Welcome to the Windy Weather Website.

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These are musings from my vantage point on the Oregon South Coast.

A long-time software engineer and general geek, I continue my exploration with Photography, 3D Graphics, Linux and other nonsense. Come along for the ride.

My Photo Gallery is here. And of special interest are the albums of the beautiful models that I’ve worked with. If you are of age, and enjoy artistic photos, you should register on the photo gallery to see all of the beautiful pictures. If you are a model or need photos for any other reason, my rates are very affordable. And for special clients, I will consider TFCD. Contact me and we can discuss your needs.

Look on the left for links to topics of interest as well as my photographer sites on modeling portals.

I fix computers, and software and build websites. For more information, check this page. I’ve built WordPress based sites with custom themes, and photo galleries based on Coppermine for several clients.

Enjoy, and don’t hesitate to drop me a note at djduffy at windyweather dot net if you have a question or comment that you don’t want to just leave here on the site.

Sunspear Armor in Blue

I began my career on 21 July 2010, and was able to rapidly progress with help from my brothers and sisters who have come before me. Usually it is very difficult to save gold and materials to obtain new armor and weapons, but since my brothers and sisters have provided for my training, I was able to use the best armor and weapons from the very beginning of my training.

After starting my training in Chahbek Village in Istan, I was able to do a few quests to obtain the 100 gold or so required to open a Xunlai Storage account, and at that point I could obtain the gold, materials and weapons that my older siblings saved for me.  Among the first of these was a very powerful Droknar’s Spear that Windy Reaper obtained when he completed Eye of the North. This spear and a powerful Daedal Shield [both with +30 health bonus] allowed me to mow down the foes to complete my early quests without fear of damage.

Droknar's Spear

Daedal Shield

At level 10, I was able to obtain two things that were of a lot of help. One is MOX, a hero who is a very powerful robot. Since we all have access to all the worlds of Guild Wars, we can each obtain MOX as we reach level 10 to help us progress in our training. Also, when I was level 10, I was able to pay for a ride to the Consulate Docks outpost, which normally I would not reach until I was at level 17. This allowed me to purchase the most powerful armor, normally not obtained until much later in the training. At that time I purchased the Sunspear Armor and I decided, based on my novice status, that I would dye it blue.

At level 15 I journeyed to Tyria to accomplish two tasks: Obtain the help of Olias the necromancer hero, and obtain a skill called Chaos Storm, to round out my Mesmer skills. Olias is easy to recruit after completing an easy quest, but it took some time to journey through many long miles of Kryta, and the Northern Shiverpeaks to reach Yaks Bend where I could obtain Chaos Storm from a skill trainer. The foes along the way were only level 8 or 10, but it was a long and arduous journey. The skill was very useful however, and it has served me well in my secondary profession as a Mesmer.

Along the way in my training in Istan I recruited several heroes and each in turn, except MOX, needed to be trained. So we would quest together so that we all reached our maximum potential.

When we had reached level 19, we set sail for Kourna from the Consulate Docks to bring the fight to the Kourna homeland.

There was still much training to do to bring me and my heroes to level 20, and when we accomplished that, just before the Venta Cemetery quest, we set sail for the Eye of the North to continue our training in the Far Shiverpeaks. It turns out that there are many skills and new armor that one can obtain in the Far Shiverpeaks that are very useful in whatever quests you may like to pursue. With my superior weapons, armor and training, I was able to complete the Shiverpeak quests in only a few days and then return to Kourna to continue my quests there.

Reaching Eye of the North First Time

Completing the Eye of the North campaign I was able to obtain a Droknar’s shield to go with my Droknar’s spear, so that now I have a matched set. Also, I was able to obtain the rank of Slayer of Wurms with the Norn and they have allowed me to purchase some very stylish Norn Paragon armor, which I have displayed in my Hall of Monuments.

Norn Armor, Hall of Monuments

So in seven long days of training over about ten days, I have been able to reach my full strength as a warrior in Elona and to continue to aid in the effort to prevent Nightfall.

May the five gods protect you,

Mistress Stormcloud

I made this movie using State software from the XtraNormal site. I tried to make the movie online, but I had to pay for some unknown number of points to be allowed to publish the movie, but thankfully I was able to download the State software for free and make the movie on my desktop and then manually publish it to youtube. The choices of characters and scenes are very limited using State.

Enjoy and consider how dependent you are on your wireless devices.

Jacob Whirlwind has obtained the Ancient Prestige Armor in the Nightfall Campaign.

Jacob Whirlwind - Ancient Armor

Jacob also has obtained all the Avatar skills, both for his own use and of course for all the heroes.

Avatar of Grenth

These Avatars are skills that are quite formidable and add a lot to the success of parties employing Dervish characters or heroes.

Windy Reaper has completed the Eye of the North campaign [EotN] and has obtained the Asura Rank of Not Too Annoying (5), which allows him to purchase the Necromancer Asura Armor. Of all the Necro armor, only this armor appealed to Reaper, and though it was a lot of work to get the gold and the other materials for the armor, it has been worth it to look this great.

The Asurans also supply Spectacles as head gear as an additional bonus.

Asura Necro Armor

Reaper is using a Kerrsh’s Staff, which is a unique item in the EotN campaign. It is obtained once per character after a long and difficult quest. All of our brother’s and sisters have this staff, either for their own use or for the use of their heroes. Since the staff has a health bonus of +60, it is one of the most powerful weapons in our world. It is no doubt that the Asurans make excellent weapons, and we are all fortunate to be able to carry this powerful weapon.

In addition, Reaper has displayed some of the other accomplishments, such as animal companions in his Hall.

Fellowship Monument

Other recent completions of note include both Windy Flayer and Windy Delight completing EotN and with Delight helping Flayer get a unique shield, Flayer now has a Droknar’s Axe and a Droknar’s Shield, both of which are unique items which can only be obtained on the first completion of the EotN campaign. Here is Flayer with his new weapons.

