Category: computer history

The greatest minds went river boarding.

When I was in high school, my friends and I would go down to the Salt River, tie one end of a ski rope to a tree, and the other end to our home made river boards. These were generally three foot diameter circular pieces of plywood, carefully and lovingly designed, painted and created by me and my friends. We’d throw the board into the middle of the river (this used in the broadest sense of the term, since Arizona isn’t too well known for flowing bodies of water), jump on and ride the current. We’d jump the board and do tricks like head stands, hand stands, back flips, etc. It was the source of very fond memories.

Well, imagine my surprise, when looking up some information about Wernher von Braun for a school paper today, and here he is, “water-boarding” in the middle of the Tennessee River! Wernher von Braun, enigmatic rocket man! Creator of the U.S. missile and space program! Rocket genius! and River Boarder! Awesome!

Wernher von Braun on a river board

Stuhlinger, Ernst. Wernher Von Braun, Crusader for Space: An Illustrated Memoir. Malabar, Fla: Krieger Pub. Co, 1994, page 39.

Evolution and history of the computer interface, Macintosh style.

Appleinsider is my go to source for Mac news. What I really like about their articles are the in depth, historical explanations of Mac’s new OS features. Some places just tell you what’s new, but appleinsider gives you the background and history of what led to this change or feature. It’s really pretty nifty.

Here are a few favorites about:
The Doc
Virtual Desktops (Spaces)
The Mail application
TimeMachine (backup up utility)

Good to know what to look forward to, and how it came to be.

Tabledump

I had the need once again to dump only certain tables from a database, instead of all 100+ tables. This was where I had a database with about 5-8 wordpress installs. I wanted to backup all of the tables for only one install. There is a way with mysqldump to do this, by listing out all of the tables you want to dump. So I just wrote a bash script to take care of making the list of tables to dump.

It has an array of database table names (without the common prefix) in the script. Then it prompts for the mysql user, database, and prefix. It could be changed to prompt for a file that contains a list or array of table names.

Anyhow, here it is for anyone’s use:

[code lang=”Bash”]
#!/bin/bash

#—————————————–#
# Ammon Shepherd #
# 09.05.07 #
# Dump a database with only the tables #
# containing the prefix given. #
#—————————————–#

echo “This will dump just the tables with the specified prefix from the specified database.”

echo -n “Enter the database name: ”
read dbase

echo -n “Enter the table prefix: ”
read prefix

echo -n “The mysql user: ”
read sqluser
echo -n “The mysql pass: ”
read -s sqlpass

# Get list of tables with the desired prefix
list=( $(mysql -u$sqluser -p$sqlpass $dbase –raw –silent –silent –execute=”SHOW TABLES;”) )

for tablename in ${list[@]}
do
if [[ “$tablename” =~ $prefix ]]; then
tablelist+=”$tablename ”
fi
done

`mysqldump -u$sqluser -p$sqlpass –opt $dbase $tablelist > $dbase.$prefix.bak.sql`

echo

exit 0

[/code]

History of special effects.

Who doesn’t love a good special effects movie? Of course, when you can’t tell that there are special effects, that’s when you know it’s a good movie.

I stumbled upon this article at AmericanHeritage.com, that describes the beginnings of Industrial Light & Magic, George Lucas’ personal special effects company, makers of all cool films (especially Star Wars). This article also describes another sort of paradigm shift in the film industry.

Personally, these types of effects are my favorite. Using real things in innovative ways. I think it’s unfortunate, in a way, that so many of the stunts and effects are digital. I like the good, old fashioned effects where objects are real, made from real things, like the mother ship on “Close Encounters of The Third Kind” (the movie I haven’t seen, but the ship I have).

MotherShip

Anyhow, it was a good article.

And, just as a side note, I always fear losing these web articles, until now. I use Zotero which allows me to store, sort, tag and view web pages, books, and all sorts of stuff. I’ll be using it to collect data for my research projects this year. It’s also made by the good guys at the Center for History and New Media, where I work. 🙂 – Shameless plug!

A different history of computers and Linux

Wow, two posts in a day…

I just skimmed through this interview with Con Kolivas a major Linux kernel developer who has quite the Linux development world in frustration. What caught my attention was his ‘history’ of computers. His recollection of the computers history is truly different than I had ever learned or thought of. Basically, he paints the picture that computers could have been extremely different if the hardware had ruled instead of software. While computers were in their nascent state, the hardware being developed was ever changing. New and different ideas were used in each computer company. Then a software operating system came out that changed all that. By becoming the default OS, there was no more need to create better, different, new hardware. Instead all of the hardware was built and developed to suit the software.

It makes one think, what would computers be like if hardware ruled? What would they look like, how would they perform, how would they work, if they were not limited to one operating system?

Timeplot and Exhibit

The folks over at MIT’s SIMILE have two new projects that are just mindbogglingly awesome. I used the Timeline Project for my research project a few semesters ago about World War II.

Now they have a new time line type tool called Timeplot. This project uses a plot graph to display numerical data along with historical events. Sort of a mix between numbers and dates. Analytic history, if you will. I love the simplicity of the look, the ease of use, and the way it merges cold, dead data with live historical events. I have always wondered what historical events were happening at the time when I see graphs of data. This is an awesome tool to allow that to happen.

The other project, Exhibit, is a digital historians dream. Do you have lots of spreadsheets of info, perhaps all your dissertation data stored in the old JSON file? Wondering how to show that on the web without creating an extensive database solution? Exhibit takes care of it for you. And it’s dynamic! Sort and search the data automatically included. Crazy goodness! Now I just have to think of where to use this too….

The history of a software application

While doing some work today I stumbled upon a bit of history. The author calls it a story, but that’s what history is, right?

Anyhow, it’s a very entertaining and enthralling look at the birth and death (or retirement) of a software program. It provides a lot of insight into the process of making an application, building a software company, and some intriguing behind the scenes information about the coming forth of major Apple products like iTunes, iPhoto and the iPod.

Read “The True Story of Audion” the application that could have been iTunes. Link: http://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/

I'm alive… really, I am…

Not that anyone reads this with any regularity (made impossible by my irregular postings)….

I stumbled upon this cool video explaining “Web 2.0” from http://www.metagrrrl.com/ (I hate buzz words, and Web 2.0 is a huge bloated, overused, ugly buzz word. Oh well..)
Anyhow, it’s really cool…

(If it doesn’t show up, here’s the link.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE