They need weapons. You might be aware that the US is one of the biggest exporters of weapons. You don't have to cut it out, but you do want to be more careful who you sell them to.
Whoaaaa there. We are? I'm assuming you're talking about small arms fire here. If you weren't talking about small arms fire then just ignore the following.
You've seen terrorist groups in TV right? They're almost always sporting an AK-47. They're cheap, reliable, simple, and made by many many countries. Here in the US they suck. Badly. They're so watered down no self respecting terrorist would want to buy one if he had a choice. No threaded barrels, "thumbhole" stocks, and sometimes non-conventional magazine ports to only accept single-stack 10 round magazines. No thank you. Hell I'm an American and I won't buy one of these -- I'll take my Egyptian made AK any day.
We might very well be the largest exporter of firearms, but that would most likley come from companies like Remmington, Winchester and maybe Smith and Wesson. Hunting rifles/shotguns and handguns. When it comes to build Homeland Defense Rifles (formerly termed Assault Rifles) we're pretty crappy at it due to government restrictions. Although, Bushmaster makes a damned nice AR-15 clone. Still sucks that I can't get a threaded barrel on it though.
Here's to hoping the 1994 Crime Bill doesn't get renewed next year.
Maybe a distro intended solely for introducing linux is in order. Not like Lindows and Lycoris which "introduce" you to linux by isolating you from it, but something that is more of an interactive tutorial.
Your post got me thinking... and that's sometimes hard to do.
People hate tutorials. If they actually liked learning stuff they'd read all of the documentation that abounds before they went through the install. I know I sure as heck didn't know what the differences were between AfterStep/WindowMaker/Enlightenment/twm/fvwm/Black box/KDE/Sawfish when I first installed Linux, and I sure wasn't going to wait around to get that bugger installed. I was excited.
Don't "tutor" them -- "market" to them! Instead of giving them a flat text blurb about what you've got with a couple of screenshots make it an all out "advertisement" for it. Turn the whole package management deal into a friggen shopping spree for users. Maybe women would get more into it even:).
Turn it into an experience sort of like purchasing a nice new suit or something. The installer is a salesman of sort. In the beginning you pick the general purpose of the install (all workstation -- server people don't need this stuff). Find out what's important to the user up front: small and zippy, big and flashy, not too different from Windows or a Mac interface, and take them from there.
"Well, sir, to be honest with the window manager (jacket) you picked you've got plenty of options when it comes to reading your mail (a shirt)... you have Kmail, Balsa, and good old mutt and pine still. If you like the Evolution look though we'd probably want to change your window manager to suit it though, perhaps Sawfish?" Something like that "feel" to it. Without some stupid animated sales guy resembling clippy walking you through it. Actually, maybe a clippy would be good for it. I don't know.
If you keep it entertaining, and not too bogged down in the details people might actually like the experience of picking out their suite of tools.
When the whole network is going up in flames its advantageous to have a person to point fingers at if nothing else...
I hate this sentiment. It doesn't do the network or the business any good to be able to point a finger. It does you some good though, as you're not responsible for it in managment's eyes. So, not only are you paying out the arse for support, you're also suffering downtime. Wonderful!
Nobody considers it your fault though, unless you didn't have a good reason for picking your vendor. If everybody thought the vendor was a good one then you're okay. Well, the end of the fiscal year comes around and your department spent all of it's money and didn't achieve it's goals. The internal IT team sticks their thumbs up their collective asses and points the index finger of their free hand at the vendors. Business conclusion at this point: The department costs too much and provides too little. Outsource it or cut it.
You still lost your job.
Maybe I'm idealistic but it frightens me how many people only do enough to keep their job safe without thinking about the company's benefit as a whole.
Perhaps I'm a bit jaded though. A recent project that I've been working on just illustrates the point that your vendor isn't employing hundreds upon hundres of Supermen. In fact, their employees might be just damned near retarded sometimes. Their engineers have deadlines to meet and they can't meet those deadlines if you're still finding bugs in their recently released product and demanding fixes for them. It really doesn't matter how much money you put into them -- they're still only human. No amount of cash will change that.