Droknar's Weapons

The Droknar’s weapons that Flayer carries, each have a health bonus of +30, so he is afforded a powerful health bonus as he forges forward through our world.

Update: Jacob finished enough of the EotN to get a tapestry and has displayed his armor in the Hall of Monuments.

Jacob Closeup

Here are the snapshots we have taken of our travels:

The Dragon Festival 2010

For the past few days there has been a chain of quests to get most of the Victory Tokens that are required to get a mask. I misunderstood, even after reading, that I needed to get 250 tokens for each of my 8 characters to have them each get a mask. It turns out that you can get one mask per account, and then use the Festival Hat NPC to get other masks for each character in the account. So now after about an hour’s work for each character, plus several more hours and a few K gold to buy additional tokens, I have a ton of tokens that I can sell to others.

I have spent some time dyeing each of the masks to match the costumes of the characters.

Gulf Coast Cleanup Ideas and all associated materials by Darrell Duffy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

The oil coming ashore on the gulf coast is making a terrible mess. In order to save the wetlands, the wildlife and the seafood industries of the area it is clear that the oil will need to be cleaned up, but this is not going to be the same problem as we faced in Alaska. Men in haz-mat suits with brushes and steam hoses are not going to be able to tackle the problem. So how might this problem be solved?
I recently saw a program on HD Theater channel which described the De Beers diamond mining dredge called Peace in Africa. This ship mined diamonds from the ocean at the rate of about 240,000 carats per year. See: http://www.theartofdredging.com/peaceinafrica.htm and http://www.debeersgroup.com/en/Exploration-and-mining/Mining-operations/South-African-Sea-Areas/
Here is a picture, copyright De Beers, of Peace in Africa.

If we, as a civilization are willing to go to this time and trouble for diamonds, surely we can go beyond these lengths to restore the ecology, the wildlife and livelihoods of the folks of the gulf coast after this tragic accident. This paper looks at some of the problems involved in building cleaning dredges to solve the problem of cleaning up the Gulf Coast.

Caveats

While I am not a process design engineer, I am making a proposal for some of the problems that will be encountered along with some candidate approaches. The intent of this document is to encourage debate of the process required to clean up the Gulf coast after the Deep Horizon oil spill.

Describing the Problem

There are a number of challenges to be solved to clean up the oil from shallow water, wetlands and beaches:

1. The water is shallow. Any processing dredge must be able to operate over mud as well as shallow water and narrow passages. It is possible to consider that the ship will make its own channel to travel, but it must be able to operate with very shallow draft.
2. Large volumes of water, mud and sand, with many types of vegetation must be processed and clean sand and water must be returned to the environment. This means that heavy metals, dispersant and other toxins as well as oil must be removed from the sand, water, and scrubbed from any smoke that is the result of burning processes.
3. It is going to take more energy to incinerate the millions [billions] of tons of coastline than will be provided by the oil  that is present, so fuel must be provided, and this is most effectively be unprocessed crude oil from nearby wells delivered by shallow water tankers or by pipelines that are towed behind the dredge.
4. Wetlands are excellent filters so only the margins are expected to be affected by the oil.
5. Since only the margins are affected, the length of coast line affected in wetlands is very much larger compared with the straight coastline between two points.
6. Wetlands must be protected once they are cleaned, probably by a well designed set of shallow water sand bars that trap further oil coming ashore.
7. Once the oil threat is gone, these sand bars must be removed or redesigned to allow the wetlands to flush normally with the tides. These bars can form part of a barrier bar system to mitigate and control future hurricane damage and should be designed with that in mind.
8. During some times of its operation, such as low tides and when operating in narrow channels, there will not be enough water locally at the dredge for proper processing, so a continuous pipeline will be required to the dredge from deeper water to provide additional water for processing. If this water contains oil, that is no problem since the dredge will clean all of its effluent completely of oil and toxins, such as dispersant, before discharging it into the estuary.
9. There are three components in the material dredged from the estuary: mud sand and possibly gravel which is heavier than water, organic debris which is lighter than water, and water with entrained or emulsified oil. The heavier and lighter components can be burned together, but for this to work effectively, most of the water/oil mixture must be separated. If the water/oil is not removed, then the other debris will cook a long time before it reaches a high enough temperature to burn the oil / toxins out.
10. A likely approach to removing the oil from the water would be to using a large continuous belt of a thick mesh filter which is made of a substance which will trap oil / toxins. The belt will move continuously from entrapping oil / toxins to a furnace where it will be heated to a very high temperature to burn off the oil / toxins and back to the entrapment zone of the dredge.
11. All smoke from the incinerators is scrubbed to move any particulates and any toxic gasses. A modified version of scrubbers for coal fired electric power plants seems promising for this technology.
12. All processing areas of the dredge are provided with double or triple redundancy so that any failure or maintenance would reduce capacity, but not stop the processing.

Schematic Design of the Dredge

Example Renders of a Dredge

Overview

This example shows a platform 100m x 50m with two dredge booms. The processing plant may require a platform twice that size. For comparison, the diamond dredge mentioned above is over 200m long.
I have not tried to design any way to move the dredge through the marsh. It seems clear that either towing with anchors or walking with legs will be required.

Crawler Detail

The recovery head is suspended from the booms which move back and forth and can direct the head via cables from above. Each head contains a cutter head to process sand, mud and vegetation including small trees as well as powerful rotary pump to recover the debris with sufficient water to avoid loss of the contaminated debris.

Processing Detail

The processing plant is likely to be more complex than a diamond dredge, which cost about $110m to convert from a cargo ship completed in 2007. But with BP company profits exceeding $20BPounds in 2007, it seems clear that money is not a problem. Many of these dredge platforms are going to be required to clean up the marshes in a reasonable amount of time.

Crawler Dredge Head

The dredge heads do not ride in the marsh but are suspended above it to avoid stirring the mud and making the oil harder to recover. The platform floats over land that is already cleaned. The boom head is steered by cables from the boom above it.
The dredge heads resemble vacuum cleaner heads with grinders that cut up vegetation including grass and trees, as well as mud and sand and then using a large blower to pump the contaminated debris and water for processing.

