photodharma.com web update progress

I have placed my paintings in the new, nifty galleries. The old, hand-made galleries have been moved, but are still online. I will be going back and adding links and information when I can. Check out the new look, and let me know what you think! photodharma.com

photodharma.com updates

I spent much of the last 24 hours procrastinating on preparing for our move, and working on getting photodharma.com back up and online.It's getting there...In fact, most of the previous pages are back online, with some changes, some consolidation, etc.The biggest change is that I am no longer using fotopic.net to host my photogalleries, but have installed a gallery application on my server, and am creating my own galleries.They're pretty nifty.They even do slide shows!Here's a screenshot:


The painting galleries are not using this function, yet, but I might do that.
The new photo galleries are so slick, I'd definitely like to have my photos presented in similar fashion.Take a look and let me know what you think!

web developments

Okay... BaldwinSoftware.com is back online, with the new host. Many pages still need links updated, etc., but the site is functional. TonyBaldwin.info is also now up. This is a new, general site. Photodharma.com is live, but there is only a placeholder page, pointing visitors to other locations where they may see my art & photos, or listen to my music. I will be rebuilding photodhama.com, and continuing to reorganize baldwinsoftware.com, shortly, but, at the moment have a bunch of translation work AND, am attempting to organize and pack for our move this weekend. I likely won't get around to rebuilding until late next week.

current screenshot - escuchando cabezones

Invitame a vivir en lo profundo de tu acaso.
Estallaré.
Soy un pasajero en extinción...
Busque...busque...

If you get confused, listen to the music play

Listen to me on Last.FM

Mike Oldfield - Tubular Bells (from the Exorcist)

Bebel Gilberto

Coming to Boston, Nov. 27.
I want to go so bad.

Essa garrota é demais...tão gostoza, e canta como um anjo...w0w...

NICE

The house in which we rent an apt. has been foreclosed (I may have mentioned that before). The bank was just here. They've offered us $2700 to move out my Nov. 5, even though we already have another apt. lined up and planned to be out by the 1st. YEAH!

binary message

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A Layman's Thoughts on Freedoms and Open Standards

A layman's thoughts on open document formats, open source software, freedom of choice, freedom of information, liberties in general.

Consider, for a moment, where the world might be now, if, say, whoever first developed a means of written communication, written language, had copyrighted, this means of communication. I'd like to consider not only copyrighting his particular writing system, but, even more generally, the concept of symbolically representing reality in a written/graphical form.

Had the inventor of writing, if you will, demanded his rights in terms of the use of such a system, of course, anyone that wrote anything would owe him for use of this intellectual property. Thus, he would have a right to demand his fee for the conveyance of any information, of any nature, in a written form. This would mean, he would have control over any written communication. He would be able to control what information could be conveyed in writing, who could have access to that information, and, of course, he could demand payment for any and everytime information of any nature was conveyed in this fashion. Let me just clarify that by being a bit more precise, while summing up the entire situation in general:
He would have control over the conveyance of any information in written form.
He would control information.
Anyone with such power, of course, would have immense, if not complete control over public opinion and knowledge. I think we can agree that such control centralized in the hands of one person would be A BAD THING.
This individual could control religious thought, philosophy, the semination of scientific knowledge, etc., ad infinitum.

Now, consider even if Gutenburg had patented and copyrighted the printing press, and all printing of any matter would, again, be his to control. Or perhaps, say one person controlled all rights to the use of paper (papyrus), when it was invented, and, thus, could control any use there of and any matter that was printed or written on paper, etc. Control over any such process or media would put untold power in the hands of the individual possessing such power. I think we can agree that such control centralized in one person (or one company) would be A BAD THING.

Freedom of information, freedom of expression and freedom to learn are, and I believe this is a widely enough held notion that nobody will argue the contrary, ESSENTIAL freedoms.
Freedoms necessary to the advance of the human species, of knowledge, of culture and scientific progress.

This is why we need to have open standards for document formats, and why proprietary document formats are to be avoided. This is why we should not allow specific software vendors to monopolize the dispersion of information by allowing their proprietary document formats to become standard to any industry. Allowing them such control allows them control over that industry. They will have the ability to stifle choice of software use and will have control over the publication of knowledge.

In today's digital, information age, if one individual or one company has control of the file formats in which information may be shared, or if one company or individual controls all software capable of accessing information in said formats, that individual or company has control of all information.

This is why document formats such as Microsoft's .doc or OOXML, SDL's .ttx, .mp3, .wmp and other formats that are proprietary, and specific to one software vendor, are harmful, and to be not only avoided, but completely eschewed in favor of open document formats, such as .odf, and .ogg.

relevant links:
ODF Alliance
Oasis Open
Open Document XML
ODF at FSF
No Word Attachments

screenshot

I like to post occasional screenshots to proudly display my geek fu.

