Editors

One of the most useful programs, that you will ever encounter is an editor. They have existed almost since the birth of computing, and in this little piece, I’ll try to figure out, which editors, I have encountered in the periode om my computing, eg. 1965ff.

To start with the end, my favorite editor today is … TextPad. It is not even free or open source, but it works – try it out at: http://www.textpad.com

Next – be careful not to confuse text processing program with editors. Don’t even think of bold, underline, images and so on. They are far too complicated for day-to-day work, where you just want to use the basic alphabet, some number and a few signs. Although I must admit, that at this moment I am trying out such a program here at Blogger, eg. Windows Live Writer. That is because a friend asked my how to place images in Blogger, and I came down with a long fairy tale using basic HTML-code and an editor.

In that case – I even recommended an editor: KompoZer, which is an open source program for write a home page. Since it incorporates bold, underline, images and the like, it is actually more than an editor, BUT the main idea is to be able to go back to basics and edit the raw HTML-code, and KompoZer can do exactly that.

Why not use Windows Notepad, which has existed for ages, eg. since the beginning of Windows in the early 1990’ies? – You can, but it is simply too dumb, if you for instance want to read/write text-files from different operating systems like Apple and Linux. That is where TextPad is brillant.

It goes without saying, that in Linux you have very fine editors also, that can do the same trick starting with the classical vi. With a graphical interface there are several good editors around – I don’t know about Apple, since I have never had such machinery around – or the patience to figure out how to run it.

This describes the current situation – and since this is also a test of Windows Live Writer, I’d better close this document at see, if it works, when I press the ‘save’-button. Execpt – I need to add an image and place it exactly, where I want it. The built-in editor in Blogger cannot do that, it places an image in the beginning of a page … Let med give you an example of KompoZer … and see, what happens?

It worked – right out of the box. 1-0 for Microsoft, but my long experience tells me, that although it went well to start with, there may be problems lying around – but more about that at a later stage. Now to the saving of the document – I can see a button saying: Publicize – let’s give it a try?

It worked !! 2-0 for Microsoft – I almost feel like back in 1998, where I tried the first version of Frontpage – a piece of software, that Microsoft bought from a Unix-company and tranformed it into a windows-based system – which again was later intergrated with Microsoft Office. It also worked fine to start with, BUT how I regretted having used that software for producing home pages for years 1998-2004 or so …

ps! This is now being edited by the built-in editor in Blogger, and there seems to be no problems with Live Writer's HTML-code.

Health

Last year I participated in a project: Cities on a diet (Byer på skrump) - where up to 9 cities in Denmark for 9 weeks tried to loose weight. Guess what? My city Furesø (above photo) won the race and was named Danish Champion !

It lasted 9 weeks and we are 30 people trying not only to loose weight, but also gain better condition with respect to muscle, blood sugar, fat percentrage, colesterol and the lot ..

For the first 4 weeks, I did not really loose weight, but my some of my fat was converted to muscles. Since they weigh more that fat, it explains it all, except: How do you then start loosing weight? Easy - our good coach said - eat less, use more energy, eg. exercise. Which was the whole idea of the programme: to change your bad habits effectively, so you can remain in a solid and robust condition.

Which again means goodbye to all the sweet things and hello to more exercise - that is why the group was presented with many alternatives - and I am sad to say, that horseback riding was not included in our program - but I will try to press it through next year, which is an election year, so maybe I'll be a rider after all.

Be careful that you don't get hurt by exercising. It happened for instance, when we went to a pool, where we should try-out a kayak - not the Greenland-model, where you are strapped into the boat, but a more loose one. After some difficult moments where I learned to balance and use the handle, it went very well to the other side of the pool, but I hat not learned to break, so I hit the fence and fell out. But altogether we had a great time playing.

And that is the whole meaningful thing about the project: That it had to be fun to last - because one time is not enough - you have to find a way, that fits you to move your muscles every day to compensate for your age and the greater intake of good food and so on.

Finally we are going to learn to cook - and I have a speciality, that is special wheat, which does not destroy your blood sugar, but keeps it in balance. It was used by the ancient Romans - they got 1 kg a day and made bread out of it. They survived somehow, as history will tell. It does not taste well, but combined with other things it can be good for you.

I watched a German Tv-program about Roman Wellness, and the name of the stuff is: Hartweizen - which in English is Durum Wheat - maybe you know about it? It is not grown all over the place, originally it comes from Sicily in Italy and in Denmark is is grown on the island of Bornholm, where my oldest son was living. When visiting him recently I bought 2 kg of a combination of this product in ecological format - what do you say?



Finally I am learning vegeratian habits, since the whole idea is to conentrate on making vegetables taste good. If you start with ordering meat, then you are lost - you should instead try to make the best out of these green things and THEN you might add some meat or fish or whatever. Long time ago I got a book from a friend, who translated it from French: Vegetables / Roger Vergé, and it was only later that I discovered, that it was all vegetarian - what a disappointment. But now - I recalled the fine photos in it, and I want to try out his recipes. It was an old story about a son, who wanted to pay tribute to his father being an amateur gardener, but with love for the "green things".

