mw on November 30th, 2008

Let us recap the steps we took in the previous post to produce a centred square: We choose the left coordinate of our square, e.g. left = 20. We know that the left bottom vertex of a centred square is on the main diagonal and hence bottom = left. By definition, the left and right [...]

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mw on November 29th, 2008

A WordPress blog can have one or two sidebars, each divided into several parts: search box, list of pages, monthly archives, links to external sites and blogs, etc. The content of each part is generated by a widget. To decide which widgets should be used, go into the Design > Widgets sub-panel. You’ll see on [...]

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mw on November 29th, 2008

In DBN, the canvas for our artistic output is a virtual square sheet of paper, 101 points wide, with the lower bottom point having coordinates [0 0] and the top right point having coordinates [100 100]. The DBN command line X1 Y2 X2 Y2 draws a straight line from endpoint [X1 Y1] to endpoint [X2 [...]

Continue reading about DBN tutorial: Lines

mw on November 29th, 2008

Earlier this week, I was invited to the programme committee of the industrial track of the major academic software engineering conference. I logged into the blog to add the event to the Upcoming Events page. But, surprise, surprise, there was a little red balloon over the Comments sub-panel button, telling me I had 3 comments [...]

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mw on November 23rd, 2008

To execute DBN programs we need the DBN programming environment, available on the DBN website. It can be downloaded and executed on various platforms because it is written in Java. Even more simply, the environment can be run directly from the website as a Java applet, within a web browser. I use the applet instead [...]

Continue reading about DBN tutorial: Getting started

mw on November 23rd, 2008

DBN (Design by Numbers) is a very simple language to program small, non-trivial, interactive, and animated computer art works. DBN can also be used as a language to introduce fundamental computing concepts (like variable, iteration, selection) because the immediate visual feedback obtained by executing a DBN program helps one to understand the program’s instructions and [...]

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mw on November 23rd, 2008

Now that the web host move is out of my way, I can resume where I left off one week ago: organising the sidebar links. The default WordPress installation shows on the sidebar several links to wordpress.org pages (documentation, etc.), all under the heading ‘Blogroll’. That is actually a slight misnomer, because a blogroll is [...]

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mw on November 23rd, 2008

This weekend I started using a new web hosting provider, as the previous one was having too much downtime for my liking. A WordPress blog consists of a lot of PHP files that provide the funtionality, the files that have been uploaded to the blog, and a MySQL database that stores all posts, pages, and [...]

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mw on November 16th, 2008

A permalink (short for permanent link) is a permanent URL to a webpage, contrary to a URL that may change between different accesses to the webpage. For example, in the early days of blogging, the URL of a post would change when the post moved from the front page to the archives. By default, the [...]

Continue reading about Defining the permalink structure

mw on November 16th, 2008

If you installed your blog in a separate sub-folder of your domain (as I did), then your blog’s URL will be something like http://yourdomain.org/yourblogname. If you want the main http://yourdomain.org to point to your blog, then you have to go through these steps:

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