You've got a point - for many things it is good to make things easier on the front end. But if you ignore constraints on the back end, remember that databases are often long-lived, and someone else may/will code up a front end for it. And years later when someone has to try and make sense of the gobbledygook that has entered the database, the curses will reverberate throughout the land.
OOBase does not yet cope well with that. Or rather, it comes closest here.
That was my point. It's worth a look, it may suit your needs, it may not. Obviously not, in your case. But I did find it closer to Access than anything else I could find, and easier to get working. YMMV.
Re:Has the Documentation Been Improved?
on
PostgreSQL 9.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Err, have you actually used the PostgreSQL manual? It's one of the best manuals I've ever seen for a software product.
AFAIC, it is the standard by which other software manuals should be judged. Good call.
Re:Waiting for a capable PostgreSQL front-end
on
PostgreSQL 9.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The last time I looked at ooo.org Base (at least a year ago, if not longer), I found it surprisingly capable, even workable. Give it a go, and have some patience. I only really had a look at the forms though, but I used to use subforms a lot and I could do what I wanted to do with it. Did not really look at reports though.
Transform it? You've just gone and made it more hysterical, so let's not get all wound up. Oh the irony! And now I've upped the frequency, it just seems to get easier and easier!
I have to disagree with McNealy's push to go all-online though. There's no substitute for having a physical book at times. We just need to get off of the "new textbook" gravy-train.
That's what printers are for. I suppose you could also get a more rugged book produced by getting it done at a print shop. But a manilla folder of printouts would accomplish the same thing, really.
The other benefit of going open source is that bugs can get fixed very easily. And the number of people capable of fixing spelling and grammatical error is greater than the number of people who can fix programming errors. Perhaps.
I believe that it was an influence in the epic RPG, Progress Quest. As I sat, transfixed by that progress bar, I felt like I was doing something worthwhile for my machine. Now I don't run MS any more, I kind of miss those fun times of defragging, not to mention the periodic reinstalls of everything.
If I had alzheimers to the point where I was wandering off into the woods somewhere, unable to get home, I don't think I'd like to be "rescued" with a GPS device. My own grandfather (alzheimers) tried to commit suicide at least once by sitting in his car in his garage with the engine turned on. He was found and "rescued". He lived to a somewhat older age, with all the dignity of a crazy old man, not knowing who most of his relatives were, shitting his pants, etc. I hope my relatives don't keep me around against my will as a still technically living reminder of the person I once was.
As the usual proportion of baby boomers start to become demented, I hope we will see some more realism about what dementia is. There will be a lot of demented people and the associated problems will become commonly experienced. Car accidents for one. It's not going to be pretty.
Most Linux or other FOSS LiveCDs are a complete affair and have been for years now. And that includes a full office suite. About the only non-media thing that keeps increasing in size and needs lowish latency are games.
Though Dr Aleks Krotoski does say that in the future, people who do not have a complete record, warts and all, will not be taken seriously, because they are not fully three dimensional people.
It will work the same as it ever has. The average person would rather vote in an axe murdering psychotic provided that he didn't get caught and says all the right things, than a normal person who has said some things that most people disagree with, but is otherwise a good guy. The sociopaths who take pains to cultivate a bland, god fearing public persona will be able to rise to the highest levels of anything, irrespective of what they are actually like or what they actually do. Or at least, they will make good puppets for those who care less about publicity and more about achieving what they want.
Those with a complete warts and all record will have to deal with the negative consequences of it... unless they continue seek publicity, fame and fortune, which has its own rewards and curses.
Except folks who use those mice(?) with the trackballs. You guys are just weird
RSI sucks, that's the reason for the trackball. In FPS it's hard at first but I think I got within about 80-95% of my ability with the mouse (estimated just after a stint using the trackball). The problem with using a mouse is that the pain from RSI eventually drops my performance to where it's below that with the trackball, so it's not sustainable.
Or, in other words, can we stop this even if we want to?
In principle, I believe so. 1. Collect solar energy from deserts (there is more than enough), using some sort of global (probably carbon) tax to fund it. 2. Use energy to convert water and CO2 to hydrocarbons. 3. Pump hydrocarbons back into the ground.
Step 3 needs a bit of work, but at least there are some proof of concepts I think. You could probably use this method to tweak global temperatures until they are just right (long-term), adjusting the CO2 level to counter other phenomena (e.g. solar output, whatever).
and we might as well take our minds off what we cannot change and work a little bit more on what we can, i.e. the misery of mankind.