Distribution Plenum

The distribution plenum allows parts of the dredge to be taken offline for repair or maintenance.

Liquid / Debris Separator

It is essential to separate water/ oil from the sand / vegetation for incineration. A rotary separator probably will work for this. Essentially spin dry the debris out of the liquid. Any vapors are sent on with the debris for incineration.

Liquid / Oil Separation / Incineration

The water and oil must be separated so that clean water can be returned to the marsh. Removing salt is not done, but toxic metals should be separated with the oil. This might be done by a large blanket of absorbent material which will survive the high temperatures required to incinerate the oil. Oil is trapped in the blanket and then burned off the blanket while the water does not stick to the blanket and is discharged. Further cleaning may be required of the water but the blanket should be designed to remove the oil to a very large extent.
The smoke is sent to the stack scrubbers.

Debris Incineration

The debris, including all sand, mud, shells and vegetation are incinerated to remove all oil and other toxic materials.  It may not be necessary to remove the ash since this may not be very harmful to the environment. The smoke from this incineration is sent to the stack scrubbers.

Stack Scrubbers

Before releasing any smoke from the platform, it is scrubbed using a suitable method to remove any toxic gases and metal oxides. This technology is similar to that used in coal fired power plants.

Energy and Water Supplies

The oil recovered will not be enough to supply the energy requirements of the platform. An oil pipeline  dragged behind the platform to a mother ship offshore will provide the energy and pump clean sea water from offshore to aid in the processing. Additional water will be required at low tide for the dredging. As the rig operates, it adds a large amount of water to the marsh which washes back out to sea taking the silt stirred up by the operation to mitigate the drowning of uncontaminated marsh with silt.

Where Do We Go From Here?

I hope this paper spurs debate and design. No matter what happens from now on, at least one such clean-up dredge will be required to clean up the Gulf Coast marshes. The sooner we start design, testing and construction, the sooner we will have the mess cleaned up. It seems clear that a multi-disciplinary team of ecologists, process engineers and heavy equipment construction contractors are required to complete such a large project.
Darrell Duffy
Coos Bay, OR
6 June 2010

Document as PDF Gulf_Coast_Cleanup_01

3dsMax 2009 Model of Dredge Oil_Dredge_Crawler_06

Seitung Armor in Green

My name is Windy Summoner. I was born on April 1st, 2010 on Shing Jea Island and began my training with Master Togo. My mission was to train to level 20 in Kaineng City and then emigrate to Elona to assist the Sunspears with the battle to save Elona from Night Fall. As a Ritualist I control the spirits of nature to help in my battles.

My weaker Seitung Armor was green in keeping with the forest colors of the island. But shortly after moving to the City, I found that Seitung armor was way too expensive since it required 32 Monstrous Claws which were 1800G each. This meant that my armor would have cost well over 40P [40,000G]. I was able to obtain Canthan maximum strength armor for 5P [5000G] and decided it should be purple. The market price for Monstrous Claws seemed very unusual.

After moving to Elona, I returned to Kaineng City and obtained a set of Imperial Armor and now wear a mixed outfit from the two sets. I prefer the boots and jacket of the Imperial set, and the gloves and kilt of the Canthan set. The Imperial jacket and boots are more formal, while the kilt of the Canthan set is cooler in the hot climate of Elona. When I visit the Far Shiverpeaks of the Eye of the North, I prefer the complete Imperial set.

Imperial Armor in Elona

This is the Imperial armor set. Looks hot don’t you think?

I like the formal shoulder piece on the Imperial set and the boots look a lot more formal and more masculine.

Mixed Set

Here”s the mixed set that I’m wearing now.

Here are some more snapshots I’ve taken recently.

Notice my pet tiger who is now at level 20 and quite powerful.

• ZOHO Creator – 3 apps free. $15/mo basic plan.
• Dabble DB – free public data. $24/mo for private data. Very cool concepts.
• Web Office – $53/mo includes data.
• Google Docs – Free. No database. Spreadsheet only.
• BaseCamp – No free option. Starts at $24/mo.
• Windows Azure – Clearly not personal. Impossible to tell what it would cost.

And there are more, mostly pitched at small businesses and enterprises, and expensive. At least very expensive compared with Blogging or Photo Galleries. So my question is: Why are database tools so expensive compared with Blogging and Photo tools, which are usually free or almost free? The reason I believe is Open Source.

I think there is a very interesting opportunity for a platform, like WordPress for personal data tables.

Like WordPress for Data

WordPress is a very popular blogging platform and it has an Open Source model. The software is free, but there is a combined Hosting Service / Blog based on wordpress that costs a modest amount. It seems to me that we need to have this model with web data tools, or what I’m going to call Personal Cloud Databases. What I want is a WordPress like platform for Personal Data. It would have the following attributes:

1. The software would be OpenSource under GPL licensing and
2. would be suitable for personal and small business use. The target is not the Enterprise, those folks already have many cloud solutions.
3. You could easily install it on your own hosting service or
4. there would be one or more paid services that provide reasonable plans – $5-$10/mo – that would provide hosting possibly with co-located blog/sites and domain purchase.
5. Hosting sites like SquareSpace could integrate the software to provide data services in addition to their site creation and hosting.
6. The platform would allow import and export of data in some common forms, including SQL so that more complex databases could be accomodated.
7. The methodology would be simplified. More at the level of MS Access or OpenOffice Base, rather than the level of SQL tools or phpMyAdmin.
8. WordPress features of Themes, Plugins, Widgets would be provided to allow a rich eco-system of contributors to develop. The real success of WordPress, I think, is the nature of this large eco-system. And themes, and plugins are key to this eco-system.
9. WordPress features like ease of install and ease of update are provided. The ability install plugins/themes directly with no download/upload cycle and the ability to upgrade the wordpress directly on the site are key ease-of-use features for any modern web platform.
10. It would fit nicely with, or embed in, Joomla, Drupal, WordPress and Forums. This means that it can be embedded to add data, as well as view it, and it can have complementary themes, or use, themes from these CMS systems – and possibly others. Joomla and Drupal do not have serious data management plug-ins, and the use of these CMS systems to build serious business sites points to the need for a data tool that works with these environments.

