Friday, March 31, 2017

Ubuntu Web Browser

Computer Woes

Wow, I am using the Ubuntu Web Browser that came free, along with the rest of the operating system.
They are looking for a new logo...


I had to temporarily abandon Firefox because I couldn't answer comments. I would type in the text and hit publish, and the screen would do a very ungraceful couple of jerks from one screen to the next, showing the blog front page and then the comment box, and then the comment box empty of the text that I just spent time typing in, and then that would be it.

One "clue" as to what is going on is that "Google account" is not already entered as the default "profile" under the comment form; like it used to be. Now it has the "enter profile," prompting me to select by scrolling down to Google, or Wordpress, anonymous, or whatever..

And one "do you think?!?" clue is that I popped the hard drive out of this Thinkpad and put in the one out of my old Windows 10 system and booted it up.

I can't help think that the operating system found a way to change some of the settings that stay in memory even when the machine is turned off.

Did Windows think that it was being illegally pirated and put on a second machine when it booted up to learn that all the Toshiba hardware that it had been configured for had been replaced? Did it somehow recognize that the serial number that it read off the CPU when it booted up didn't match the one in the laptop that it had been "licensed" to run on?

Who Knows?

This Ubuntu browser, I kind of overlooked when I took it "out of the box" because of how simple it appeared to be, stripped down might be a better term, compared to Firefox.

I know Firefox is highly esteemed as a browser, with the consensus being that it makes Windows Explorer obsolete; but right now I can't comment on my own blog using Firefox and I just did, using the Ubuntu Web Browser. I'm game for jumping ship for now; I'm sure I can even import all of my bookmarks and history and cookies from Firefox.

One thing that I notice about linux applications is that there is a lot of sharing of features that work really well.

For example, the Audacity editor makes it easy to do things like highlight a section and perform and action upon it with a few mouse clicks. Go to the Openshot video editor and voilĂ ! -the same functionality is there when it comes to highlighting things and performing actions upon them.

That's not accidental and illustrates one of the beauties of open source computer code.

Whomever developed the Oneshot editor must have thought "we should make this feature as handy as it is in the Audacity editor; it's really easy to perform these operations in that editor...I know, let's just copy the code from it and paste it in our program; it's open source, after all...

I liken it to driving a BMW, and then switching to a Lexus and finding that they both have great traction because they each have Perelli tires on them. If Audacity is a BMW, and Openshot is,...well you get the idea.

One weird thing is that when a browser opens over the Sacred Heart network, it opens to a Yahoo search page. That just kind of over-writes whatever you might have entered in your browser settings.

At Starbucks, it lands on the Starbucks homepage, showing the latest coffee related articles and advertisements. This is understandable and not an annoyance at all, in exchange for free wi-fi to go with coffee.

This is one of the reasons that I want to become an "expert" in computer languages; so as to not be baffled when all of a sudden I can't comment on my own blog using a certain browser.

I can update Firefox, I can update Ubuntu, and then I can just be glad that I at least have found a work-around for commenting on my own blog.

I guess this is what I get for opening the hood, and tinkering around.

Now, To My Post

I am still up from Wednesday night, into this Thursday morning.

It is raining and gray outside. I can hear the swoosh of the tires on the road.

I am using my Perl script to process this blog post.

I reclaimed the script off of my old hard drive.

All I did was remove one screw and the hard drive slid right out, and the one out of the fried laptop slid almost "right" in (it would have had I inserted it into the little guiding harness that the Thinkpad's current drive was in, so as to guide it right to a perfect mating).

The Thinkpad booted up to windows and began to look and feel just like the Toshiba had before it fried. Except everything looked too wide, and I didn't know where to find the setting to correct it.

There is a ton of music on the thing.

My next step might be to put the old hard drive in the Thinkpad, boot it up to Windows, and then plug the hard drive with the Linux system on it and see if I can mount it as an external drive; then I'd be able to copy music right from one drive to another. It didn't work in the opposite direction...

I found a pleasant surprise in the Perl script. I had added the feature of inserting the code to make bold every word that begins with a capital letter. I already bold-face proper nouns, and I can't think of much that I would capitalize that I wouldn't also make bold. This is so a reader could do a very quick scan, looking for persons, places or capitalized things of interest to her.

I need to fix it so it won't bold face the word "I," though. It's persons places and things other than myself that I want in bold print.

The Quick Fix Jumped Over The Lazy Dan

The quick fix would be to go in and add a line to specify: If the capitalized word is only one letter, then don't bold face it...in case I start a sentence off with "A long time ago..." it won't bold the A just because it is capitalized. Of course, if I write "A Tale of Two Cities," then the whole title EXCEPT the A would be bold; for no apparent reason.

I am happy with my script, though. I look forward to learning XML inside and out, and maybe some PHP, and someday, I would like to embed my little Perl script into the template of this blog, so that I can just type my words in and it will be somehow executed behind the scenes on the text...I haven't gotten that far yet in "Beginning XML" yet, to know.

