Welcome to the Windy Weather Website.

Click for a larger view.

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.

• 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

some textsome text some textsome text some textsome text some textsome text some text some textsome text some text some textsome text some textsome textsome text some textsome textsome textsome text some textsome text some textsome text some textsome textsome text some textsome text some textsome textsome text some textsome text some textsome text some textsome text some text some textsome text some text some textsome textsome text some textsome text some textsome text some texttext some text sometext some text some text some text sometext some text some text some text sometext some text some text some text sometext some text some text some text sometext some text some text some text sometext some text some text some text sometext some text some text some text sometext some text some text some text sometext some text some text some text sometext some text some text some text some text some text sometext some text some text some text some text some text sometext some text some

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

Demon Spear

We are all level 72, or more for Christmas. Some of us are wearing our Christmas hats. At level 72 we all get to wear those new helms we killed the bosses in Castor and Norak to get and we all have new weapons.

We have included a gallery of our latest photos with this Christmas Card.

To work up from level 68 to level 72 has taken about a day and a half for each of us. We started doing the quests and hunting in Crespo and then at about level 70 we were able to move to Draco Desert and do the quests there. There are two types of quests, the normal quests and the Commission Quests. Commission quests are purchased at a special commission center.

The commission center for Crespo is in Parca Temple and of the several quests the two that were interesting were the ones to hunt Kolaiger and Clay. There were other quests to hunt Ellipse and Elaiden. These monsters are quite powerful and it takes a long time to kill each one. So the first day for each of us was taken up with working in Crespo to reach level 70.

While we could have gone to Draco Desert at level 65, we found that it was best to reach level 69 or 70 before going to Draco. There are a few quests to accomplish there, but the best quests are again the commission quests to hunt Altar. These quests pay high numbers of experience points and are quickly accomplished if one works in parties of 2 or more members. The women warriors among us found that we could more easily attract party members or join parties. “Level 70 Spear Party Girl looking for a Good time” was a line that worked best for me. But many players realized that since everyone got credit for all the kills, that partying is the way to go in Draco.

There is a rise in bullying in Crespo and Draco. High level players stand around and fight among themselves near the Merchant NPC and Commission Center and often beat up on lower level players. Or for some reason, players steal mobs of players that are working in the desert. It seems very silly since players can quickly level up by working together. Those that understand this progress rapidly. Although there are no Akris horses in Draco, the loot drops are good and prey plentiful. Another problem in Draco is the hackers that sweep through and steal all the prey. This reduces the prey for a time, but by chasing a hacker one can sometimes either steal their mob, steal their loot and often they leave the area since they don’t want to be photographed while they are hacking.

We have all made it to level 72 or above. VengefulBreeze, our summoner brother, has made it to level 74 where he has picked up two new skills. We’ll have a nice Christmas and get back to work progressing through the game with our new weapons and helms.

Have a happy holiday and may the five gods protect you,

DemonSpear, Aloken Warrior.

TWIT 225 Schmidt Happens

Maybe it’s not privacy, but monetizing. It’s about “monetizing me”. Obviously Facebook, Twitter, google, netflix and the other sites are making money by selling our info. But they aren’t paying us for it. I might be disposed to make a lot more information available and public on those sites if I were being paid by Facebook and the others to do that. The more information that I share and make public the higher the rate / month that they send to my PayPal account.

And the more movies I watch/rate on Netflix, and the more searches I do, with an Opt-In for google and bing, and the more background info I give google and bing.

Why should google make billions – with a B – from their advertisers based on knowing about me, which is why the advertisers give them the big bucks after all, and I don’t get a cent? I should get a reduced rate from Netflix the more movies I rent/ watch instantly, and rate. I should get a reduced shipping rate the more I buy from Amazon and still more off if I rate items and provide feedback about sellers. And provide Amazon with more “private” information about me.

I turn off Third-Party-Cookies because it allows harvest of information about me for which I’m not being paid. How about $5 or $10 / month from ClickWhatsIt – I forget the name of the prominent third-party cookie baker – if I enable third party cookies? That’s about Opt-In and Monetizing Me.

I provide a lot of private information here on this blog about me, but that can’t be monetized by those sites because it’s not connected with transactions or page views on those sites. So they can’t monetize this blog. But when I do something on those sites, then they figure out a way to sell the “pages hits” combined with the private info about me – maybe anonymized maybe not – to other folks. That’s about Monetizing those sites – to some extent. Either directly or indirectly.

But what about my value in the equations. Shouldn’t I be paid to some extent for my information?

It’s about Monetizing Me.

Christmas in Loa Castle

Hi, Demon Flayer here. I’m a younger brother of many of the folks you’ve seen before, and as such I’m often given the task of selling things that my other siblings find along the way. But that’s a small annoyance compared with the large advantage of getting the hand-me-down armor and weapons from my older brother Windy Flayer.

As you can see, 2Moons has been decorated for Christmas. The main towns of Loa and Braiken have trees and Santa. I’ve not checked yet but Parca Temple usually has a tree outside on the walkway too. Last year they left that tree up until July as I recall. But Heiharp is a cold and snowy place, so the tree seemed right at home in the cold weather.