This shows me listening to Cabezones (awesome rock from Argentina) using mocp, on my Debian gnu/linux system, in a roxterm terminal, using the Ion3 window manager.
I'm just too co0l for words, really...

ughhh...heavy lifting

I'm sitting here downloading and backing up all the relevant materials for http://www.baldwinsoftware.com and http://www.photodharma.com and http://www.uuchaliceart.com, and I'm realizing what a load of work it is going to be to get them all back up and online and gro0vy once the domain transfers resolve, etc. For one thing, I have a lot of images hard-linked to various locations all over, including in the linguasos.org domain, which will be expiring, so I'm going to have to update all the links. I'm going to have to edit nearly every page on these sites. I've decided I'm more or less going to give http://www.photodharma.com a complete overhaul, anyway. It needs it. This is going to be a lot of work, and will take a while, so, I probably shouldn't have decided to get started on all of this right now, while I'm moving, etc., but, at the same time, I think I should have done it all a long time ago. After the initial heavy lifting is done, my online presence will be much simpler to manage, and, I believe, once I've done a bit of reconfiguration, these sites will come out more attractive and useful. My online presence has just been too scattered and schizophrenic for too long. Time to consolidate, simplify, and beautify the whole chaotic morass of scattered sites and disorganized links, etc.

web developments

Currently, I have own/manage several sites, on several hosts, and with domains registered in with several registrars.
That's all in the process of being streamlined, as I type.
I've had http://www.photodharma.com (my art/photos/music site) hosted with DWHS Inc., who is a pretty good host, really (linux servers, good tools, etc., fairly decent value); I have http://www.linguasos.org (linux for translators) hosted at godaddy.com, who provides excellent service and a great value in terms of disc space, bandwidth, etc. for the dough. I have http://www.transprocalc.org and http://www.baldwinsoftware.com hosted in subdirectories of linguasos.org.
The domains photodharma.com, transprocalc.org, uuchaliceart.com and baldwinsoftware.com are all registered with MyDomain Inc., which provides fairly decent domain management features, and good domain reg prices, with two of the domains, as mentioned, simply forwarding to subdirs on the linguasos hosting acct.
I have http://www.baldwinlinguas.com (my translation services agencies, and main source of income) hosted via "free" hosting that comes with my paid account at proz.com (a site for freelance translators and language services providers).
Basically, I have a mess...and I pay three or four entities to keep all this stuff up on the internets.
Now, I'm no longer developing the Linguas OS project, so that domain is simply going to vanish into the ether.
So now I have altered my godaddy.com account, and will be keeping http://www.baldwinsoftware.com as the top level on that hosting account, and reconfiguring the site accordingly. Also, since I got one killer deal (150gb space, unfathomable bandwidht, etc, and the capacity to host unlimited domains), and also moving http://www.photodharma.com to that godaddy account. I may move http://www.baldwinlinguas.com over, too.
I've also transfered the domain registrations all to godaddy.com.
Now I will have one registrar, one host, one bill (and a very reasonable one at that...roughly $6.00 a month for all that disk space and bandwidth and mysql dbs and...oh...it's all so exciting!).
A few sites have or are being let go in the process:
http://www.altlatina.com - rock en español, a wasted venture;
http://www.transprocalc.org will likely fade away, while the project will simply be hosted on baldwinsoftware.com
http://www.linguasos.org will fade away, but I will probably keep the old ISOs on hand at baldwinsoftware.com, for posterity.
And, I will have three main sites still online for all my goodies:
http://www.baldwinlinguas.com - my translation business
http://www.baldwinsoftware.com - for all my hackery and geekish tomfoolery
http://www.photodharma.com - for all my artistic endeavours, photos, music, etc.
This consolidates my scattered web presences, streamlines my overhead, and will make my life a lot easier, all while actually giving me HUGE amounts of online storage disc space and bandwidth.
I'll be able to add new sites to the same account, registering any new domains with this same provider, like falling off a log, if I so choose.
I should have done this long ago.
The only draw back with the godaddy acct is that I don't have shell access (ssh, scp), and godaddy's online cpanel and tools are kind of crappy, but I manage my sites writing pages in a text editor and uploading them via ftp, anyway, so that's hardly significant, since I will have ftp access, of course.
Now, with all that glorious disk space, I am tempted to think of new sites to launch, and venture into php and other goodies. I've had numerous online ventures that more or less floundered, so I don't want to waste time trying to repeat mistakes I've learned from already, but, gosh, I gotta do something with all that space...honestly. I think if/once I move baldwinlinguas.com over, I'll probably implement the webservice version of OmegaT right on there, which will be great for outsourcing translation projects. I won't have to send files and deal with various applications, etc., but simply send the provider a link to the OmegaT project on the server, where they can do their work. That would be cool. I'm not sure how complicated that will be, though...we'll see. Some of that can already be done with shared google docs, but, as much as I love google, I'd rather have my work on my own server, and away from the prying eyes of their spiders, or whatever.
I'm wondering for how long some of my sites might be down while I move stuff around.
Oh, and I've nearly forgotten...I also need to move over http://www.uuchaliceart.com (my Unitarian Universalist related art), and http://www.connecticutportugueseinterpreter.com (obvious, just forwards to baldwinlinguas.com for search ranking purposes, gets me work).
All that, and using petrus to semi-simultaneously post to three distinct blog/journals, is seriously simplifying my online activities.