FWIW, the prevention of the extinction of humanity should trump the alleviation of temporary human misery. Unless you meant the other way (images of Dungeon Keeper spring to mind)?
Really? Asking for help is a red flag? Wow, I'd hate to work with you!
It's a red flag, not a deal breaker. He's trying to weed out the people who are too lazy to google things like regex creation etc, as the time required and constant interruptions to spoon feed will mean that it would be quicker for him to do the coding himself and not hire anyone.
I don't know if it's because of the way I write code or because I've been doing it for a while, but I was just totally blown away that nobody they had interviewed could come up with 400 lines of code that actually ran.
You think it's common to routinely sit down and write a complete application of 400 lines of code without testing any sub-section of it? In 45 minutes? To reiterate, that means you were writing a working line of code every 7 seconds, with no testing, not including the time to analyze the database schema, without a bug? Either you have been doing exactly that sort of task for a long enough time to internalize the syntax, or there is something you aren't telling us.
Almost every time I've typed out a bunch of code without testing components of it, I've regretted it. The debug process takes orders of magnitude longer. I daresay most programmers have learned the same lesson, and that's why they would struggle with this test. Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace specifically applies this style to aerospace - lots of small tests to debug things, rather than build it in one go and hope it works. That's not to say that if I've been using some language for a long stint to the point where I've become fluent in it, I couldn't do the same (I'd just triple check each small section of code by eye), but not being able to google stuff and not being able to test every few lines or so would be an unnatural work method and I suspect, not a good indication of my ability, or many other people's for that matter.
A person testing every few minutes or so to verify that they code they have written is correct, will produce the same bug-free output as a savant who is supposedly capable of doing the same thing without the frequent testing, in similar time. The verification pretty much guarantees it, unless it was a particularly thorny bug. And the practice of frequent debugging is not a detriment to being able to competently create highly complex and useful applications, as is evidenced by the many people who do exactly that. Create something complex enough and there will be bugs. Being able to pinpoint them to 1 line, or 5 lines, as opposed to 100 lines is just a sane thing to want to do. Occasionally I will get lax and code up a lot of lines without testing. Sometimes it will work. But when it doesn't, it often costs many hours to debug and I've cursed myself repeatedly for being lazy.
If you are a bug-free code writing savant, I'm impressed. This test is pretty much guaranteed to find people like yourself. On the other hand it will exclude people like myself who have the unusual ability to learn new and complex things quickly, but tend to routinely flush the mental cache. I wouldn't trade that ability, even if it meant the potential of not doing well in such interviews.
Interesting you bring that up. I'm glad I have my degree in lots of ways, because it taught me that most subjects have depth to them. That it pays to dig deeper than the surface, because there are minefields of gotchas and footguns lurking when you don't anticipate problems involved with projects. That it pays to listen when other people say things, and when you hit on unfamiliar terms, to research them.
Endless research does mean that you tend to get less things done, and have problems finishing things. When you do get things done though, they usually kick major ass. To use an RPG analogy, you can go the way of the warrior or the way of the wizard. The warrior's road is easy but there is a finite amount of power you can accrue. The wizard's way is hard, but by the time you do get around to doing whatever it is you want to do, it's easy. It's staying alive until you become powerful that is the hard part.
I have been a system engineer for going on 20 years now and I still look up 90% of the stuff I do.
Thank you, parent and the other people commenting on here - I do exactly this and it works out brilliantly for me. Unless I have just looked stuff up, it seems I have to go back and refresh myself on things time and time again. Someone else mentioned regexes - they are a classic example. Every time in my life when I need a regex, I have to relearn how the darn things work again. It doesn't take that long though, and each time it comes back faster. Syntax for various languages too. I don't even internalize how to do basic things like loops, tests or assignment statements. I've probably spent thousands of hours coding in shell, SQL and Perl but if you asked me how to do the equivalent of "Hello World" in each, I'd fail because it's been at least 2 weeks since I've used any of them. I know at least for shell, I'd just google "advanced bash", get the Advanced Bash Scripting guide, and go from there. I'd have equivalent resources for everything else. It does not stop me from creating what I want. For lots of things, I'll start with an example and be able to grok what someone is doing, and just modify it to do what I want.
I see something similar in other forums - the best resources on there, pretty much without fail, are other autodidacts. They are poor in certification because by the time someone else has found a course, booked, attended and been spoon fed information that may or may not teach what they wanted to know, the autodidact has googled it, learned it, applied it and moved on. And possibly ordered a book on it if he couldn't find it online.
