, there are many different sets of tasks that a user might perform. some or many of these tasks might cause the use of a certain set of windows, perhaps even setting them into a certain pattern for ideal use. They often span multiple applications, so that a single application properly sorting its windows would not be sufficient.

stub, sorry I’m tired, I will have to revise this jumble later.

schooling: variable length course duration

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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

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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.

mail to person, not address

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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

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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.