Starting a Design but DHX Quick Tables is Better

I have started design of such an environment as I just described, based on the DOJO Javascript toolkit and a php back end. But then I found the DHX tools and specifically DHX Quick Tables and I’ve re-directed my efforts.

At this point, I’ll be forwarding these ideas to the creators of DHX tools and continue, at some level, to investigate using DHX tools to build a Personal Cloud Database.

DHX QT Enhancements for Personal Cloud Data

As I understand it, DHX QT has the following limitations that should be enhanced to provide the PCD platform:

1. Ability to build tables and fields directly in the tool rather than importing tables that are created with another tool.
2. Support for field types. See below.
3. Support for forms. While one can to CRUD [Create Update Delete] on a table using only a grid view, there are more complex tables [or support for long text fields like the book example] where forms are useful.
4. The elimination of a table creation step in favor of table creation as a form is created has much appeal in simplifying the process. ZOHO creator does this. Study of ZOHO Creator may lead to interesting insights into the entire design.
5. Support for multiple users and passwords in the style of WordPress.
6. Support for multiple databases under one installation. Currently DHX QT supports only one database per installation, so a separate installation is required to support multiple databases.
7. Storage of meta data in a database table rather than a text file. This makes backup easy. Currently backing up a DHX QT application requires backing some some configuration data files.
8. Themes. Incorporating the Skin Designer into the platform and allowing Themes to be exported would solve the problem. Of course apply and manage themes
9. Ability to easily embed table views in other CMSs / web pages. Export an <IFRAME> at minimum.
10. Plug-ins, Auto-install, update etc. as for WordPress.
11. Plugins probably take the form of filters and datatype widgets. Complex layout like wordpress is not needed since the data tables can be embedded in other CMSs to provide this layout.

Support for the following datatypes is interesting. These are pretty much those provided by ZOHO Creator:

1. Text with max width.
2. Multi-line text.
3. Text with an input mask.
4. Numeric field: Integer, Decimal, Real?
5. Date, Time and Date/Time. All with popup widgets for setting and display preferences.
6. Enum – with an easily edited set of choices. Display as Pull-Down or Radio box as edit.
7. Set – with an easily edited set of choices. Displayed as a set of checkboxes when modifying the field, rather than requiring “armor,pants,gloves” style entry.
8. Single Checkbox.
9. Image – as file path on the server or url or blob.
10. URL – as link to web with New Window option default.
11. Table Link or Lookup field. This relates a field on one table to a field in another table. This provides the ability to build 1st normal form databases. For example, A Char_Table contains an ID and a CharName field. In another CharArmor table, the Char holding the armor is specified as a CharID field which contains the ID number from the Char_Table. In the UI it is displayed as the CharName text field and is set with a drop-down populated by the CharNames from the Char_Table. ZOHO Creator has a Lookup field, which appears to work this way.

Most of the complicated parts of the platform are already present in the DHX tools, including the widgets – maybe not image – and the grid display and “connector” which provides a simple way to build a server in php, or other languages.

I would hope that the DHX folks pick up the torch and proceed to build the environment as an Open Source platform in the style of WordPress so that we can get on with building the eco-system.

Enjoy,

Windy

I have found a solution with DHX Quick Tables, and for now I’m using that as we will see. I’ve exported the 2Moons data from Zoho Creator and built a MySQL database with 3 tables: character, armor and weapons. I’ll do the other tables later, but for now everything is working. I’m using MySQL 5 and innoDB tables. One minor glitch is that DHX requires php5, and I had not yet upgraded my site to php5. Once I asked the support group how to upgrade, I was all set.

I’ve discovered the following things that will help you if you decide to do this as well:

First you need to define  your MySQL database and table. When testing this locally in an xampp environment, I used MySQL Admin to define the database, and a user with a password and full access to the database. On my hosting service, I used phpMyAdmin, which is provided in the control panels. Once I had the database and user defined, I used phpMyAdmin to create the tables and upload the data. I had exported the data from ZOHO creator as CSV files, so I stripped off the header and used the LOAD function to populate the table. There are several things to watch for as you migrate to DHX quick tables.

1. You need an INT autoincrement field in the table. This field will not be displayed in the tables, but is required so that updates work correctly. It is easy to add a field using phpMyAdmin. Set the datatype to INT and enable AutoIncrement and Primary Index.
2. Avoid integer fields, unless you want to enter data. Null fields for INT fields do not appear to work. But VARCHAR NULL fields work just fine.
3. SETs and ENUMs work, but you cannot leave ENUMs null either, so you may want to use SETs. ZOHO provides a series of checkboxes for ENUMs which is more convenient to edit them. With DHXQT, you must enter them as a series of names with commas. Leave out the spaces like this: pants,armor,helmet.
4. You can set a character name using a pull down list.
5. Linked fields are not provided. The tables are isolated. This may be a problem for some applications, but in this case it’s not a big deal.

Table Definitions

Unlike ZOHO creator, MS Access, or OpenOffice Base, defining tables in DHXQT requires knowledge of SQL and detailed knowledge of databases. As I will discuss in a later article, DHXQT could form the basis of an easy to use Personal Cloud Database tool, but it’s not there yet. You must be database savvy and comfortable with tools like phpMyAdmin to use DHXQT.

