Annoying Webpage

Oh, as far as the “How To” part goes, just follow these simple steps when building a webpage:

1. Use ugly, clashing colors
2. Integrate pop-ups as much as possible
3. Includes sounds that play automatically
4. Be sure to include some sort of animated text
5. Create a MySpace page in lieu of steps 1-4

First off it’s not technically my computer since it actually belongs to Walnut Creek of Thomasville. I am just using it to do work at home with a program called MacDraft which, believe it or not, is not available for the PC unless you get PCDraft, but I’m not getting into all that.

With my previous Mac experience being somewhere between zero and “didn’t I use something like that back in the early 90′s when it was called Macintosh?” I wasn’t sure what to expect. I will say the first couple days have been a positive experience. So far I’ve clicked about every icon on the dock, and learned enough about the system settings to set up accounts, mount a windows network share, and make some other simple changes (background, screensaver, etc…).

So far … one of the best features … the keyboard … one of the worst … the keys. I’ll explain a little further.

I love the keyboard – probably my all time favorite. Aside from the obvious cool sleek look which you’d expect from a Mac, the touch is the best I’ve ever felt. Keyboard touch is a big deal to me, and it may be in my head, but I feel that I can type faster, and in general get a lot more done with a good feeling keyboard. The keys need to take a minimal force to press, yet there needs to be a definite break point where the keystroke has been made. A stiff, hard to press keyboard is obviously no good, but those without that distinct keypress feel are no good either. The sweet, silver and white iMac keyboard just hits the sweet spot.

I don’t like the keys. Maybe I just need to learn a little more about them, but many of the keys on the Mac keyboard do not behave the same as they do on their PC counterpart. This is a big deal for me since I’m an extensive keyboard user as opposed to an excessive mouse clicker. Keyboard shortcuts really speed up your workflow, when you can seamlessly call up a feature without moving your hand over to the mouse and back.

For example, the home and end keys just seem totally messed up. On a PC, when editing text, home takes you to the beginning of a line and end takes you to the end. However, on the Mac, home takes you to the beginning of a document and end to the end but it does not change your cursor position. I’m not sure why one would do that but I’m ok with it if there was a replacement for the Windows function of home and end. I read on one message board to hold command and the left and right arrow keys. This only halfway works. For instance in Firefox, where I am now typing this post using WordPress, if I press command + right arrow it takes me to the end of a line, but command + left arrow takes me back to the previous page. That makes no sense to me. There are some other issues including the two keys labeled delete when one is really backspace. Also, does the keyboard really need shift, control, option/alt, fn, and command? How many qualifiers do the other keys need? For a company that appears to stress simplicity in its products this seems out of place. These things may seem trivial, but they have really hindered my workflow.

As much as I may grow to like the Mac I know I can never fully switch for one simple reason: applications. I am, for now, tied to the PC since there are many applications I use which have no viable alternative on the Mac. One is AutoCAD, and another is Chief Architect. CAD is not a strong point of the Mac which is odd since that is the reason (MacDraft) I am even using a Mac in the first place. From what I’ve seen so far MacDraft‘s capabilities pale in comparison to AutoCAD, and I am only using it because a supplier for Walnut Creek requires it. There is a reason AutoCAD is the industry standard: it is the best. I also use engineering evaluation software which is only available for the PC, and have not even checked into alternatives.

The great thing about the Mac is its ability to handle media. I have not had enough time to experiment with it, but I hope to report more later. I did easily manage to hook up my digital camera and import the image above into iPhoto, resize it, then upload it to Flickr without any real problems. Most things are very intuitive even for a Windows user except for those stinking keys.

P.S. And why, when navigating the file system, does pressing enter attempt to edit the folder or file name instead of opening it?

Why does Radio Shack ask you for your phone number when you buy batteries? I don’t know. – Kramer

In the Kitchen Workstation – Part II post I did a 3d rendering of the proposed addition to our kitchen cabinets. Renderings attempt to accurately represent reality using 3d shapes along with varying textures and lighting. In order to better explain what it takes to make one of those models and why it can be so incredibily time consuming I will spend some time going into a little more detail.