To try to maintain the value of Usenet I still regularly post to many groups but, I don't follow the groups. What I mean is that I post solutions to the problems I encounter and thereby use Usenet as a storage medium for my personal knowledgebase articles. The posts are as clear and detailed as possible and usually follow the following format:
A valiant effort, but I'm afraid that mitigates one of the best things about using Usenet archives to find answers to questions. A knowledge-base like article is useful but it's very 1 dimensional. When I search groups.google.com I generally skip over any thread that only contains 1 article. Typically if there's only 1 article it's an unanswered question. Threads that contain 3-4 are usually great. You have the original question and 2-3 people post a follow up to it each giving their own thoughts. I think it's the very act of having to communicate your answers back to the original post -and- having to defend them against the group that makes them of such high usefullness.
I'm almost convinced at this point that all documentation should be written as a conversation. Lock a user in one room, lock the experts in another room and set them in IRC. User has questions, experts answer. When that's all said and done you format it up, organize things a little more and send it out the door. You can even lead bad information in there so that users know that that ISN'T the answer to their problem. For complex problems knowing just the answer is next to worthless over a longner period of time -- knowing what doesn't work is the mark of experience.
You read my mind. I paid about $500 bucks (well, traded work for equipment really) for the Cisco ethernet router I have in my apartment. It's a little on the geeky side, but it's nice having Cisco equipment laying around so what little knowledge I have about IOS doesn't get lost.
I would prefer doing this with a PC and OpenBSD at some point in time because, well, it'd be cool -- but I don't want another fan running. I never even thought of taking a mini-itx or similar system and building a router out of it.
It's gone too far, and now the RIAA is getting pissed. You guys blew it, don't be surprised about what's happening.
Actually, in my opinion the RIAA blew it. I remember the hay-day of Napster, and I was an avid user of it; or rather my computer was an avid user of it. Around 1998 or so, when i'd leach MP3's from FTP sites I -dreamt- of a service that would let me download one for 75 cents a copy. That would have been great -- if I got 2MB out of a 4MB song I was pissed when it went down becuase I'm on dialup. It was horrid trying to get stuff. Strangely enough it was still less hassle because I was located 30 mins. away from the nearest CD store.
Back to my avid use of Napster -- it was primarily for parties. I had a good DSL connection in my apartment and my roomate was another techie who got a kick out of making things easy to use. I made them work, he made them easy. We rigged up a network in the apartment with a decent fileserver and kept all of our media files on there. Many of which we legally owned mind you. We'd get 10-15 people in our apartment though hanging out and partying some weekends and they'd kick up Napster to find a song they wanted to play and download it. It was faster than them getting the CD from their car and having it ripped too. Doing that would have interrupted the playback of whatever else was going on. My roomate rigged up some IR software and stuff that I made work with the XMMS+Linux playback machine and it was like the ultimate whatever-you-want jukebox. Pretty slick.
Yeah, it was illegal -- sort of. I'd imagine if the RIAA busted in somebody in the room probably owned the CD to whatever we were playing. Songs were kept on disk, usually only played back when the same group of people came around. I don't like being illegal, so I would have GLADLY paid a fee to download popular tracks. I still would. There's a slew of singles I'd like to get right now that I have in my head but I'm sure as hell not going to pay $12 bucks a piece for their CDs and drive out to get them and rip them myself.
Since Napster? Well, somebody goes out to their car and gets the CD and we rip a few tracks and toss it into the playlist. No increased revenue for the RIAA and more pain in the ass for me. They're losing business. It's been said before, but the RIAA doesn't need to squash MP3's, they need to embrace them, and offer them at a price. I'm all for it.
After I explained that I tend to rate my skills lower than peers do because I compare myself against people with far more experience than I*: my interviews are usually unimpressive. I'd been told that by the HR directory of my previous job too -- I interview poorly.
* For instance, Bjarn Stroustroup , the creator of C++ mentions he's not an expert in the language anymore in his 3rd edition of The C++ Programming Language. Knowing things like that I can't rate myself as anything more than a 6/10 as a C++ coder. I've never had a living person next to me who could do significantly better, but I know they're out there.
... or if you're so damned good at coding find another job. Seriously, if you're a coder and you spend a lot of time at the keyboard and hack away constantly for 8 hours in a day you're in the wrong job or doing things inefficient. Granted, not everybody can just up and change positions, but I'd look into that before I blame keyboard designs.
If you hack for 8 hours every day and get CTS from it, I'm sorry. I've had symptoms of it myself, and I realized after a while it was because my job was just plain too easy and I was doing things poorly. Take some time to think about what you're hacking up, design it better, and write less LOC while you're at it. Coding isn't data entry -- and if your code -IS- data entry something is wrong about your approach, or your company's approach.