The morale of the story is: It is possible to achieve a perfect balance, if you are patient and start with moving your body around converting fat to muscle. Then you start dropping excess food, and all of a sudden you loose 2 pounds a week without hurting ...

What have we here: A winner ....

Heroes

or stars in the sky: Human beings, that I admire and respect, who inspire me and for which I bow deeply in the dust.

Here we go - and since I cannot mentions them all at once neither give one of them priority over the other, I have decided to use time as my scale, eg. using special dates that referes to them - and then tell my story.

Today is the 20th of July, which reminds me of: Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg. I admire him, because he dared his life at a time, where everyone in Germany just cared for themselves - I am talking about the holocaust started by the National Socialist in Germany in the period 1933-1945. It took this officer several years to discover, that something was rotten in the Nazi-system, and then he acted trying to assasinate the dictator (whose name I don't want to type here, it best be forgotten).

It happened on the 20th of July 1944 - and it failed, unfortunately. The dictator survived the bomb, that Stauffenberg planted in the situation room. On the same night, Colonel Stauffenberg was shot together with 3 other military persons in the Bendler Block, which housed the German military command.


When I visited this special place in Berlin, I was taken by surprise, since an American film crew were planning to "shoot on location" (Valkyrie with Tom Cruise), so at first I was denied access to the museum, where the post war German Government tries to document history correctly. But I was finally admitted, and it was such a daring exhibition, that I can never forget it.

Since then I have seen several documentaries of Stauffenberg on German Television - and even seen the movie, that was made with Tom Cruise acting as Stauffenberg. Each time I get this feeling: How he dared to be different and act in a situation, where everybody kept their mouth shut waiting for miracles or what?

Had Stauffenberg succeeded in killing the dictator in 1944, millions of lives could have been saved - but no. Instead Stauffenbergs legacy after the war was, that he was a traitor!! - He had made an oath, that he did not keep, and that is enough to loose your honor forever. Not many Germans tried to oppose the Nazi-regime - I can think of another, namely Willy Brandt. He fled to Norway during the war and was also doomed traitor, when he returned.

Colonel Stauffenberg left his wife and 4 children - one of which was born after he was killed.
A German priest - Martin Niemöller wrote these lines:

When the Nazis came for the Communists
I kept quiet
I was not a Communist.
.
When they locked up the Social Democrats
I kept quiet
I was not a Social Democrat.
.
Then they came for the trade unionists
I kept quiet
I was not a trade unionist.
.
Then they came for the Jews
I kept quiet
I was not a Jew.
.
When they came for me
there were no more
to speak out

Coming up:

• Nelson Mandela (cannot wait, since it was only yesterday on July 18 - his birthday - that I should have started writing about this unique leader)
• Audrey Baird - My American Mom - still going strong on July 22nd, her 91st birthday. She has been flying ever since I was born in 1945 until recently and then being a mother of 4 children - my ideal of a strong personality.
  

Photos

My interest for "taking pictures" - as we say in Danish - started in spring 1963, where I was awarded an AFS-scholarship. I bought my first camera - a japanese model Olympus Pen for the neat price of 180Dkr (I forgot the exchange rate then, could it be 10 kroner on 1 dollar?). And then I started shooting photos of my home town in order to get a print or - wait a minute - dias-slide, so I could bring it with me to the US.
Already back then I "dared to be different" as was to become my motto taken from the Class of '64 at Dickinson High School, ND - I had bought a camera, that was efficient, eg. it stored two pictures in the space of on: 18x24mm times 2 makes 36x24mm, right?
From then off I have been at war with doing things normally - and it has brought me a lot of trouble ever since. To make prints or dias out of a film with 18x24mm negatives, that was not easy - normally I just got two pictures in one fram ;-)
Nevertheless - it was a good investment, since I still have the original negatives. And with moderne digital technology coming around, it has been a pleasure to convert the old negatives to digital images, which I can then export for various purposes.
The Olympus camera lasted for a long time, but it was converted to a Nikon camera once I got married, and my wife and I traded: She got a fur coat and I got a camera !! - I don't remember, how we got the money, maybe we were not paying mortgages at that time ... It was a used camera though with a standard 50mm lens, and I later bought a fine 105mm portrait lens, that took great portraits.
At that time I rented a room in a rich man's house, and I got access to a dark room, where I could develop my black/white negatives - what a treat in the late 60'ies. Because: It was expensive to buy film and get it developed - and even worse: To get prints - I remember, that one simple copy 10x15cm or so cost about 3 kr. - so I only got prints out of the most important pictures and kept the negatives for better futures ...
Another fine aspect at that time was photo albums - of which a made quite a few with beautiful annotations. Just like young people would make a blog today with the finest art work to illustrate their views. I still have the latest addition from around 1984, which is - empty! I don't recall what happened, I guess the children got too old to photograph and store in albums, but I do recall, that I all of a sudden changed to dias, maybe because I thought they were easier to keep in good order - what a fatal mistake!!
Eventually also the dias have been re-mastered and converted to digital images, but the annotations were missing and just think, that you dropped a dias-cassette with 100 pictues - what a mess to restore the order.
It all continued that way until 1999 in august, where my American family came visiting - and John brought his first digital camera. Was that an adventure to watch him operate this little thing! I should mention, that back in 1990 I got hold of a video camera - and that really cost me a lot of time, so it was almost only in vacations, that I continued to use my wife's camera - a Canon from the Olympics in Moscows /what year was that?/. But videos are another story ...
I got hold of a digital camera via my work, because at that time, I had quit being technical director of information technology/IT - and had focused on ... photography with special emphasis on digital video (here we go again ...!). No - we bought an expensive Sony camera, and off I went shooting everything and everybody for the next two years. What a fantastic feeling it was to be free of negatives, of development and prints and what have you! Just connect the camera to the computer, and voilá: The finest photos came rolling in.
To cut a long story short, I got yet another camera - a Canon Powerhot G3 in connection with being webmaster for a local football club, and with it I added another 25.000 photos to my growing collection. Unfortunately it was stolen while on vacation in Milano, Italy - and it took me almost a whole year to decide on buying my own digital camera: The very first one - which became a Samsung NV100HD - because it was tiny and I like to take photos/video of performances like open air concerts, operas and other things, where you are not allowed to use a camera.
Now I have a problem: How to find 10 of my best photos from the vast collection and put them right here for your convenience ...