The biggest issue I have with using nuclear energy for power in a widespread fashion is that it is the most dense source of energy known to man by far, and once used it's gone. Future space exploration and colonization will probably require nuclear fuel, especially if it's beyond the solar system.
Meanwhile we have deserts that are receiving orders of magnitude more solar energy than the world currently uses, that could be harvested using technology we have today.
The danger from dioxin is that it is cumulative. The "safe" exposure is what is tabulted to be "not particularly harmful considering consistent exposure over a lifetime." Much like DDT in the environment building up and eventually killing birds by making eggshells too brittle to be hatched, dioxins build up in animal tissues, and accumulate in epic proportions in apex predators (like humans...)
What martial art focuses most on disabling and killing an opponent, having the same goals as military combatives training?
How is that useful in the days of ubiquitous CCT cameras? If you disable or kill an opponent, you are extremely likely to get caught. Far better to run away, but if you are forced into a combat situation, the best outcome is probably to choke someone out - they will come to without any broken bones, cuts or bruises, or pending lawsuits against you.
But FWIW, any of the component disciplines of MMA are going to enable you to render unconscious or disable your opponent, and from there you could kill them if you were so inclined. That would be wrestling, BJJ, Muay Thai, boxing, kyoukushin karate. Technically wrestling is only about achieving dominant position on the opponent, but from there the hammerfist, elbow or knee is a fairly obvious and effective technique.
The best way to win a fight is by never fighting at all.
This is true when you are an adult. Unless you are stupid or live somewhere undesirable, it should be easy to avoid situations where you might be attacked.
School is different. It's a lot like a prison - you will be forced to come into contact with all manner of people, including those who actually WILL be in prison when they are older. There are some sadistic people out there, and you might become a target of bullying. I did. Chances are if I could go back and relive high school, improved social skills would minimize the bullying I would receive. I wouldn't answer the teacher's questions as much in class, for one. But I'd probably still play chess in lunch, or read, or jot out equations to solve a problem that interests me, or anything to take away the boredom. That marks a person as a nerd, and someone to be picked on.
From that perspective, you can either live a life of fear, or you can win the conflict on a level the bully understands through effective physical violence. There is always the possibility that a bully will fight you on his terms, in a place of his choosing, with all the possibilities of physical danger that entails. But if it gets too much and you can prepare for a confrontation that is on your terms, you stack the odds in your favor. Bullies tend not to like getting their asses kicked. Sometimes the bullies will be too much of a risk to take on, and then you just have to live with a life of fear. At least now there are way more effective martial arts you can learn than the ubiquitous TKD McDojos that were the only arts available back in my day.
You are confusing being an introvert (preferring not to spend time with other people) with being socially inept.
True. They are indeed orthogonal, but there is certainly a good correlation as developing social skills requires practice. Introverts tend not to get much, unless they train specifically for it. After a while of being a hermit, your social skills can get rusty, even if they were once good.
Slashdot Mirror
You've got a point - for many things it is good to make things easier on the front end. But if you ignore constraints on the back end, remember that databases are often long-lived, and someone else may/will code up a front end for it. And years later when someone has to try and make sense of the gobbledygook that has entered the database, the curses will reverberate throughout the land.
That was my point. It's worth a look, it may suit your needs, it may not. Obviously not, in your case. But I did find it closer to Access than anything else I could find, and easier to get working. YMMV.
AFAIC, it is the standard by which other software manuals should be judged. Good call.
The last time I looked at ooo.org Base (at least a year ago, if not longer), I found it surprisingly capable, even workable. Give it a go, and have some patience. I only really had a look at the forms though, but I used to use subforms a lot and I could do what I wanted to do with it. Did not really look at reports though.
As far as business logic, put that in PostgreSQL.
6. It would mean we'd have to clean up our code.
Transform it? You've just gone and made it more hysterical, so let's not get all wound up. Oh the irony! And now I've upped the frequency, it just seems to get easier and easier!
That's what printers are for. I suppose you could also get a more rugged book produced by getting it done at a print shop. But a manilla folder of printouts would accomplish the same thing, really.
The other benefit of going open source is that bugs can get fixed very easily. And the number of people capable of fixing spelling and grammatical error is greater than the number of people who can fix programming errors. Perhaps.
I believe that it was an influence in the epic RPG, Progress Quest. As I sat, transfixed by that progress bar, I felt like I was doing something worthwhile for my machine. Now I don't run MS any more, I kind of miss those fun times of defragging, not to mention the periodic reinstalls of everything.