For this application I’ve defined three tables:

1. A character table.
2. A table with Armor parts.
3. A table with Weapons.

Here’s the Characters table:

--
-- Table structure for table `characters`
--
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `characters` (
`ID` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`char_name` varchar(32) NOT NULL,
`level` int(11) NOT NULL,
`class` enum('Aloken','Knight','Summoner','Segnale','Hunter','Magician','Bagi Warrior') NOT NULL,
`server` varchar(16) NOT NULL,
`account_name` varchar(32) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY  (`ID`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB  DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=12 ;

The armor and weapon tables are more complicated:

–
– Table structure for table `character_armor`
–

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `character_armor` (
`ID` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`char_name` varchar(32) NOT NULL,
`level` int(11) NOT NULL,
`armor_type` varchar(64) NOT NULL,
`armor_parts` set(‘boots’,'pants’,'gloves’,'armor’,'helmet’) default NULL,
`boots_fortified` varchar(64) default NULL,
`pants_fortified` varchar(64) default NULL,
`gloves_fortified` varchar(64) default NULL,
`armor_fortified` varchar(64) default NULL,
`helmet_fortified` varchar(64) default NULL,
`sold` set(‘boots’,'pants’,'gloves’,'armor’,'helmet’) default NULL,
PRIMARY KEY  (`ID`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB  DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=80 ;

–
– Table structure for table `character_weapons`
–

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `character_weapons` (
`ID` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`char_name` varchar(64) NOT NULL,
`level` int(11) NOT NULL,
`weapon_name` varchar(64) NOT NULL,
`have_need` set(‘have’,'need’) default NULL,
`plus_level` varchar(4) default NULL,
`enhancements` varchar(64) default NULL,
`gem_fortifications` varchar(64) default NULL,
`sale_state` set(‘sale’,'sold’) default NULL,
`dil_price` varchar(11) default NULL,
PRIMARY KEY  (`ID`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB  DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=115

The quick tables created from these look as follows:

The Character Table:

The Armor Table:

The Weapon Table:

As you see, each instance of DHXQT supports multiple tables from the same database.

You can have as many databases as you like on your system. Just install a new instance of Quick Tables for each database.

Applying New Styles

As you can see, I have set the title tag and adjusted the styles to be the built-in style of black. This must be done by editing the php file for each table manager.

The DHX Skin Builder is used to build the styles and then they are copied to the DHXQT directory and the table file modified to load the new styles.

The Books Database

Two years ago I needed to sell a couple of hundred old science fiction paperback books, so I entered them all into a database table, photographed their covers and divided them into lots by publication years to sell on Ebay. At the time I wanted a way for folks to see the detailed information on the books before they bid. I built a MySQL data table by hand and then a simple php application, again by hand, to sort and display the books in a web page. The web display is trivial using DHXQT, but there are limitations. It does not seem there is an image display widget in the DHX toolkit this is a surprising omission given the power and breadth of the toolkit.

Here is the book table in QT.

Summary

While Quick Tables does not have linked fields, and some of the other  field types that ZOHO supports, Quick Tables have the advantage of being free, so you can build as many tables as you like. They are slightly more difficult to build, but there is no limit to the number or the size of the data you can store. Given the key scheme that Quick Tables uses for security, the data is quite secure from modification.

- windy

Middle_Earth_Sidebar_foot

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An iCal importer for Open Office Calc would have the widest appeal and widest platform support.

I have written a simple importer for Open Office 3.1.1. I have not tested it on other versions of OO.

You can download it here: iCal_Import_04

After an Import

One of the things that I needed to do was to add up times that I spent on certain activities. By adopting conventions about how to fill in the event summary field, and adding a column for Duration, it’s easy to do this.

To use the importer, download it and unpack it to your hard drive. You may need to adjust your Security settings to allow macros to run, and possibly set a folder on your hard drive as a trusted source.

Open the spreadsheet with Open Office 3.1.1 or later. I suggest you Save As… to a new name as soon as you open it to avoid modifying the original file. Once you have saved it with the name you like, run the main macro as follows:

Run a Macro

and choose the macro MAIN from the file.

Select the Main Macro

Browse for the ics file, and set the time zone offset:

iCal importer dialog

Next click the Import File button to import the calendar file.

After an Import

After the import you can adjust the column widths, sort the data and add new colunns to analyze the data.

Select to Sort

Select rows 2 to the end to sort the data. Do not select the column headers.

Sort Dialog

Here we sort by column C, the subject.

After Sort and adding Duration

The import sheet comes with the duration column pre-loaded. The formula for the duration is:

=24*(TIMEVALUE(B2) – TIMEVALUE(A2) )

Of course charts and other analyses can be easily done now that the data is in a spreadsheet.

The importer is distributed with a GPL V3 license.

Enjoy,

- Windy

Is that cool or what??

I didn’t have any tags assigned, but it’s willing to cloud my topics, er Categories. So no worries.

Enjoy,

Windy

I built this graphic using 3dsmax using splines and bevels and then lit it with two lights one at top left and a dimmer one on bottom left.

The whole graphic shows the header surround, the sidebar top and bottom background and the footer pieces. The high res graphic will be cut into chunks for backgrounds for the various parts of the theme.

- windy

Category Display

Here is the category display from the joomla database.

If you could Google for “Ubuntu Samba Install” and get a page that told you what you wanted to know, then I wouldn’t do this post, but you don’t get a good page. This page is not that helpful. It looks it was written in the dark ages and it does not configure WINS so that you can PING the other systems on your network.

So here’s the real scoop, which is a modified version of this post I did for Gutsy.

First you need to install WINBIND. So use the package manager at SYSTEM > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager. Search for WINBIND and mark for install. This picture shows what you need to have – or at least what I have installed. I think if you search successively for WINBIND, SAMBA, SMBCLIENT and SMB you will find these. Many of the things in this picture are probably dependencies that will be pulled in automatically.

Now you need to edit the /etc/nsswitch.conf file to change the order to allow wins to work.