Sometimes, marathon sessions have to be done, but if it's every day, 8 hours a day, 6 days a week, 50 weeks a year, you're in the wrong job. You just can't type that fast every day and not get hurt from it. You're not paid for manual labor either -- you're paid for your mind and what you can produce. A symptom of that is that you must often use your fingers to put it to use.
Switching to DVORAK is pointless if you're a coder IMHO. Seriously, DVORAK is meant to make English easier to type -- how much English do you whack out in a typical 100 lines of code? Probably not much.
When you take that 20 seconds or so to pause and think about your next regexp that you need to write, flex your hands around -- get them off the darned keyboard! In my experience, keep them off the damned mouse too -- them darned scroller-wheel things are horrid for CTS if you ask me. They put all the stress on a few tendons in one hand that yank on the middle finger in the downward direction. The middle finger was meant to be pulled the other way, in the same motion that you'd give your boss when you yell, "I'm not taking a break, I'm refactoring!".
Just my two cents. I've had symptons bad enough that I'd drop stuff when I held it in my right hand. I changed my habbits, and I changed job too -- but not just because of the CTS. The job wasn't right, I could code for 8 hours straight doing stuff I knew like the back of my hand 7 years ago. That's not programming, that code-monkeying for a year straight. That'll hurt your tendons AND your pride.
Kinetic powered watches already exist. They have a pendulum that winds by you moving. Probably wouldn't work too well with keyboard/desk bound programmers.
I've always wondered how much energy I loose to my keyboard every week actually. I grew up on the old IBM Model-M keyboards with the heavy duty springs, so I tend to type rather hard. I've actually had people think I was hitting something just from my prissy little Dell QuietKey keyboard bouncing up and down on the desk as I hack away at something.
So, if we took the pressure required to do a keypress on a Model-M, add 25% to that for good measure (gotta make sure that key is down) then sustract the pressure required for a new QuietKey keyboard, multiply that by 115,200 times in a day (4 hours at 80wpm, 5 chars per word and one space/return after it)... what would we get? Probably nothing useful, but it could perhaps power a tiny little fan on my monitor just for the geek factor. Maybe re-charge a couple sets of AA batteries over a week?
applying such broad brush-strokes to say that men's and women's experiences and understanding of humour is fundamentally different, could be dangerous
When's the last time you saw an 80 year old woman fart and think it was funny? I don't get it, but a good fart just never seems to get old. When you're 5 it's funny, and I've even seen a 96 year old man let one rip and chuckle about it... 'cuz we all had to smell it.
Something's horribly goofed up in our (men's) brains here. It seems as though we never get too old to laugh at a fart or a monkey doing something stupid. Monkeys are great.
I've always wanted to see this happen to a webserver of mine, so bring it on. 768k DSL up/down on a AMD K6-2 400mhz w/ 128MB of RAM on IDE drives. Lets watch her die...
If you're using a Mozilla browser you really should just use their text zooming feature. Unlike IE it actually works when you tell it to largen up the page. I'm in galeon now, which has a quick little up/down arrow clicky thing on it that lets me do it, Phoenix/Firebird/??? has ctrl++ and ctrl+-, but I entirely forget what stock Mozilla uses.
It's handy, as my eyesight isn't the best and spending 12 hours a day in front of a monitor will -really- stress them out. A quick mutter of "damn designers" when I hit a page that's forcing small font sizes, a couple of keystrokes, and I can read the darned thing. Sometimes the formatting gets a little goofed up, but that doesn't really bother me.
I'm geeked -- my screen has NEVER been this readable before. I might surf the web all day just to drool at how purdy my screen is now.
For me, a six pack of beer would do nicely. It may not fix the actual "problem" but it sure would improve relations between the help desk and the supported customers/users really.
We all know the bloke that called in a computer problem didnt' -really- want to work that day -- he just called the problem in because he'd look unfit if he didn't. So, puddle in there with your backpack, tell the guy you can fix it in 5 minutes if he wants, but if it's okay with him you'll sit there and kill a sixer with him. We geeks are all to often accused of being unsocial, so lets fix the problem -and- the computer glitch at the same time. Plop down, crack open a few cold ones, and the two of you can bitch about how much your job sucks. When there beer's gone, you crack open the -real- gear, fix the crap, and head on your way.
Guarantee you'll be the #1 requested support guy in a short time too.
Ah yes.. the sign of another person who has never worked with me.