Hmmm...petrus

Okay, I've just learned that Petrus does, indeed, now support insanejournal, as well as blogger and livejournal. Of course, as mentioned earlier, it will not post to all three simultaneously, but requires that I login to all three accounts, in three separate windows, and then copy/paste the post to each windows, and click three different buttons to post to all three journal/blogs simultaneously... What it does mean, however, is that I could conceivably dig into the petrus code and work up a way to make it post to all three simultaneously, perhaps....Except that Petrus is written in Java, and have no Java fu. I once successfully wrote a "Hello, World!" in Java, but that's as far as I got. Wish I could find one of these in tcl, perl, or python... I've been looking at the blogger api docs, and I find it a bit confusing. I wrote my LJ/IJ clients to work with simple HTTP posting, not xml-rpc, etc. Basically, there are some simple elements to posting to a blog: a) the handshake (identifying and authenticating with the server) b) posting. That must is cake, really...or so it seems. Sending a post via simple HTTP is rather uncomplicated, basically sending a plain text file identifying certain variables. Not too tough, as witnessed by my success in doing so for LJ and IJ, with my rather feeble hacker fu. But making my app create a suitable xml file will be a bit more convoluted and time consuming, in terms of generating the code. Anyway, I'm about to click three buttons to simultaneously post this to three blog/journals. In the future I may have worked out to do so without so much clickety clicking...

testing, again (+ ramblings on blogging clients and simultaneous posting)

Okay...in this post, I am testing simultaneously posting to my livejournal and my new blogspot, simultaneously, via e-mail.
Please bear with me...

This is because I have multiple blogs, and sometimes want to post the same articles to all of them.
I'm considering taking the code for the blogging clients I have already made (Tickle Therapy for InsaneJournal and TKLJ for Livejournal), and combining them, then adding blogger/blogspot functionality, so that it will post to both the above mentioned LJ, and blogspot, as well as my insanejournal, all simultaneously.
Currently, it seems the best way I have to post simultaneously is via e-mail...but e-mail posting on insane journal is only available to paid accounts.
To date, there are other, incomplete solutions.
Logjam will post to livejournal AND insane journal, but not simultaneously, and not to blogger/blogspot. One has to post to one journal, then reload the entry, change user, and post again.
Petrus will post to livejournal and blogger/blogspot, but to do it simultaneously, one has to open two windows and copy/paste the entry to both windows, click two buttons to post.
Now, enabling simultaneous LJ and IJ posting with my existing software will be easy enough, but I want a solution that posts to all three, simultaneously, without copy/pasting, and at the click of one button.
So I'm going to write my own...possibly. Also, since the majority of my previous hacking efforts have been in tcl, I think I might try to do this in eithe perl or python (with perltk or pythontk for the gui).
Additionally, my LJ/IJ clients use the old html posting method. I understand that is not an option with blogger/blogspot, and will have to learn to use the xml method, so I might as well learn and implement that for LJ and IJ, as well...
Why not? I haven't dug into a hacking project in a while, and, I have way too much spare time on my hands. Of course, it's not like I couldn't better employ the time adding improvements to my existing
software, but I get bored with a project and like to move on, and learning new stuff is always good.
I will keep you posted of further developments, of course.

:)

--
BaldwinSoftware.com
tcl yer OS with a feather?

Just testing posting from my

Just testing posting from my mobile phone...

testing 1 2 3

And now, testing e-mail posting...

:)
/tony
--
http://www.baldwinlinguas.com
Translation & Interpreting

Así también, la lengua es un miembro pequeño,
y se gloría de grandes cosas.
He aquí, un pequeño fuego
¡Cuán grande bosque enciende!

testing petrus

Okay, just for starters, I've downloaded and installed Petrus, a blogging client written in Java, for linux or mac (using Debian gnu/linux here), and giving it a test drive. I've written blogging clients for livejournal and insanejournal (being TKLJ for LJ and Tickle Therapy for insanejournal), and also wrote in LJ and IJ posting capabilities into the text editor I wrote (TclText), so, perhaps I should simply look into configuring them to work with blogger, too...likely not that difficult, but, in the meantime, I'm trying this petrus out. If you are reading this post, it worked.

and so it begins...

Once more, I am attempting to start a new blog.
I have numerous blogs, at the moment, on various providers (blogspot, livejournal, nabble, etc.), each dealing with a variety of topics (free software, my art, translations, music).
This time, I want to start one blog to rule them all...
One blog, where I will write all of my entries, rather than schizophrenically dividing myself into multiple online personalities.
This blog is mine, and will be me, and I will post my art, my poetry, my music, my software, musing about the translation industry, political developments, thoughts on parenting, recipes...everything.
I've imported previous posts from two blogger blogs that I previously held, to consolidate previous efforts, and make a new beginning.