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Your Worst IT Workshop?
suntory writes "I am a lecturer at a Spanish university. This week had to attend a workshop on 'Advanced HTML and CSS' for the university staff. Some of the ideas that the presenter (a fellow lecturer) shared with us: IE is the only browser that follows standards; frames and tables are the best way to organize your website; you can view the source for most CSS, Javascript and HTML files, so you can freely copy and paste what you feel like — the Internet is free you know; same applies for images, if you can see them in Google Images Search, then you can use them for your projects. Of course, the workshop turned out to be a complete disaster and a waste of time. So I was wondering what other similar experiences you have had, and what was your worst IT workshop?"
If you can, could you provide the name of the vendor who gave that course? I would like to avoid them at all costs :)
Since the difference between intelligence and stupidity is that there's a limit on intelligence, let's try naming the *best* conferences we've been to.
I've been to OOPSLA a couple of times. Very enjoyable and informative. More recently, I just attended a "No Fluff, Just Stuff" conferences in Atlanta. Lots of good information, especially on Groovy and Grails.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
While HTML and CSS are important to know still, I can't help but wonder how many people actually still build websites with HTML and CSS and Java and such? I stopped using plain HTML at least four years ago, when I discovered Content Management Systems (WebGUI back then, now using Joomla). I've built or helped build dozens of sites, all part time, using CMS, and most of my clients couldn't be happier. They have access to add content all day long, and don't have to worry about "design".
If I went to a Web seminar like the one described in the story, and it didn't mention building sites on top of a CMS, I'd question the presenter and the company that paid for me to go. There is no reason that your average person needs to know HTML or CSS, as those should be handed over to DESIGNERS, people skilled with making things look good. If you want to see what it looks like when everyday people do design just go over to MySpace (akkkk).
Just my $.02 (actual value subject to market forces)
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
back in the Tivoli days I got sent to a 2-day class on how to use it. It was about totally worthless.
I found out the next week that the class had cost $750, and I actually went into the CEO's office and suggested to him that next time they want me to know something, they pay me the $750 and I'd purchase and read the appropriate book. He wasn't especially amused.
My
MySpace user, hell. Try looking at the shit the "professional web designers" at MySpace call HTML sometime.
They would have both been pwned. Windows faster, but both within a day or a week. Possibly either within minutes, it's a crapshoot.
/servers/ out there are running linux. The "Linux is secure by design" mantra does more to hurt Linux users than help them.
MOST of the pwned
You are of course correct, but if you speak with some business people you will be surprised why some businesses (and even individuals) take courses and enroll their staff to workshops and training sessions. Sometimes training is done not in order to actually learn something, but only because of various external requirements (eg legal, or requirements imposed or recommended by professional bodies), obscure accounting motives, publicity or advertising reasons ("we spent a million in staff training last year!"), hierarchical or careerist reasons ("manager: I will enroll my staff in extensive training so that my boss can't use their lack of skills as an excuse to fire me for hiring incompetent employees" or even "I, as the training manager, must make everyone attend training sessions because it's good for making me more important within the company"), or sometimes even irrational psychological reasons ("if we lose, it won't be because we didn't try hard but because out training was useless, so it's the trainer's problem not ours"). Yea I know all this is completely anti-productive and irrational, but I have actually seen all this being done in dysfunctional companies (sometimes even required by external agencies or bodies).
Did you do the attendees a favor and correct the lecturer, or did you just let the misinformation run wild?
My experience with the CompuMaster "Mastering Java Web Applications" was disappointing to say the least. Anybody considering one of their courses should reconsider.
..."
1. Two ancient computers for 3 students. 933MHz P3 with 256MB of RAM running XP. It literally took minutes for the Java IDE we were using to load.
2. Instructor was completely unprepared - we had to download the Java JDK over the hotels dog slow network and install it ourselves - taking up most of the first morning.
3. The instructors idea of "teaching" was reading verbatim from the powerpoint and the ~50 page info packet we got. Any attempts to break him loose from that revealed that he was completely clueless.
4. That 50 pages of material consisted mostly of step-by-step tutorials of the trained monkey variety (push a button, eat a banana) which were completely bug-ridden. And this is for a class which this instructor alone claims to have taught 6 times before.
5. At the beginning of the class the instructor asked what we wanted to accomplish. I spoke up and said I wanted to learn how to set up a web service. With 2 hours left, I brought it up again - his reply was to find a section on web services in one of his big Java books, put it in front of me and say "here, look at this." I asked him point blank if he had ever set up a Java web service. No
6. The class was 0900 to 1600 with a 1.25 hour lunch and two 15 minute breaks per day. So about 11.5 total hours of "instruction" for about $1200.
Now, I didn't expect to "master" java web applications in two days. But I did expect to come away with a good feel for what they were, where to start, etc. I've taken other short courses on engineering subjects and have been generally happy with what we covered. But they were much more intense, focused, fast paced, and usually put in at least a 10 hour day. And the instructor was generally a recognized expert in the field. This guy did have all the certs though - he rattled off a whole alphabet soup list of them at the beginning of the class.
