Archive for: July 2004

July 28, 2004

Progress! (Sort of…)

Filed under: Math Mojo — Brian @ 7:26 am

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Progress! Your intrepid Professor has finally figured out how to make subscribing to the Math Mojo Monthly (comes out yearly, mostly!) Newsletter easier for visitors to MathMojo.com.

I’ve be wrestling with PHP and MySQL for awhile, and have taken the easy way out with prefabbed scripts. I intend to break the programming beast eventually, but until now, I’m taking Teddy Roosevelt’s advice about “Do what you can, with what you have. where you are.”

To that effect, I’ve put in subscription forms, instead of having subscribers send me e-mails requesting to sign up for the Math Mojo Monthly.

The next step is to publish the next Monthly. As a veteran procrastinator, I’ve been avoiding that, because I always want to make it perfect. Fat chance of that, though. So I’ve decided to publish it more often, and make it smaller. One lessor in each issue.

Expect the next one out this week; probably about conversion from Fahrenheit to Celcius and a vice-versa.

Also, the page for ordering materials will change. I am getting rid of the cumbersome “Paypal” method of payment, and am making ordering simpler for anyone who wants to try out some real Math Mojo booklets, downloads and abaxes.

See you soon.

Hi-ho!

Professor Homunculus

July 17, 2004

Frust Never Sleeps!

Filed under: Math Mojo — Brian @ 12:17 pm

I have been working on this site, on and off, for years.

Since I decided to go for it full-time, I have made less progress than before!Sometimes working on a slow connection, living in the country, working on a Mac, and not having access to much live instruction in this area gets me down. But I’m not stopping.

You probably face as much or more frustration when you try to learn math.

Math Mojo is about reducing that frustration, and when we can’t reduce it, at least help you live with it.

So I’m going to keep plugging away at this site.

The present fantasy is to make it at least bring in some money, make it more interactive, and give me a chance to write some more pages, tutorials and books to help you as a student, teacher, parent, or simply curious person.

What I’m working on now (this will be of no interest to most of you - but I gotta get it out, for catharsis sake and to help crystalize my thoughts:

Trying to learn how to use Dreamweaver to make interactive pages with mysql and php. I am using phpmyadmin on a remote host (the one which hosts my the Mathmojo website).

The first project is to make a form to gather name, e-mail address, interests and comments for people to sign up for the Math Mojo Newsletter.

At present, you have to fill in and send an e-mail to me, and I take all that info, and cut and paste it into a database on my computer. It is a filemaker pro 5.5 base, (I also use excel). I don’t know how to upload that info to a mysql database on the remote server. At present, there are over 300 people who have already signed up, and I don’t intend to cut and paste all those entries!

I also have to figure out a way to pass the information new from a form (which I know how to create in Dreamweaver) that I’ll place on the homepage, to the database in mysql (which I know how to create).

If there are any webmasters, programmers or other helpful geeks who can help me with this, I’ll gladly make an exchange for Math Mojo help or materials.

That’s about it for now. Wishing you luck in all your thought-endeavors,
Brian (A.K.A. Professor Homunculus)