If I had alzheimers to the point where I was wandering off into the woods somewhere, unable to get home, I don't think I'd like to be "rescued" with a GPS device. My own grandfather (alzheimers) tried to commit suicide at least once by sitting in his car in his garage with the engine turned on. He was found and "rescued". He lived to a somewhat older age, with all the dignity of a crazy old man, not knowing who most of his relatives were, shitting his pants, etc. I hope my relatives don't keep me around against my will as a still technically living reminder of the person I once was.
As the usual proportion of baby boomers start to become demented, I hope we will see some more realism about what dementia is. There will be a lot of demented people and the associated problems will become commonly experienced. Car accidents for one. It's not going to be pretty.
Most Linux or other FOSS LiveCDs are a complete affair and have been for years now. And that includes a full office suite. About the only non-media thing that keeps increasing in size and needs lowish latency are games.
It will work the same as it ever has. The average person would rather vote in an axe murdering psychotic provided that he didn't get caught and says all the right things, than a normal person who has said some things that most people disagree with, but is otherwise a good guy. The sociopaths who take pains to cultivate a bland, god fearing public persona will be able to rise to the highest levels of anything, irrespective of what they are actually like or what they actually do. Or at least, they will make good puppets for those who care less about publicity and more about achieving what they want.
Those with a complete warts and all record will have to deal with the negative consequences of it... unless they continue seek publicity, fame and fortune, which has its own rewards and curses.
RSI sucks, that's the reason for the trackball. In FPS it's hard at first but I think I got within about 80-95% of my ability with the mouse (estimated just after a stint using the trackball). The problem with using a mouse is that the pain from RSI eventually drops my performance to where it's below that with the trackball, so it's not sustainable.
// max_int should be enough for anyone
for(i = 0; i < max_int;i++){
sleep(1);
beat_heart();
}
// printf("hi!!!!!\n")
In principle, I believe so. 1. Collect solar energy from deserts (there is more than enough), using some sort of global (probably carbon) tax to fund it. 2. Use energy to convert water and CO2 to hydrocarbons. 3. Pump hydrocarbons back into the ground.
Step 3 needs a bit of work, but at least there are some proof of concepts I think. You could probably use this method to tweak global temperatures until they are just right (long-term), adjusting the CO2 level to counter other phenomena (e.g. solar output, whatever).
FWIW, the prevention of the extinction of humanity should trump the alleviation of temporary human misery. Unless you meant the other way (images of Dungeon Keeper spring to mind)?
It's a red flag, not a deal breaker. He's trying to weed out the people who are too lazy to google things like regex creation etc, as the time required and constant interruptions to spoon feed will mean that it would be quicker for him to do the coding himself and not hire anyone.
The information is usually there. It's knowing what to look for, finding it and applying it that's the hard part.
You think it's common to routinely sit down and write a complete application of 400 lines of code without testing any sub-section of it? In 45 minutes? To reiterate, that means you were writing a working line of code every 7 seconds, with no testing, not including the time to analyze the database schema, without a bug? Either you have been doing exactly that sort of task for a long enough time to internalize the syntax, or there is something you aren't telling us.
Almost every time I've typed out a bunch of code without testing components of it, I've regretted it. The debug process takes orders of magnitude longer. I daresay most programmers have learned the same lesson, and that's why they would struggle with this test. Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace specifically applies this style to aerospace - lots of small tests to debug things, rather than build it in one go and hope it works. That's not to say that if I've been using some language for a long stint to the point where I've become fluent in it, I couldn't do the same (I'd just triple check each small section of code by eye), but not being able to google stuff and not being able to test every few lines or so would be an unnatural work method and I suspect, not a good indication of my ability, or many other people's for that matter.
A person testing every few minutes or so to verify that they code they have written is correct, will produce the same bug-free output as a savant who is supposedly capable of doing the same thing without the frequent testing, in similar time. The verification pretty much guarantees it, unless it was a particularly thorny bug. And the practice of frequent debugging is not a detriment to being able to competently create highly complex and useful applications, as is evidenced by the many people who do exactly that. Create something complex enough and there will be bugs. Being able to pinpoint them to 1 line, or 5 lines, as opposed to 100 lines is just a sane thing to want to do. Occasionally I will get lax and code up a lot of lines without testing. Sometimes it will work. But when it doesn't, it often costs many hours to debug and I've cursed myself repeatedly for being lazy.
If you are a bug-free code writing savant, I'm impressed. This test is pretty much guaranteed to find people like yourself. On the other hand it will exclude people like myself who have the unusual ability to learn new and complex things quickly, but tend to routinely flush the mental cache. I wouldn't trade that ability, even if it meant the potential of not doing well in such interviews.
