Anne

A new webserver. I only lost half a blog page because it contained a lessthan sign which apparently tells the blog it is the end of the text! I have no idea how to find help and learn to escape characters, so for now I put text instead of the symbol and I will move on. Formating is better, with lines of code following each other line by line, instead of bunched in an unreadable paragraph.

These last couple weeks, I have made progress with Ruby and the web. It is a sweet feeling to finally get a “hello world” example to work. I spend so much of my time trying to get installs to work, that I wonder if I will move on to actually writing code! Maybe I am getting addicted to this, “install and how do you get to this to work” pattern of tension and delight in the release from tension.

“The buddha evoked the unrest, instability and uncertainty that color our lives …desire is a natural response to the reality of suffering. We feel incomplete and desire completeness; we feel unrest and desire ease; we feel insecurity and desire comfort; we feel alone and desire connection.” Mark Epstein. So I am endlessly flying on the wheel of suffering. But at least in this case, thanks to the generosity of folks on the web, there are short moments of release from suffering.

For now, I am following some of the beginner’s assignments posted by MIT professor philip Greenspun on this older course website
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/6-171Fall2003/CourseHome/
Most of the implementation is left for me to discover, but in a sense, that makes it easier to learn: I don’t have to skip over perl or java code to get to the main ideas. And hopefully the text will guide me to some web application mastery. For now, I have written my first CGI code entering data in a form and sending it to a ruby code to process and generate a web page with the answer. Cool!

I have also learned one way of setting up eruby and erb on tiger. First I set up erb with the help from this weblog
http://dekstop.de/weblog/2006/01/rhtml_on_osx_with_apache_and_erb/index.html
and then I did the same with eruby, except I copied eruby to eruby.cgi.

A key part of learning, is finding an object of desire. How many come to the ruby site and say, I have read the book, now what, what problem should I try to solve? And on the other hand, how many come to 3D like I do with an overwhelming desire, I want to represent my cousin’s head, a boy jumping in the air, etc, dreams of perfection so far beyond anything the most skilled person can attain. With such richness of perception from daily life around us, how can we look at a dreary cube with the least bit of lust? I sat under a tree in bloom yesterday. Each branch was heavy with hundreds of tiny perfect white flowers sparkling in the sun by the river.