Why design software with error handling I ask? Why not just write your code to not have errors? Much simpler if you ask me. Only pussies catch exceptions and deal with them. Real Programmers never throw an exception, therefore we are the exception.
Then agian, maybe it's shit like that that gets me weird looks in design meetings.
Microsoft also publishes a tool that will automatically identify any known security vulnerabilites that need to be patched, but I can't find the link off hand.
It's pretty easy to find out what MS software needs patching really. Just take a bare minimum install of an MS OS of your choice and do the following from a command prompt:
Wow, I'm not sure who in the world moderated you up for that "Interesting" post, but they must have been drinking heavily.
1) The CD standard is published. There is no reverse engineering rquired to understand it.
2) CD's aren't encrypted in any way, shape or form.
3) CSS is something used on DVD's containing copyrighted video. Now, while a DVD and a CD are the same physical size I hope you realize that they're actually very different in their implementation.
Gun Death Stats... Please note on this page that Norway has a 32% ownership rate vs the US's 39%. By your calculations they should have nearly the same death rate as the US by firearms (homicides that is) but they're about 1/6th the US.
Keep trying, you'll find a stat the proves your point someday I guess.
I agree, every beginner book on a subject should have examples of the shit people will do and think it's okay when it's not. I'd like to add to your list though:
Sections, or lines, of commented out code that remain over time. If you feel the non-working code should serve as an example, comment why it's commented out.
Code that breaks the 60-lines-per-function rule. This is varying rule, as the more complex the code is the shorter the function should be, and the less complex it is the longer it can be. Nothing wrong with 120 lines in a case statement, as long as each block is only a couple of lines long.
Code that breaks the 3-indents rule. This one and the previous I've garnered from the Linux coding standard recomendations. They're good rules if you ask me.
Code that includes code that slaps things into the same namespace. This is inexcusable, unless you're pulling in constants. If there's logic required to obtain a commonly used parameter then put it in a function, include that function set, and call that function and assign it to a variable declared in the scope it will be used in.
Code that includes other pages, does some logic, and includes more pages. Sorry, not acceptable. It shows poor design and lack of initial thought.
Just my two cents. I see this a lot on projects and they're dead ringers that what I'm about to embark into is just a sheer mess.
If garabage collecters can be "sanitation engineers"...
Personally, I'd rather they called themselves Sanitation Engineers or more properly Sanitation Solution Implentors. I get horribly confused when I see "garbage collectors" and begin thinking of Java's memory reclaiming capatiblities. The term's been watered down too much, and no longer has a proper definition in my mind.
So are code mumbling sysadmins like me really programmers? I'm certainly not a code monkey, although I use _no_ form of design methodology. Hack first, ask questions later.
This is going to sound like a flame, but it's not really meant to be one.
No, you're not a proper programmer, your a two-bit hacker when it comes to programming. Before anybody turns their eyes off, let me explain.
I'd wager, because you're a SysAdmin, that your typical coding work will not exceed 500 lines in any given project; and most of them probably fit between 50 and 250 lines. I don't consider LOC to be the ultimate guide to code complexity, but you can clearly see a difference in a 250 line project and a 100,000 line one. The person that doesn't, is in a sorry state when their 100,000 lines of code are in app.h and app.c.
A SysAdmin that codes with the "Hack first, ask questions later" is a poor programmer -- but most likely a damned good sysadmin. You're writing an app that fills a gap that exists right now, and needs to be fixed right now. You get the job done, and fix it when/if it breaks down the road due to unforseen circumstances. That's perfectly acceptable to me, given that you're not a proper programmer, and nor should you be. If the problem is more complex than 500 lines it should be turned over to a proper development team.
The problem arises though, when two-bit hackers think they're programmers and begin writing code with that same mindset for large systems. Oh my, the pure shit I've seen in my life -- and it's a fairly short one. A VBScript web application that use an include statement to pull in 600 Dim statements, which then proceeded through 3,000 lines of code that had not a single function it; just one giant glob of instructions. No logical seperation. I've seen web applications that were properly seperated into different Perl modules for different functions. Although, none of them called each other for common functions, and nearly every one of them had a single main() function in them that spanned anywhere from 300 to 3,000 lines of code. That's not good.
You know enough to code for your sys admin job, and that makes you a damned good sys admin, but please, for the Love of God don't try and jump into programming until you've got a really good handle on the basics of how semi-large projects should work.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting. Useless, but interesting. You've essentially created a PRNG (pesudo random number generator) that's awkward to use.