Interesting you bring that up. I'm glad I have my degree in lots of ways, because it taught me that most subjects have depth to them. That it pays to dig deeper than the surface, because there are minefields of gotchas and footguns lurking when you don't anticipate problems involved with projects. That it pays to listen when other people say things, and when you hit on unfamiliar terms, to research them.
Endless research does mean that you tend to get less things done, and have problems finishing things. When you do get things done though, they usually kick major ass. To use an RPG analogy, you can go the way of the warrior or the way of the wizard. The warrior's road is easy but there is a finite amount of power you can accrue. The wizard's way is hard, but by the time you do get around to doing whatever it is you want to do, it's easy. It's staying alive until you become powerful that is the hard part.
Thank you, parent and the other people commenting on here - I do exactly this and it works out brilliantly for me. Unless I have just looked stuff up, it seems I have to go back and refresh myself on things time and time again. Someone else mentioned regexes - they are a classic example. Every time in my life when I need a regex, I have to relearn how the darn things work again. It doesn't take that long though, and each time it comes back faster. Syntax for various languages too. I don't even internalize how to do basic things like loops, tests or assignment statements. I've probably spent thousands of hours coding in shell, SQL and Perl but if you asked me how to do the equivalent of "Hello World" in each, I'd fail because it's been at least 2 weeks since I've used any of them. I know at least for shell, I'd just google "advanced bash", get the Advanced Bash Scripting guide, and go from there. I'd have equivalent resources for everything else. It does not stop me from creating what I want. For lots of things, I'll start with an example and be able to grok what someone is doing, and just modify it to do what I want.
I see something similar in other forums - the best resources on there, pretty much without fail, are other autodidacts. They are poor in certification because by the time someone else has found a course, booked, attended and been spoon fed information that may or may not teach what they wanted to know, the autodidact has googled it, learned it, applied it and moved on. And possibly ordered a book on it if he couldn't find it online.
Exactly. The Sahara is not the only desert in the world.
The biggest issue I have with using nuclear energy for power in a widespread fashion is that it is the most dense source of energy known to man by far, and once used it's gone. Future space exploration and colonization will probably require nuclear fuel, especially if it's beyond the solar system.
Meanwhile we have deserts that are receiving orders of magnitude more solar energy than the world currently uses, that could be harvested using technology we have today.
Cannibals are going to be all sorts of screwed.
How is that useful in the days of ubiquitous CCT cameras? If you disable or kill an opponent, you are extremely likely to get caught. Far better to run away, but if you are forced into a combat situation, the best outcome is probably to choke someone out - they will come to without any broken bones, cuts or bruises, or pending lawsuits against you.
But FWIW, any of the component disciplines of MMA are going to enable you to render unconscious or disable your opponent, and from there you could kill them if you were so inclined. That would be wrestling, BJJ, Muay Thai, boxing, kyoukushin karate. Technically wrestling is only about achieving dominant position on the opponent, but from there the hammerfist, elbow or knee is a fairly obvious and effective technique.
This is true when you are an adult. Unless you are stupid or live somewhere undesirable, it should be easy to avoid situations where you might be attacked.
School is different. It's a lot like a prison - you will be forced to come into contact with all manner of people, including those who actually WILL be in prison when they are older. There are some sadistic people out there, and you might become a target of bullying. I did. Chances are if I could go back and relive high school, improved social skills would minimize the bullying I would receive. I wouldn't answer the teacher's questions as much in class, for one. But I'd probably still play chess in lunch, or read, or jot out equations to solve a problem that interests me, or anything to take away the boredom. That marks a person as a nerd, and someone to be picked on.
From that perspective, you can either live a life of fear, or you can win the conflict on a level the bully understands through effective physical violence. There is always the possibility that a bully will fight you on his terms, in a place of his choosing, with all the possibilities of physical danger that entails. But if it gets too much and you can prepare for a confrontation that is on your terms, you stack the odds in your favor. Bullies tend not to like getting their asses kicked. Sometimes the bullies will be too much of a risk to take on, and then you just have to live with a life of fear. At least now there are way more effective martial arts you can learn than the ubiquitous TKD McDojos that were the only arts available back in my day.
True. They are indeed orthogonal, but there is certainly a good correlation as developing social skills requires practice. Introverts tend not to get much, unless they train specifically for it. After a while of being a hermit, your social skills can get rusty, even if they were once good.