Chapter 2 work and reactions:

I read through the chapter. I liked it, it was good and informative. I've got to say, I don't much enjoy working with html - now or any time i've tried it before. CSS is interesting, seems like it has a lot of potential to do cool stuff with, but still not amazingly fun to work with. I did the work, it's at http://students.gctaa.net/~dreich/projects/ch2/. I didn't do either the end-chapter excerices or the excerices you linked to, because they all just seemed like meaningless busywork, considering I understand the stuff already. If you want me to do them, I will, but that's the one thing I didn't expect to see taking a college-level course. Particularly that one you have where you wanted me to make a table of dec/hexa/octal/binary values; that's excatly the sort of thing I (and, presumably, other computer-hacker-y people, including you) would hate - mindless, not even copy-pasting, but typing the same thing over and over. If you made me do it, I'd likely just write up a python script to generate it. Which, admittedly, may take longer, but it might not and it would wind up actually teaching me something - which doing that wouldn't. Not to mention, it would be about 100x more fun.

Anyway, that semi-rant went on for a while. Looking ahead a bit... the next chapter's on really insanely simple stuff with python. I can skip that, right? The next one's on.. (these ellipses are me checking)... Something I don't know, that looks fairly simple. I'll do it soon then. I'll probably be done with it by the time I come to the acreer center, finally - next tuesday, right?

Chapter 1 Reactions:

First, I read though all of chapter 1 and did this in about 40 minutes at home while multitasking. It's the only substantial bit of (not post - 10:00) free time i've had or will have until monday, with science fair and the musical. So forgive me if I havn't been entirely... thorough in reading it. I get it though, it's very simple stuff. The writing style is fine, nothing to get excited about but definately readable. Some of the metaphors are a bit stretched, but that seems about par for the course in computer stuff. As to what i find interesting, the abstraction stuff certainly - both interesting about what it is and about how i'll get to use it. The bits of code they have are cool, i can kinda figure out what they do - the index.py (named like index.html?) file prints a plain text file that the app.yaml tells the app engine to serve. As for the excersies (don't know if you wanted this or not, so good to do it):

1. I have less to worry about on the server end, but have to be sure I don't do anything to Google either.

2. My computer sends a message through the DNS, etc. 'cloud' to the server, telling the server what it wants and giving a return adress, and the server starts sending those 40 things (text, code, html, pics, movies, sound, anything) back to me.

3. to name the locations of files etc in the app.

lots more working ciphers!

I've been working on redocnE over a while, and have all ciphers except bookcode (which I can imagine how I'll impliment) and User-defined ciphers, which will be hard, but really cool when they're done. I may hold off on that one for a while to add other features - i've realised redocnE has no way of decoding in the gui yet, but that'll be easy to fix.

Code's in devel on launchpad, as always.

Functional (in the sence that it can do 1/16th of what it's supposed to) GUI!

Well, I got the gui to the point where I can encode text using Atbash. Atbash is the easiest though, the way I have it planned the area on the side will be used for code-specific fields like keys and so on - atbash has none of these.