On top of all that, the guy was a complete MS shill - but he always prefaced those statements with "I'm not a microsoftie but
All in all, a very disappointing experience.
We did complain, and the company offered to credit our tuition toward another of their classes. Sorry, but my time is more valuable then that.
Actually, there was some merit in his reply.
On many architectures the jump from 32 to 64 bits simply gives you access to more memory and lets you do 64-bit math somewhat faster. The downside is that all your pointers and variables of type "long" are now twice as long, which means that the app consumes more memory, more cache, more bandwidth, etc. This is why the standard mode of operation on a ppc64 machine is to have a 64-bit kernel with a userspace that is mostly 32-bit.
On x86, when they added 64-bit support they also doubled the number of available registers and made some other instruction set changes, which generally compensated for the additional overhead.
Seen plenty of long-lived deadwood in the non-academic world too.
I've always taken the meaning of that phrase to be that people who "can" get paid a lot more for "doing" than they would for teaching. So, rather than a barrier of entry, it is an incentive not to teach.
Those who can, do.
Those who can do more, teach.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
"IE is the only browser that follows standards; frames and tables are the best way to organize your website"
Back in 1997 this may have been somewhat accurate (not sure about the standards though).
I stole this Sig
Hey, you had it great.
A teacher does not by definition know everything; very often, teachers are wrong about stuff, too.
A teacher who can stand being corrected is nearly a treasure to be cherished these days.
Some of the teachers I've had have been patently wrong on come counts, blatantly unknowledgeable on others, yet would not accept any kind of correction, criticism or comment.
I got my revenge by getting a high grade and writing a poor evaluation.
Now if only those evaluations really meant something...
Ignore this signature. By order.
...I can't help but wonder if any of them gave up computer science because of that bad experience.
Actually, it sounds like this class was a perfect example of what life would be like in the real world.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
When communicating with other people, what words mean *to you* doesn't count for much. In the context of web content, static means unchanging _from the server's point of view_. Whether the client thinks the content changes or not doesn't matter. Flash is (usually) static content, for example.
.cfc which responds to AJAX requests, and he loads all of the dynamic data as JSON during onLoad, and then he uses DOM manipulation to add the information to the page. What a MESS!! All because he used a CMS for something it's not meant.
WebGUI has some support for dynamic content, but I'm not familiar enough with it to know how much (I'm thinking of the thing where it takes a SQL query and turns it into a table or whatever). But what the guy you were talking to meant, is that if you put a PHP script into the WebGUI edit box and save it, it just spits the PHP back when you request the page (static content) instead of *executing* it (dynamic content).
I'm actually dealing with some pages right now where the content needs to be dynamically generated, but the original author wanted it integrated with WebGUI. So what does he do? He writes a ColdFusion
It's always a long day... 86400 doesn't fit into a short.
Your solution was not the "obvious" one unless the majority of that 150 student course came up with the same one and failed the lab for the same reason. I assume they did not because operator overloading had not yet been covered in the course. So your solution was elegant, but in this case unconventional, and it's pedantic to argue otherwise.
When people ask you to do work, they want results that make their lives as easy as possible. Your instructors care about you, but only in as much as it's convenient for them. Your TA wanted the same program everyone else produced because its hard to think about whether an alternate is equally correct - doubly so since she apparently didn't even understand the idiom you were applying. You might not have thought about this when creating your submission and so asking about it afterward wasn't a bad idea, but doing so in a confrontational manner was. You may think this unfair but in the end your instructors have long forgotten you and you've a B on your record. The lesson is that soft skills are often more important than technical skills.
Well, one thing that was correct in the article: tables are still the best way to organise a html page. At least for relatively complex websites. There is absolutely no replacement for tables, when it comes to aligning elements to each other, both horizontally and vertically.
CSS just doesn't cut it for relative positioning to multiple elements in a column. For simple layouts, CSS is great. It works, it looks neat, and is very maintainable. But as soon as you start needing a proper grid style layout, it just falls to pieces. There's no way that CSS can replace tables in that instance, unless you use absolute positioning and meticulously calculate the exact sizes and positions you want. But then you're left with a complete mess, much worse than using tables to begin with.
As long as you keep the table as simple as possible, and use CSS to layout the simple elements, then it's still very maintainable. Just try to avoid using tables for every little thing, and the design is generally fine.
There are two possible explanations:
:-P
(1) Most low-uid people have become lurkers. They read a lot but post little. I know this applies to me.
(2) Nobody really looks at the uid of posters until a uid-war starts, so nobody notices the low-uid people unless there is a uid-war.
I suspect it's actually a combination of the two.
What have I done since I joined slashdot? Changed universities, changed a few jobs, changed a few girlfriends, changed a few psychiatrists, and also changed a few passwords.
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