Another new item has appeared with the recent release that helps me in my selling and will no doubt help you in your Holiday Shopping tasks. The Agency is a place where you can go to check prices or buy items that are for sale anywhere in 2Moons. In order to buy inside the agency you must carry a special amulet that is available from the store, but anyone can enter the agency and use it to check prices of items that are for sale.

Pricing Silver Argates

Here is the price listing for Silver Argates, a popular and very powerful upgrade stone that high level players use to enhance their weapons and armor. As you can see, the items are easily sorted by price and by selecting the middle of the list, it is easy to determine the median selling price for the item.

I”ve included some other pictures of the agency.

Once you price your goods in your shop, then you must sit in the square and wait on passers-by to buy your items. Or of course, folks visiting the agency will see your goods in the lists sorted by category and can purchase directly in the agency. But while you sell, you can’t be doing anything else in 2Moons. It can get awfully boring sitting for hours waiting on those buyers I can tell you. You will notice only a few folks selling in the square. I usually sell in Asray rather than Kalibus. As you can see in the gallery, Kalibus is quite a mad house with all the sellers.

But there is plenty of time after the sales to kill monsters and do quests, and I get hints about the best places to hunt and the best quests from my older siblings.

May the five gods protect you,

Demon Flayer

Sandy Dunewinds of Elona

Finally in 2012 an Open Source MMO appeared. As late as 2009 the entire field was littered with the corpses of failed and abandoned projects. With a few exceptions, like Panda3D , very few Open Source MMO platforms have made any lasting impression.

However, now the long wait is over. Dream World has appeared. Dream World combines the good ideas from a number of proprietary projects that have gone before, but has opened up the world to players and non-programmers.

Free or Pay to Play

The first decade of the 21st century saw an explosion of Free to Play MMOs. Of course the leader, WoW showed that millions of users were looking for the MMO experience, but many weren’t ready to shell out the $15 per month to play the game. Guild Wars, and possibly other games, had a free to play model once you had purchased the game. This model has proved profitable and we have seen two sequels to Guild Wars.

By late in 2010, the single player or single campaign game was largely extinct, except in the hand-held market. Dragon Age: Origins was one of the last of the single player genre and soon spawned a true F2P MMO. Even in the hand-held market the hand-held computer, which used to be called the smart-phone, has spawned many online games as well.

The primary motivation for the ubiquity of MMOs is based on economics of the game company as well as the interest of the players. The game companies have discovered that they will make more money over time if they build a loyal player base and the way to do this is to build a long-lived game, as WoW and its ancestors have proven. The game designers are kept gainfully employed with constant upgrades to the game as the players grind on through the levels, engage in epic battles, dress up in boutique armor and weapons and buy and sell loot. The income from the micro-transactions for buffs, mounts, vehicles and costume armor provide plenty of income to sustain the servers, and the designers.

Finally Dream World

Late in 2009, a dedicated group of software designers began putting the parts of Dream World together from the corpses of other OpenSource games and new code. By late 2010 the game showed promise as a platform, and during the next year the releases came fast and furiously as the platform gained momentum. The Open Source nature of the product and the promise of being able to move characters between worlds caused the most interest as the platform took its final form.

Some of Dream World’s features include:

