Tutorials On Using Voltaic Difference Engines

The Spook Has Moved!

2008-05-21T11:32:00.000-07:00

my new address is:
http://www.althespook.com/ravings/
please drop by! And did I mention you can finally comment? Really!

A Brief Note About Comments

2007-09-21T03:18:00.000-07:00

After some discussion it appears that the Kelgarries Blogswarm won't be able to support comments at this time due to sheer volume of material we need to work with to achieve our goals. Once we migrate to our own servers (scheduled for early 2009) we'll be able to support a full comments implementation.

Thanks for your interest, and enjoy the blog!

[IE Codex][RSS Folio] A Tutorial On Using The Internet Explorer 7 RSS Feed

2007-09-19T21:22:00.000-07:00

This is a tutorial on subscribing to a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed with the built-in Internet Explorer 7 RSS feed reader. It applies to all web sites, blogs, and other internet content which provide some form of RSS output. (All the Kelgarries Blogswarm blogs have this capacity.) By subscribing to an RSS feed from a blog, you are guaranteed not to miss a posting; the RSS mechanism updates your browser with the latest posts from the blog automatically every time you run the browser program.

A Bring up Internet Explorer 7 on your Windows desktop once you have a stable internet connection. This technique won't work offline.

B Navigate to the blog or web site you wish to check for an RSS feed. This example uses the Ravings Of A Rational Mind blog as an example, but these steps work identically on any blog or web site that provides RSS information.

C If the web site or blog provides an RSS feed, the small striped orange RSS logo will appear on the main IE toolbar. Click on it to begin the subscription process.

D In some cases (but not all) a menu will appear of various RSS feed types. Selecting the RSS type is the best default action; if only another type (like Atom) is available, select it instead.

E A complicated web page will appear. Fortunately you don't have to understand any of it to subscribe to the RSS feed. The only thing to check at this point is that the name of the RSS feed matches that of the blog or site of interest.

F To take advantage of tens of thousands of man-hours of labor at Redmond, simply click the "Subscribe to this feed" link to activate the RSS subscription process in IE 7.

G. A dialog will appear with far too many choices on it once again. The boys at Redmond are perhaps a bit overenthusiastic in their work.

H The only field that matters for our simple purposes is the Name one; it should match the name of the blog you are trying to add an RSS feed from to the IE reader. (This isn't for the benefit of the program, which is speaking a strange binary tongue called "XML" below your hearing threshold to locate said RSS feed. It is to help you as a poor, challenged wetware to find the bloody thing amidst a list of several hundred similar blogs. And yes, your RSS feeds will rapidly grow that large. Trust me.)

I To actually subscribe to the blog, you now have to click on the....wait for it...."subscribe" button. Wow! Please do so unless this has all been a peculiar exercise in GUI sadomasochism.

J If you succeed (and you almost always will), the success page will show up. It also has too many features, so again we will blythely ignore them and go about our bloggy business.

K As a final protection against the internet's DOM (Department Of Murphy), be sure the latest post of the subscribed blog which appears below the success message matches the one you were interested in. With Murphy, you never know.

L All right, now you want to check up on this great new feature to find out if the blog of interest has any new posts. Okay, first start IE 7 again. Then click on the yellow "Favorites" star on the main IE7 toolbar.

M We are assuming you have not used RSS before. Therefore, the Favorites drop down sidebar will be set by default to your Favorites (IE bookmarks).

N From this version of the sidebar you can navigate to any saved URL (bookmark) by simply clicking on it. This includes blogs. However, none of this has anything to do with RSS!

O To check on the shiny new RSS feed you just subscribed to, click the orange striped "Feeds" button.

P The sidebar will change and a list of the subscribed RSS feeds will appear. Since we've only subscribed to one, only one such feed is listed. To see the latest posts to the feed (and thus to the blog of interest) simply click on the feed name in the list.

Q After a while, you will begin to accumulate a number of RSS feed subscriptions. A later Tutorial will show you how to organize them into folders in IE7. Feeds which have no new posts are shown in ordinary type in the list. Feeds with new posts are shown in boldface type.

R You can obtain extra information about a feed by simply "hovering" (moving the mouse pointer but not clicking) over an RSS subscription link in the list.

S A "tip" window will appear, showing the number of new posts and how long it has been since the subscribed feed was updated by its server.

T When you click on an RSS subscription in IE7, you don't go immediately to the blog or site itself. Instead, you are presented with a precis page listing the name of the blog and various statistics about the current RSS feed.

U The latest blog or web site post will appear in the list below the name. To see additional posts, simply scroll down and they will appear in the order posted and syndicated. (You can control how many posts are displayed and whether only unread posts appear in the display. All these will be covered in later Tutorials.)

Thank you for your kind attention. We hope this helps you keep track of all the fascinating, not to be missed content on the Kelgarries Blogswarm. The attendant has your souvenir tee-shirts and mouse pads by the door; he's the one with the trained cormorant on his shoulder. Our next Tutorial will provide this identical functionality in the popular FireFox web browser.

Following In The Footsteps Of Babbage And Lovelace

2007-09-12T22:20:00.000-07:00

The first modern mechanical computation device of any serious power was designed (twice!) by Charles Babbage. He called it a Difference Engine, and intended it to be used for the solution of complex polynomials like those used to produce logarithms. He never actually built a fully working device, but his plans were sufficient to allow others to do so. To celebrate the 200th anniversary of his birth, the London Science Museum created a fully functioning (and printing!) Difference Engine from his plans, using engineering tolerances available at the time and finding only minor flaws which would have been easily corrected at the time. This stands as a truly momentous achievement on its own, but Babbage was not satisfied with it! He sensed (correctly) that he was onto something much more powerful and began work on his Analytical Engine.

It is important to understand that Dr. Babbage lived almost seventy years before the formulation of the mathematical underpinnings of what he was doing, namely the Church-Turing Thesis, by Alan Turing who would build the Bletchly Engine and become viewed by many as the Father of modern computer science. Despite this, Dr. Babbage developed a Turing-complete assembly-language-like programming system for the machine using three different sizes of punched cards (yes, developed from the same automatic looms that later inspired Dr. Hollerith, founder of IBM!).

Some accounts of Dr. Babbage's work on the Analytical Engine suggest he hired Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, to work with him. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Instead, she learned of the device from friends and became fascinated with it but never was able to formally collaborate with Dr. Babbage due to the man's unfortunate interpersonal issues. She did, however, learn enough on her own to annotate a paper on the device published by Luigi Menabrea, where she showed how to use the device and its language to calculate Bernoulli Numbers. For this elegant act she is considered the first modern computer programmer, and the pascal derivative language Ada is named in her honor.

These computers were entirely mechanical; electricity existed then for mechanical uses only in "Voltaic Piles" (the earliest true batteries) which were the subjects of avid experimentation both scientific and empirical, but were not yet ready for use in anything as delicate as a Difference Engine. (Dr. Babbage did most of his early work in the 1820's and 1830's; the Morse Telegraph became the fist major adaptation of electrical power to an information-oriented use starting about 1850.) Today we have passed the Galvanic barrier and can harness the blythe dance of the ephemeral electron to our own phillistine purposes. One of them is the very beast you are now using, the personal computer.

This blog is designed to provide its readers with sophisticated tutorials in enhancing their use of the modern Windows, Linux, or Macintosh Personal Computer. It will focus on web browser use, application functionality, operating system configuration, and interaction with personal information devices (like smart phones and personal music players.)

We only hope our modest efforts are worthy of the giants on whose shoulders we teeteringly perch...

(Photo courtesy of Wikipedia and The London Science Museum.)