This change allows winbind to find the other computers on the network. This allows PING to work, which allows you to diagnose issues, and allows SAMBA to find other systems on the network using the wins protocol. You don’t need to restart anything or reboot after you edit this file. When this is working, you should get the following when you use System > Administration > Network Tools > Ping:

Ok, the next step is to configure SAMBA by editing the /etc/samba/smb.conf file. The system that I upgraded worked fine after the upgrade from Gutsy to Karmic because this file was preserved, and because the upgrades [ 4 of them] all preserved the packages already installed. But if you are installing a new system, then you will need to change the smb.conf file since it does not work out of the box, as far as I can tell. Here’s a terminal session that shows what to do to edit the file. I’m not going to describe the whole Sudo thing, you can find that elsewhere.

Notice that Samba needs a restart after any changes to smb.conf. I’m not going to go through all the details like I did last time, you can refer to the previous post.  Here’s a copy of the file that I’m using now.

smb_conf

There is one more thing to do. Since we are using security = user with samba, we must set a samba password for every account that we are going to use with samba. I believe this results from the fact that windows users md4 for password hashing, and passes this hash across the network to authenticate users. Since linux [unix] uses a stronger password hash, you must save the MD4 hash of the password in a samba database to allow authentication for samba. Here’s the process from the other post:

darrell@squall-ubuntu:/etc/samba$ sudo smbpasswd -a darrell
[sudo] password for darrell:
New SMB password:
Retype new SMB password:
darrell@squall-ubuntu:/etc/samba$

Ignore the following material, it is fixed by the above smbpasswd fix.

There are still problems that I cannot solve:

With this configuration I get two way file sharing with Vista x86 x64 and Win xp on the system that was upgraded. But when I installed a new system, and followed these steps, including using exactly this smb.conf file, the newly installed system would not allow Vista x86 or x64 clients to access Ubuntu. Win XP as the client worked just fine. Ubuntu as the client worked for Vista x86, x64 and Win XP. Read only. I only allow read-only file shares on my network to avoid the spread of worms should I get them.

Looking into a Vista x64 Machine

Here’s an example of an error when trying to connect to Ubuntu from Vista.

This is the network as seen from a Vista x86 machine. You can see that both Ubuntu machines, Squall-Ubuntu and Blue-Diamond are visible.

Network as Seen from Vista x86

You can connect to Squall-Ubuntu, but not to Blue-Diamond.

It doesn’t matter whether you put in darrell, or blue-diamond\darrell, you get the same error. But if you connect to squall-ubuntu, which is the upgraded machine, then it works just fine. I have no clue what the differences are between the configurations. Recall that I’m using the same smb.conf file on both machines and that both have the same nsswitch.conf file.

No clue what’s wrong.

But the Ubuntu machines can see all the Windows machines so I can pull files from them if I like. I pulled the pictures from those machines and did this post from Squall-Ubuntu.

So Karmic can play nice with windows, almost. But it’s still not that way out of the box.

- windy

And network file sharing, SAMBA or SMB, works without a hitch with no modifications to the built in configuration. Hurray!!!. You may remember a previous post about Ubuntu Not Playing Nice that showed the modifications that I had to do to BIND and to SMB configuration to get things to work. UPDATE: file sharing worked because I had fixed it in Gutsy. It still DOES NOT WORK OUT OF THE BOX with Karmic Koala.

See this post for how to start to make it work with Karmic [9.10].

Well everything works just fine now. No changes to any of the default configuration files. As you visit the first sites, I had to allow Samba to access the KeyRing and enter passwords, but after that all is well. I use the same login for all my machines, so I only had to enter that login once for it to work everywhere. I have Win XP, Vista x86 and Vista x64 machines so this is good news for almost everyone. BTW, it works to another machine running Gutsy too, which I’m in the process of upgrading.

But there was a small glitch when I did the last upgrade, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

The upgrade process takes you though each of the upgrades in sequence. No skipping ahead. So it takes a while. There are dialogs that tell you about the changes you may have made to configuration files for some components, like SAMBA, so you have to watch for those since they stop the upgrade. At first I keep my changes, but finally decided to see if they had fixed problems and said REPLACE to take the new files. There were only three of those as I recall, SAMBA and a couple of others, like Internet Time and one other that was so obscure that I don’t recall having changed it.

When the upgrades finally finished, the display was left in a strange state. The desktop was too large for the screen, and dragging the mouse panned the desktop around on the screen. This computer has an NVIDIA display controller, and apparently there is a little glitch or two to be worked out with that integration. Here’s a picture of the entire Desktop image as captured with Screenshot.

If you try to set the display size you get an error.

If you say YES at this point, which is what is indicated, then you go to the NVIDIA panel and you can’t fix the panning problem. Here’s the NVIDIA panel.

But this is set correctly to 1600 x 1050 [ which is my monitor size.] But… that doesn’t fix the panning issue.

There is another error with this panel that I don’t understand.

If you save the configuration, you get an error.

Not sure what’s up with that.

So the right way to fix this is to say YES to the first dialog about the graphics driver support and you get the built-in display dialog:

This was set incorrectly to 1900×1200, which caused the panning. By setting the resolution to 1600×1050, all is well. Minor glitch.

By the way, I enabled visual effects in System > Preferences > Appearance > Visual Effects > Extra, and the waving windows are way cool.

The reason for upgrading my Ubuntu is so that I can do Safe Online Banking with no fear of Trojans stealing my banking information. I’m going to be doing all my online banking using Ubuntu now.

Have a good one.

- Windy

In some previous cases I’ve needed simple databases: Books for sale on EBay, a DVD database list and a 2Moons Character database. For Books, I used MySQL and php here on this site [ But I didn't maintain it.] For the DVD database, I used Open Office connected to MySQL to store the data and image thumbs of covers. For the 2Moons characters, I used an Open Office Base application.

When I selected the Open Office solution to avoid high costs and to allow me to move the application around between computers and operating systems. Open Office works on Windows, Mac and Linux. However, the problems of backing up and saving versions of the application as I enhance it are a lot of work. Which version on the various computers is the latest one? Sure would be nice for it to be in the Cloud so I wouldn’t have to worry about those issues.

After a little searching, I found ZOHO Creator. Here’s two views of the 2Moons database that I build in an hour or so.

So it seems to work pretty well. Here is a list of weapons filterable by Character name.