Computers

My focus has for long time been on these magnificent machines. Although they were developed to save time, I must admit tht I use lot of that rare commodity wih them.
The important fact here is my interest in spending time with computers - I simply has liked it ever since I way back in 1965 was confronted with a huge IBM mainframe using punched cards and line printers. Just one tiny error, and the whole process had to be repeated. But was it fascinating to write FORTRAN code and get the results one or two hours later ... The photo shows some Uniscope terminals at the Royal School of Library and Information Science (in short: DB)

The next turning point was in december 1979, where we were allowed by the Danish Government to buy a minicomputer from a Norwegian company running a proprierary operating system quite unheard of. At that time we could get no standard software, everything had to be programmed from scratch - so I used my FORTRAN-skills and with the help of some students from the University of Copenhagen, Institute of Dataology - we produced some bibliographic programs.

The first machine - a NORD100 - had an internal memory of 32KB, which was just enough for up to 8 connected terminals, and the external storage was a dual disk with 2x15MB (!) - the cost as approved by the Financial Committee of the Government as the last act just before they called a new election (!) was about 300.000Dkr. When the machine arrived - and I believe it was on the 19th of December - I was on outlook on the street and waited for some hours - but finally it came, and I had to quit the traditional Christmas luncheon to get the heavy machinery in the elevator and up to the 3rd floor of the building.

Even minicomputers don't last forever, although we bought several machines during the next 10 years, but then IBM showed up again with their latest invention, the personal computer ! We actually never bought an IBM PC, we went to Sweden and bought one from their brand (forgot the name) plus a Sperry Univac (later Unisys) Pc - just to be sure! The software was the traditional to start with: Text processing, spreadsheets and again: Compiler, but now for other programming languages. Finally we were able to purchase special software for our field, especially with respect to the forthcoming information revolution.

Then another small revolution came along, and for a long time we had three systems competing: The mainframe via networking to the regional computing centers of the universities (NEUCC, RECKU and others) - the minicomputer with all its dumb terminals and finally an exotic blend of PC's connected via a new thing: an Ethernet, which was to be the advance of the Internet, which we joined on the 15th of August, 1994. In the meantime we ran through systems with modems for X.21 and X.25 standards to get access to the new informations systems popping up.

That really changed the world - the Internet. Most of my colleagues felt like the founder of Microsoft, that it would soon fade away, but they were proven wrong: Nothing in computing was ever going to be the same again, after people got the hang of using e-mail to order airline tickets after having searched for weather forecasts via satellites and what have you!

My last emphasis went into operating systems - or the war between IBM and Microsoft with the latter being the winner with Windows 95, Windows NT and ... the rest of the story you will surely be familiar with. Except for one system, that I overlooked: Linux ! It took me more than 10 years to find out, that the Open Source software had its merits, but better late than never: Today I am using Ubuntu ever since version 0504: The Hoary Hedgehog (as it was nicknamed).

And what do I then have for hardware: ASUS is my favorite - since I went on partime in 2005 I started to buy barebone Pc's from this oriental company, and when they introduced the EEE PC Netbook, I happily joined in with some samples, that my children still are using today.

It it my intention to construct a multimedia Pc, that can take care of all my ambitions of getting Tv and video and audio and photos and so on into one single system - unfortunately I have been overtaken by the simple systems with a remote control, that are more "friendly" to operate - but no problem: As long as I can decide, which video format to use, then I am a happy man, since I do not want to be a slave of IBM, Microsoft, Apple or what have you of companies, who think, that they have the right to decide, what is good for you.
Long live the Open Source- and the Pirate-movements, who give free access to information ....