Whoaaaa there. We are? I'm assuming you're talking about small arms fire here. If you weren't talking about small arms fire then just ignore the following.
You've seen terrorist groups in TV right? They're almost always sporting an AK-47. They're cheap, reliable, simple, and made by many many countries. Here in the US they suck. Badly. They're so watered down no self respecting terrorist would want to buy one if he had a choice. No threaded barrels, "thumbhole" stocks, and sometimes non-conventional magazine ports to only accept single-stack 10 round magazines. No thank you. Hell I'm an American and I won't buy one of these -- I'll take my Egyptian made AK any day.
We might very well be the largest exporter of firearms, but that would most likley come from companies like Remmington, Winchester and maybe Smith and Wesson. Hunting rifles/shotguns and handguns. When it comes to build Homeland Defense Rifles (formerly termed Assault Rifles) we're pretty crappy at it due to government restrictions. Although, Bushmaster makes a damned nice AR-15 clone. Still sucks that I can't get a threaded barrel on it though.
Here's to hoping the 1994 Crime Bill doesn't get renewed next year.
Wow... at 99cents per track you can't get a good estimate of what 7,500 tracks would cost? And you post to Slashdot?
Your post got me thinking... and that's sometimes hard to do.
People hate tutorials. If they actually liked learning stuff they'd read all of the documentation that abounds before they went through the install. I know I sure as heck didn't know what the differences were between AfterStep/WindowMaker/Enlightenment/twm/fvwm/Blac
Don't "tutor" them -- "market" to them! Instead of giving them a flat text blurb about what you've got with a couple of screenshots make it an all out "advertisement" for it. Turn the whole package management deal into a friggen shopping spree for users. Maybe women would get more into it even
Turn it into an experience sort of like purchasing a nice new suit or something. The installer is a salesman of sort. In the beginning you pick the general purpose of the install (all workstation -- server people don't need this stuff). Find out what's important to the user up front: small and zippy, big and flashy, not too different from Windows or a Mac interface, and take them from there.
"Well, sir, to be honest with the window manager (jacket) you picked you've got plenty of options when it comes to reading your mail (a shirt)... you have Kmail, Balsa, and good old mutt and pine still. If you like the Evolution look though we'd probably want to change your window manager to suit it though, perhaps Sawfish?" Something like that "feel" to it. Without some stupid animated sales guy resembling clippy walking you through it. Actually, maybe a clippy would be good for it. I don't know.
If you keep it entertaining, and not too bogged down in the details people might actually like the experience of picking out their suite of tools.
I hate this sentiment. It doesn't do the network or the business any good to be able to point a finger. It does you some good though, as you're not responsible for it in managment's eyes. So, not only are you paying out the arse for support, you're also suffering downtime. Wonderful!
Nobody considers it your fault though, unless you didn't have a good reason for picking your vendor. If everybody thought the vendor was a good one then you're okay. Well, the end of the fiscal year comes around and your department spent all of it's money and didn't achieve it's goals. The internal IT team sticks their thumbs up their collective asses and points the index finger of their free hand at the vendors. Business conclusion at this point: The department costs too much and provides too little. Outsource it or cut it.
You still lost your job.
Maybe I'm idealistic but it frightens me how many people only do enough to keep their job safe without thinking about the company's benefit as a whole.
Perhaps I'm a bit jaded though. A recent project that I've been working on just illustrates the point that your vendor isn't employing hundreds upon hundres of Supermen. In fact, their employees might be just damned near retarded sometimes. Their engineers have deadlines to meet and they can't meet those deadlines if you're still finding bugs in their recently released product and demanding fixes for them. It really doesn't matter how much money you put into them -- they're still only human. No amount of cash will change that.
A valiant effort, but I'm afraid that mitigates one of the best things about using Usenet archives to find answers to questions. A knowledge-base like article is useful but it's very 1 dimensional. When I search groups.google.com I generally skip over any thread that only contains 1 article. Typically if there's only 1 article it's an unanswered question. Threads that contain 3-4 are usually great. You have the original question and 2-3 people post a follow up to it each giving their own thoughts. I think it's the very act of having to communicate your answers back to the original post -and- having to defend them against the group that makes them of such high usefullness.