CAUTION: Do not use the JavaScript snippet. It breaks WordPress layout.

One of the issues that I struggle with in OOBase was building a form that filtered by character. I had to get an obscure script from a fellow in a forum to solve the problem. But with ZOHO creator, it was easy. Just drag a LOOKUP field into your form and set the field. Problem solved.

You’ll notice that he embedded views look pretty generic and don’t match this website at all in style. Sure would be nice if ZOHO provided “Themes” or worked with the stylesheet of WordPress or other CMS where the embedding occurred.

I did find a minor problem. If you build a Dropdown list field, and then later you try to add or modify the choices, Creator will likely kick out some errors. Based on a forum post, they will consider this as a future enhancement, but as a workaround, you can edit the form script to fix the order of the entries.

ZOHO provides useful and free subscriptions for each of their Office features. For Creator there is a free subscription that allows 3 applications, 1000 records and 200MB. But if you want more, the next upgrade is $15 / month. Sigh… There is a reason that I don’t spend $15 / mo to play World of Warcraft. That seems way too expensive compared with my hosting service which gives me UNLIMITED MySQL databases and UNLIMITED storage for $5 / month.

But the good news is that it works just fine and is easy to use, even for a novice with limited database experience. Force.com provides a solution too, but their solution requires a database administrator level of knowledge to use. ZOHO is much better.

You can share your application for $$ or for free, with or without the data, and with or without the ability for them to modify the application. Pretty slick. They also have a place for developers and clients to meet base on requirements of work that clients need done.

- windy

History Reminder

As we consider the plight of the planet, it is good to look back and remind ourselves what the earth used to look like and how it got this way.

Precambrian Era

In the beginning, say 2-3 billion – with a B – years ago, the earth was covered with a reducing atmosphere. No free oxygen was present. Only carbon dioxide, methane, ammonia and hydrogen. Oxygen is very toxic and very reactive and so it reacted with the hydrogen and methane and sulfur and iron, and it was all bound up in the products of the reactions – Water, Carbon Dioxide, Sulfur Dioxide, and Rust.

When life first evolved, it comprised various species of bacteria that fed on this atmosphere and probably the likes of the deep ocean vents, both in the ocean and in shallow pools on the surface. In places there was a meager living to be had from finding “Resources” in the form of un-reacted chemicals and further reducing those chemicals to the ones mentioned above. This state of affairs in the history of life went on for untold millennia with no real change, no higher life forms, no plants and no real fossils except for the mats of bacteria that were left, mineralized, in shallow waters that we find as the only fossils from this period.

Precambrian Era Timeline

But then there was a technological break-through in evolution. Some cells invented photosynthesis. They figured out how to use the light of the sun and carbon dioxide to make food at first, and later structural materials in the form of cellulose to build their bodies. This was a major break-through since the power of the sun, and the availability of carbon dioxide was apparently limitless. And the explosion of these algae and later the other plants, still in the oceans and shallow waters transformed the earth. Well that’s not the way they saw it. From their point of view there was a toxic crisis. Photosynthesis produces oxygen, and at first this was simply reacted in the atmosphere with the residual hydrogen and methane and all was well, but eventually more oxygen was produced than could be reacted away and it began to build up. Early plants were not adapted to deal with this toxic by-product and no doubt many species of algae died as the toxic oxygen built up in the atmosphere. But eventually, these algae evolved to protect themselves from the toxic oxygen and the levels continued to rise.

As the oxygen concentration rose, some strains of life evolved to depend on it as an energy source. It turns out that if there is enough free oxygen, it can be combined with other things in the environment, like the structural materials in the plentiful plants to provide an energy source, and so the first herbivores evolved. And once there were herbivores the carnivores could evolve.

Carboniferous Period

Along our journey we can recall the Carboniferous Period, from 360 to 290 MYBP [Million years before present] when the O2 and CO2 concentration was much higher than it is today. Now we have 21% O2 and 300ppm CO2. In the Carboniferous there was 32% O2 and 800ppm CO2. Talk about Global Warming! Actually the global temperature average was about the same as we have today. And certainly this was pre-industrial. The higher levels of oxygen allowed large insects, Meganeura, similar to a dragonfly, with wingspans as large as 75cm – about 2.5 feet.

Meganeurid

The take-away messages from this history are that

1. One specie’s pollution is another specie’s requirement, and
2. Life has evolved from a basis in exploitation to a sustainable ecology.
3. Life wasn’t always based on sustainability. For the first more than one billion years of it’s existence, life was exploitive, just as man is now.

In order for sustainability to evolve, life had to use up the easily exploited resources – the primordial Petro-chemical deposits of methane, ammonia and hydrogen – and evolve the means to depend on the cycle of photosynthesis employing the sun and CO2.

For a time, man has taken the easy way of exploiting the available resources, but like the plants before us, we need to learn to live sustainably.

Sustainability

Life has evolved to recycle everything completely. We have only to look at any verdant ecology on the planet – Coral Reefs, Rain Forests, Temperate Forests, Temperate Ocean ecosystems – and we see complete recycling in a complex web of life. We have studied these eco-systems for years and while we don’t understand all the details in each one of them, we do understand the large picture in all of them.

We have now made our own ecology too, an exploitive one, much like that of the early bacteria. This is not to compare us with bacteria, but only to remind us, as we know, that such exploitive ecosystems are fleeting in the history of life. The resources run out and the toxic bi-products build up, and if we continue on this path, not only we, but all the life around us must evolve to live with that toxicity. I’m not talking about the CO2 and Methane that may build up in the atmosphere. The bulk of the species on earth will not be adversely affected by a rise in CO2 to 380 or 500ppm. Life has been there before. Many plants will see this is as a food boon and there may be a verdant time after we have poisoned ourselves off the planet. When there is more CO2 in the atmosphere, photosynthesis is more efficient. In the grand scheme of things, the mass-extinction caused by the human condition will not even rank among the top 10 such events, tragic though it will be. But I’m sure that we don’t want to be among the extinct.