But, I am typing away right now just to give the program a good chunk to work on.

The paragraphs are split according to whenever I press the return bar. I otherwise just put sentence after sentence until my train of thought changes, then I hit the return.

And start a new paragraph.

One a different color from the previous one, and, like it, chosen at random from a palette light enough in hue to show up against the black background that the blog now has.

True Colors (since I have Cindy Lauper singing that on my player)

I limit the colors by making the program choose from only the highest hexadecimal (A through F) values that represent the Red Green and Blue values that are blended in producing a color -producing the perception of color through the human eye, that is.

This system has been around since the first color televisions, on which you could see, with a magnifying glass, the actual clusters of 3 little dots, with the reds and blues and greens changing in intensity with relationship to one another. That is until your father tells you to get your head away from the TV, especially with that magnifying glass.

There was concern, back then in the "Nuclear Age," (or the "Space Age" to the more optimistic of them) about the radiation emitted by TVs, and, of course, those new-fangled microwave ovens that were coming out. Some claimed that such constant exposure to it would turn us into a race of brain-dead skeezers, within 50 years. But, every generation harbors an element that is wary of "progress," I suppose.

They should have known that we would eventually be using microwaves to destroy nuclear weapons in space...

But, since the human eye hasn't changed much, neither has the technology had to, and Pure white is still #FFFFFF (F being the highest digit in hexadecimal, equal to 15) and pure black, "#000000."

An interesting aspect is the addition of an independent control over the "hue" or saturation of the color. There is a difference to the human eye in the color of a red shirt when it is out in the sunlight, compared to when in an almost dark room, for example, even though the shirt's "color" never changes.

The darkest hue that my program will ever randomly select would be #AAAAAA, and there is only one chance in 46,656 of all six digits being A. Example of darkest hue of color that you will see on this blog. It is equally unlikely that you will ever see any pure white text in the blog, either.

That kind of sheds light on the problem of "contrast" that I am having when the program randomly selects two very similar colors for abutting paragraphs, so that it hardly looks like they are different colors and more looks like there is something wrong with your screen and the colors are starting to bleed and look "watery."

The overall view is of pastel, with subtle changes in shade.

I thought about pre-selecting a number of colors and then letting the program randomly pick from only them. That way I could make sure it picked a color more drastically different from the preceding paragraph's, by grouping them into 2 or 3 separate files, all containing colors that match and contrast with the colors in the other one. One file could be named "pants.pl" and could hold all of the colors that pants might be; basic, subdued hues, to go along with a "shirts.pl" and "ties.pl" file. That way I could have the program randomly pick out a nice outfit, er, color scheme for the blog posts. While I sit on my ass, made lazy and complacent by technology.

Then, I also had the idea to have the program do a search for key words in the text, and then try to match the color of the paragraph to the context. Any paragraph that mentions money, has a "$" in it, or has phrases like "played last night" in it would be rendered in "money green," for example (read from the shirts.pl file).

Oh, I have ideas for this blog, people.

You readers do all know that this blog will continue to publish for another 8,000 or so, depending upon when I die, years after I am gone, don't you?

Sure. Using the post "scheduling" option, I've got some stuff cued to come out in the year 8,017 that's going to trend!

Let me process this and see what pretty colors I get, and how many words I wrote. I'll get to the problem with I, later.

Let me test it out, Lilly Pad. Sacred Heart Apartments, I am Daniel; good.

Friday morning and, the sun is coming up. I got some rest in, after having worked on recovering files off the old hard drive, then reviewed a lot of them.

This Perl script was a good recovery; but I forgot to transfer all of my Perl manuals and tutorials.

You've just read: 1,309 words. POWERED BY ↁ DANIEL-SOFT TEXT SOLUTIONS ↁ"

3 comments:

  1. Windows Key > Control Panel > Appearance and Personalization > Display Settings > Advanced and that's how you change a "too wide" display.

    Assuming you're using Windows 10 as I am.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks, that's how I would have to have done it, since it was a Windows 10? disk that I booted up...I'll do that the next time I pop that hard drive in...then when the Thinkpad has become a Windows machine, I'll connect this Linux drive with the cable I got, so it will become external storage...then the question will be, can Windows read files off a linux (ext5?) file system, or more specifically, will it be able to write a bunch of stuff out of the 300 gigs of stuff onto the linux drive; and then will linux be able to read it after I swap the drives back...
    I guess what I'm saying is that my next post might be; blogging from library, laptop all f***ed up!

    ReplyDelete
  3. You can do a dual boot, I believe, so you can run your laptop on Ubuntu but be able to switch it to Windows.

    Also, since you're in an apartment and not paying for your electricity, you can find desktops all over the place cheap and SVGA monitors too, so you could set up a machine to have in your apartment. Hell my storage place had two towers out by the trash enclosure for anyone to take if they liked.

    ReplyDelete

Only rude and disrespectful comments will be replied to rudely and disrespectfully. Personal attacks will be replied to in kind, with the goal of providing satisfaction to the attacker.