• A world builder based on the general ideas of Unreal Ed, the editor for the Unreal game engine, but with a more intuitive interface.
• The ability to import map as well as model geometry built in popular tools like 3dsMax, Maya and Blender to build new maps, characters, NPCs [non-player characters] and monsters.
• The ability to define new character classes, complete with character models, cosmetic customizations, experience level path, behavior animations, skill trees, skill animations, armors, and weapons.
• The ability to define new buffs and candy, which apply within a class or across classes.
• The ability to define new monsters to kill, including all their attributes of resistance, health, experience, attack type and damage. Also monsters are defined with loot dropping, mobbing, re-spawn times and wandering behaviors. Boss monsters are easy to define.
• Any character [account] can contribute any map, character, item, or monster content to the game. This contribution is done in the context of the game and may be subject to review of the management or a peer group of characters before being released to the entire population.
• New content is downloaded and cached on the local machine as it is accessed, this technique was pioneered by Guild Wars. A large game wide client update is not required to continue to play in old content areas. New content is downloaded incrementally as it is accessed. Deferred update occurs when a new character or new character content appears so that a novel character may appear as a gray blob for a while until it’s content is loaded.
• Characters can play in PvE, PvP and PK [Player Kill] modes and can avoid all types of play. Most worlds enact automatic behaviors which punish repeated harassing of other characters including “jail time” and large fines of in-world currency.
• Skills and tasks can be defined to enhance game play or to allow non-violent characters, skill trees or whole worlds to be created.
• Worlds can optionally define real-world currency exchange. Gateways to PayPal and other online payment services allow the game currency to interact with real-world currencies as Second Life has pioneered. Each world sets it’s own exchange rate as either a fixed number or based on a currency exchange.
• Characters can find, craft or import game objects from the outside world into the game world and then sell them to other characters to make money. The sale of loot or crafted items is limited by in-game creation or farming, but sale of imported items are not limited. This allows the game economy to interact with the real-world in all the ways that Second Life has pioneered.
• Public Key encryption techniques can be used to “sign” created items, so copyright can be enforced for items sold by characters in the game. Copies of items do not pass the authentication test for their creators. Items can be forged but on close examination, their creation date will be shown to be later than the original, so the forger can be identified.
• The items for sale by the game designers are indistinguishable from the items for sale by other players. These sales are the micro-transactions that can provide income for the server farm and salaries for game designers. A small sales tax can provide additional income for the game designers.
• Web portals for sale of game items provides a more convenient method of finding those in-game items than wandering all over the in-game world to check out the many store fronts.
• Some characters “own” game land for store fronts or houses, but most game players are wandering mercenaries who are too busy leveling their characters, and engaging in epic battles to spend time gambling or engaging in sex play. While castle building and sex play are possible, they are a minor part of the game rather than a large part of the game as in Second Life.
• Streaming of in-world music, video and in-game voice communication is provided by a variety of means. The open source nature of the software allow a variety of best of breed methods to be used for this communication. We no longer are killed by monsters while we type in a chat window.
• The game behavior is controlled by the game server rather than the client, so that while the game is open source, a well controlled server is not easily subject to hacking. So while game players may modify their clients, this does not  allow taking advantage of other players in the game. The open source nature of the software means that bugs that cause crashes or allow hacking are quickly fixed.
• While many of the progenitors of Dream World are medieval RPG games, the platform has spawned worlds of every flavor: WWII battle fields, Planetary Warfare, Anime style RPGs, Corporate and Educational meeting and educational venues.
• Since characters can move among worlds with ease, medieval RPG characters often appear in educational contexts where students are showing off the characters they have worked so hard to build.

With many different worlds running the Dream World software, it is now possible to migrate your character between worlds and servers. When a new world appears, you can now visit or join that world with your high level character from another world so that you need not start off at the lowest level of existence in the new world. Those who find the new world exciting can decide to play the copy of their character in the new world as well as the old world, or to move back into a previous world while merging their enhanced attributes, skills and loot. As characters, we are no longer trapped in one version of cyber-space, but are free to move between cyber-worlds. At long last, our cyber-selves exist outside of any particular cyber-world.

- Windy

The following gallery shows photos from a Dream World based on Guild Wars.

Demon Spear

I am Demon Spear, an Aloken. I’m writing this to let you all know that my brothers and sisters and I have all reached level 68 here in the world of 2Moons. It has been a long road to get here, and we have far to go, but by helping each other with loot, and sometimes DIL, and by working with other folks here in parties, we have been able to progress to level 68 which gives us our new armor and a new weapon at level 66.

Our little brother Windy Lancer is at level 56, but he is following  the path of the dual axes and is progressing rapidly. He will receive hand-me-down weapons from Windy Flayer and will be able to save his DIL for his wings at level 102.

We all look forward to working for our wings at level 102. That is the true reward for all of our hard work. While there are many levels beyond that, we all see obtaining our wings at a major step in our lives here.

Good luck to all of you and here is hoping that the five gods will protect you in your journeys.

- Demon Spear

Closeup of Sandy

Whew, we made it. It was quite a struggle to get to level 67 and my new armor. I’ve tried several places to work, but Castor Cave L2 has been the most productive. I worked some at Crespo but this often took too many pots. I quckly found that Draco Desert did not work well. While I can get a lot of Exp from the monsters there, one mistep and I’m dead and the pot cost is very high. I have had the best progress in Castor Cave working the sections with Algols.

I joined a Guild for a while, but soon found that the guild was really just a private chat channel for the leader and a few of his friends. The guild chat among a few members is a constant annoyance while you are trying to work. I finally just left the guild after a few days.

Now that I have my new weapon and armor I can work more effectively in Crespo and perhaps after a few levels, I’ll go back to Draco.

During my work I did run into a group one day in Castor and we partied for a while. I was able to gain about 50% of a level during that afternoon. The Mage class really works best in a party since the AOE [area of effect] skills that I have are not well used when I work by myself. All my skills use a lot of MP [energy] and recharge slowly, so working in a party allows me to level more quickly since my skills take advantage of the mobs.

May the gods protect you,

Sandy

WindyLancer

Hello. WindyLancer here. I’m a level 56 now after working up through the levels to Castor Cave L2. I was born in a separate server from my brothers and sisters, but in the great update that brought Aloken to our world, I was moved to the same server as the rest of the group. This allowed them to share loot and help with funding my armor. I have progressed quickly with hand-me-downs from WindyFlayer.

I’m at level 56 now and have a full set of fortified Radiance armor and some powerful axes. It may not be long now that I’ll catch up with WindyFlayer and have to wait for his hand-me-downs as he levels up. That won’t be a problem. I’ll be patient has he works toward level 102 and his wings.

We have recently found that Argates sell for 8-12M Dil so saving for our wings may not be as hard as we once thought.

May the gods protect you.

WindyLancer