Let’s look at some of the resources that we use, and even now attempt to re-use and re-cycle [R&R]. Let us recall that Reduce does not figure into ecology. Life is greedy and uses all the resources available to it. However, everything is re-used and re-cycled. Some of the materials that human ecology uses are: Metals, Paper, Plastics, and Glass. You can add more to the list I’m sure. But our pathetic attempts to recycle these only recovers a small portion of our use of these materials and most recycle programs are a joke compared to what happens in any ecology that we have studied. R&R is very complex to get right. It has taken millions of years for these ecologies to evolve the complete recycling programs that they use. How quickly do we think we can duplicate this complexity for all the materials that we use?

These kinds of R&R can never put our civilization on a long term recycling path. It’s a land-fill reduction policy at best.

We can only hope to succeed with a long term R&R program if we hook into nature rather than imitating it. We must adopt mostly biological materials for our civilization rather than metal and glass materials to have any chance at true R&R. That way the complex evolved organisms of nature help us rather than our having to invent all the process ourselves.

If life on this planet had evolved incorporating metals and glass into the ecology, then the R&R for those materials would already be in place in nature, but they are not. Metals and stone and glass [Silicon Dioxides] were left out of nature’s processes. This probably tells us something about the chemistry surrounding those materials. It requires too much energy or there are no suitable chemical processes for those materials to be incorporated into a sustainable ecology. We should take this hint from nature, who has had billions of years of experience in this area, and adopt materials where the chemistry supports reasonable R&R processes. Unless you are a snail or a diatom, stone and silicates are not a part of your ecology.

The Message of Avatar the Movie

And now we come to a message I found in the movie Avatar. I’m not sure if James Cameron had this message in mind when he wrote the story, or whether it is an emergent message that he did not see or intend.

Pandora is an example of a sustainable civilization. In order to see this, you have to stop looking at the Na’vi as primitive people. Think of them rather as a highly evolved race of folks with a global internet – you’ve seen the movie, right. I’m not going to review or repeat the movie here. If you have not seen the movie, then go see it and come back to this.

Let’s look at what the Na’vi have:

1. Places to live. Large buildings where large numbers of people can live in close proximity. Ok they happen to look like trees. Really big trees.
2. Abundant food and water nearby. You can pick from Rainforest, Prarie or Oceanside tribes. Like we do now.
3. Vehicles of several types for transportation both on the ground and in the air. Presumably in the ocean too, although we didn’t actually see examples of this in the movie – or at least I didn’t see it.
4. A planet wide communication mechanism. Previous stories might have called this Gaia. Although the don’t seem to be using it as effectively as they might. They flew to the neighboring tribes rather than going to the nearest tree and doing a phone call. By the way, as I read the movie, no ancestors were lost when one of the life trees was destroyed. That was the tragic destruction of a local terminal, nothing more. The planet wide network backs up multiple copies of everything: a Carbonite subscription is built into the system.
5. Everything they have is self-replicating and self-repairing. Except their bows and arrows.

Let’s see what they don’t have:

1. Pollution of any kind. All of their needs are met with natural substances that are completely recycled by the surrounding ecology, whether that be rain forest or prairie.
2. Population problems. They have adapted their numbers to a sustainable level.
3. Political misunderstandings – in the absence of the Sky People at least. If you can’t understand your neighboring tribe because your local spoken language has evolved, just hook into the life tree with your neighbor and understanding will be enhanced by the Babelfish program that is present in the life-tree network.

DireHorse

Let’s look at other properties of what they have:

1. Their vehicles are smarter than ours. They can hook into their horses and birds to tell them where to go, but the horses and birds already come with many modern features that we are hopelessly trying to add to ours: Collision avoidance, unattended operation, automated driving in crowded traffic. When you start with an animal that flocks or herds and knows how to stand up and avoid running into another or a tree, then it’s much easier to build a vehicle that does these things. If you start with a piece of metal and a computer, perhaps it can be done, but it’s much harder.
2. It may be harder to learn to fly, or drive, than it is for us. But once you do, it is potentially much safer. And who can say that our teenagers should not go through a rite-of-passage than makes them appreciate the privilege of driving rather than viewing the car as a toy. Perhaps the Na’vi have a lower teenage vehicular death rate than we do. And if you do spend a late night out partying, it is useful if your car knows the way home by itself.
3. Who needs wide-screen-HD-tv when you can hook into the stories of the ancestors? And who is to say that story-tellers among the Na’vi cannot hook into their local life-tree and imagine their stories to be told, or recount their experiences, to be recorded for all after them to enjoy in full 3D with a complete sensory experience.

The Na’vi and the World of Pandora is not a primitive aboriginal past, but rather a picture of a possible and rich sustainable civilization that we can aspire to. Our present course of building a metal, glass and silicon ecology and then recreating sustainability is going to be much harder than adapting biology to our needs to accomplish the same ends.

Now all we need to do is to get this temporary Global Warming thing under control as we see what the real long term goal is for our civilization.

Unanswered Questions

There are many unanswered questions in the Avatar story. Rich material for sequels to be sure. Here are some of the questions that I have:

1. How did Pandora arise? Did it naturally evolve? or was it created by the previous un-sustainable, metal-glass-ecology civilization as they grew out of that primitive technology.
   Are the floating mountains the remnants of the previous toxic metal-glass ecology? Long derelict remnants of buildings in a floating city?
2. Are the Na’vi still in control of their own evolution in ways that we cannot understand? Can they create or modify the life forms around them, perhaps using the life tree as an intermediary? A larger Direhorse, an ocean crossing whale vehicle, a bird that can transport the aged or very young.
3. Do the Na’vi know and understand their origins. Apparently they do by listening to the life tree. They probably have a better connection with their past than we do, since all we have are history books and fossils.

Floating Mountains

- windy

Images Copyright by Twentieth Century Fox and others.
Text – Copyright (c) 2009, Darrell Duffy

Thanks,

Darrell