First of all, the base of every 3d drawing is a polygon, thousands and thousands of polygons. Each object in the model is made up of a varying number of polygons which, put together determine the object’s shape. For instance, a simple cube would be made up of (6) polygons, one for each side. The problem is that polygons can only truly represent a flat surface. This means curved objects have to be made up of a bunch of very small polygons. The more polygons the more you can trick the human eye into believing that, for instance, a ball is round instead of faceted. An accurate 3d model is essential to producing realistic renderings. No matter how good your materials or lighting, if your model is shoddy the rendering will be shoddy. I used Chief Architect to produce my model. It is designed specifically for residential drafting and comes with a variety of built in items such as light fixtures, appliances, cabinets, etc. Believe me, I did not create all of the 3d objects in my rendering from scratch. That would have taken days or even weeks of work.

If you were to simply draw lines around the polygons of an object you would essentially get a wireframe model. To provide more realism, each polygon is assigned a material which will determine its characteristics apart from its shape. In Chief Architect every material has (6) adjustments (ambience, diffuseness, specularness, shininess, emissiveness, transparency) which determine the way it reflects light. With these adjustments you can differentiate between something made of clear glass, shiny chrome, or black fabric even if they all had the exact same shape. A material could be a simple color or a patern as with wallpaper. However, plain colors are not very represenative of reality since nearly everything in the world has some sort of texture or pattern.

In addition to the material possibilities, light is the next extremely important factor. In Chief Architect every light source can be adjusted for type (point, spot parallel), color, height, tilt, direction, cutoff angle, and drop off rate. The light’s interaction with the objects is modeled using a technique called raytracing. This technique actually traces the rays (believe it or not) of light as they reflect off different surfaces to produce the final image. Chief uses the free software POV-Ray to do raytracing on its models. This method can create very realistic reflections and shadows.

When you combine all of these variables for each object (material types and lighting) in the scene along with the fact each rendering can take hours (my final render took for the kitchen scene took around 24 hours but smaller preview renders can be done much quicker) and you can see how it can be very time consuming. The main reason 3d modeling can be so complicated is because reality is so complicated. Just think, for instance, of the amazing detail of structure, texture, and color of an ordinary leaf and what it would take to accurately represent that in 3d graphics.

To see some of the absolutely amazing things that can be done with these redering techniques check out the Hall of Fame on the Pov-Ray website. Many of the renderings there approach photo realism.

Ok – saves all settings as modified and closes the dialog box

Cancel – discards all changes to settings and closes the dialog box

Apply – saves all settings as modified and leaves the dialog box open

Therefore, there is no reason to click Apply then immediately click Ok. Just the Ok button will suffice. Clicking Apply then Cancel is equivalent to Ok. Clicking Cancel will only discard the changes that were made since either the dialog box was opened or Apply was last clicked, whichever is most recent.

I know this is simple, but it is potentially helpful.

Besides the handful of shortcuts most people used daily, the desktop tends to act as a graveyard for the useless triple or quad icon installs that are common with many programs. Whenever I use someone else’s computer and I see a Free AOL icon from their latest AIM upgrade it makes my skin crawl. Why are these icons installed and, even worse, why don’t people delete them?!

In addition to installed shortcuts, an unattended desktop tends to collect many downloaded or created files that either need to be moved to an appropriate folder or, in most instances, just deleted. I often use my desktop as a place to temporarily house files while I’m working with them (i.e. inbox), but I try to always clean it out before I leave the computer. Many times I have found old files on my desktop and I can’t remember where they came from or if I need them any more.

How To Do It

I have long since stopped using my desktop as a place to keep shortcuts to frequently used programs. There are few people who commonly use more programs than can be easily housed in the Quick Launch toolbar on the Windows XP taskbar. If you can see in the image above I have 6 icons as shortcuts on my taskbar, and I could easily house more without encroaching too much on the rest of my taskbar. I think the Quick Launch toolbar is one the of the most underused features of Windows along the Show Desktop button which is included in the toolbar.

By default, the lone icon that comes installed on the XP desktop is the Recycle Bin. The only way I have found to remove this is by using the TweakUI utility. It is part of a suite of PowerToys distributed by Microsoft which also includes other very useful utilties such as Image Resizer and Power Calculator. TweakUI has an easy way, under the Desktop section, to turn on and off all the common Windows desktop icons including the Recycle Bin. One thing to note, before you remove the icon from the desktop it is necessary to make a shortcut in the Quick Launch bar or from wherever you are planning to access it.

Besides getting rid of the standard Windows icons it is just a matter of looking through your icons and deciding which shortcuts are really needed and, if they are, then make a shortcut in the Quick Launch toolbar. As far as the random files go: file the ones you need to keep in an appropriately labeled folder and delete the ones you don’t need.

Follow all of these steps and you will realize why the default Windows XP background is appropriately named Bliss.

Check out this screenshot of the main interface. This single screen allows simple, quick control of nearly all options. Also, one of the most useful features is the ability to see, in real time, what the new file names will look like before any change is actually made.

Visit www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk to download the program. The site includes lots of information to help you quickly learn how to effectively use the application. See the features list for a more detailed list of the programs capabilities. It is a free download but donations are accepted.

The trouble started when I went to install and use Ubuntu Server Edition. I did eventually get it installed after burning multiple copies of different versions, but I ended up removing it. Come to find out the main purpose for which Walnut Creek was wanting the server, a database server for Quickbooks, requires Windows in order to work properly. Emphasis on the properly since it will and did work on Ubuntu, but it did not perform consistently. The server holding the Quickbooks data file has to have a service running on it to coordinate the multiple computer access to the same data file. The service is only available for Windows.

Besides all that, I don’t think I was ready to handle setting up users and share permissions on a Linux/Windows/Mac network. I have come to realize that despite all the knocks on Microsoft and their products they, for the most part, just work and work quite well. I know that most of my problems were probably just because of a lack of knowledge and experience on my part, but some were a result of Linux just not being as seamless and user friendly as Windows. I know it’s blasphemy to say this in some circles, but I guess that’s what you get with the $150 or so odd dollars it costs to purchase Windows XP. I’m not off Ubuntu completely since I am still running the regular install on my old laptop without any issues at all.

I ended up installing Windows XP Professional X64 Edition without any problems. I purchase the OEM version from Newegg.com for $139.99. It was the best deal I’ve seen on XP Pro. Quickbooks installed without any problem and the muiltiuser interface was up and running without a hitch.

One additional note. I added a APC UPS battery backup behind the server for surge protection as well as to increase reliablility through power outages.

My next post on Building a Server will be on setting up remote access capabilty.

Also see: Building a Server – Part I

I am planning on installing Ubuntu Linux – Server Edition on the new server. The main reason for using this operating system is the cost – free. Also, Linux is more secure and less susceptible to viruses than Windows operating systems. I have installed Ubuntu on a couple machines before so I’m hoping the install and configuration process will go smoothly. Hopefully, considering no one at Walnut Creek knows how to use Linux, once I get the machine up and running it should be mostly maintenance free. As far as the use of Ubuntu vs. another Linux distribution; it is only because Ubuntu is the one I’m most familiar with. Also, it is very user friendly which is great for a Linux novice like me.

Since I have never built a dedicated server before, I am pretty much going into this blind as far as hardware is concerned. I did some quick research and chose an AMD Opteron 165 as the processor to build the system around. This will be my first experience with a dual core processor. Once I settled on that I just found components to fit. I am planning on using dual hard drives in a RAID 1 setup for extra protection in the case of a drive failure.

All of the components were ordered from Newegg.com. I have purchased from Newegg multiple times in the past, and they always have great prices and service. If you are planning on purchasing any computer or electronics components I would suggest you check them out. None of the hardware components have arrived, but below is a list of the entire system. I plan on continuing this series of posts as I make progress with the new system. Hopefully, it is successful.

• Processor – AMD Opteron 165 Denmark
• Motherboard – TYAN S2865G2NR
• System Memory – CORSAIR ValueSelect 1GB
• Hard Drive – (2) Western Digital Caviar SE WD1600JS 160GB
• DVD Drive – NEC 16X DVD±R DVD Burner
• Floppy Drive – Hopefully I can find one somewhere
• Case/Power Supply – APEVIA (ASPIRE) X-Alien ATXA1A

Also see: Building a Sever – Part II