I'm almost convinced at this point that all documentation should be written as a conversation. Lock a user in one room, lock the experts in another room and set them in IRC. User has questions, experts answer. When that's all said and done you format it up, organize things a little more and send it out the door. You can even lead bad information in there so that users know that that ISN'T the answer to their problem. For complex problems knowing just the answer is next to worthless over a longner period of time -- knowing what doesn't work is the mark of experience.
Just my thoughts anyway.
You read my mind. I paid about $500 bucks (well, traded work for equipment really) for the Cisco ethernet router I have in my apartment. It's a little on the geeky side, but it's nice having Cisco equipment laying around so what little knowledge I have about IOS doesn't get lost.
I would prefer doing this with a PC and OpenBSD at some point in time because, well, it'd be cool -- but I don't want another fan running. I never even thought of taking a mini-itx or similar system and building a router out of it.
Actually, in my opinion the RIAA blew it. I remember the hay-day of Napster, and I was an avid user of it; or rather my computer was an avid user of it. Around 1998 or so, when i'd leach MP3's from FTP sites I -dreamt- of a service that would let me download one for 75 cents a copy. That would have been great -- if I got 2MB out of a 4MB song I was pissed when it went down becuase I'm on dialup. It was horrid trying to get stuff. Strangely enough it was still less hassle because I was located 30 mins. away from the nearest CD store.
Back to my avid use of Napster -- it was primarily for parties. I had a good DSL connection in my apartment and my roomate was another techie who got a kick out of making things easy to use. I made them work, he made them easy. We rigged up a network in the apartment with a decent fileserver and kept all of our media files on there. Many of which we legally owned mind you. We'd get 10-15 people in our apartment though hanging out and partying some weekends and they'd kick up Napster to find a song they wanted to play and download it. It was faster than them getting the CD from their car and having it ripped too. Doing that would have interrupted the playback of whatever else was going on. My roomate rigged up some IR software and stuff that I made work with the XMMS+Linux playback machine and it was like the ultimate whatever-you-want jukebox. Pretty slick.
Yeah, it was illegal -- sort of. I'd imagine if the RIAA busted in somebody in the room probably owned the CD to whatever we were playing. Songs were kept on disk, usually only played back when the same group of people came around. I don't like being illegal, so I would have GLADLY paid a fee to download popular tracks. I still would. There's a slew of singles I'd like to get right now that I have in my head but I'm sure as hell not going to pay $12 bucks a piece for their CDs and drive out to get them and rip them myself.
Since Napster? Well, somebody goes out to their car and gets the CD and we rip a few tracks and toss it into the playlist. No increased revenue for the RIAA and more pain in the ass for me. They're losing business. It's been said before, but the RIAA doesn't need to squash MP3's, they need to embrace them, and offer them at a price. I'm all for it.
My last answer: Interviews.
After I explained that I tend to rate my skills lower than peers do because I compare myself against people with far more experience than I*: my interviews are usually unimpressive. I'd been told that by the HR directory of my previous job too -- I interview poorly.
* For instance, Bjarn Stroustroup , the creator of C++ mentions he's not an expert in the language anymore in his 3rd edition of The C++ Programming Language. Knowing things like that I can't rate myself as anything more than a 6/10 as a C++ coder. I've never had a living person next to me who could do significantly better, but I know they're out there.
Oh, and yes I got the job.
... or if you're so damned good at coding find another job. Seriously, if you're a coder and you spend a lot of time at the keyboard and hack away constantly for 8 hours in a day you're in the wrong job or doing things inefficient. Granted, not everybody can just up and change positions, but I'd look into that before I blame keyboard designs.
If you hack for 8 hours every day and get CTS from it, I'm sorry. I've had symptoms of it myself, and I realized after a while it was because my job was just plain too easy and I was doing things poorly. Take some time to think about what you're hacking up, design it better, and write less LOC while you're at it. Coding isn't data entry -- and if your code -IS- data entry something is wrong about your approach, or your company's approach.
Sometimes, marathon sessions have to be done, but if it's every day, 8 hours a day, 6 days a week, 50 weeks a year, you're in the wrong job. You just can't type that fast every day and not get hurt from it. You're not paid for manual labor either -- you're paid for your mind and what you can produce. A symptom of that is that you must often use your fingers to put it to use.
Switching to DVORAK is pointless if you're a coder IMHO. Seriously, DVORAK is meant to make English easier to type -- how much English do you whack out in a typical 100 lines of code? Probably not much.
When you take that 20 seconds or so to pause and think about your next regexp that you need to write, flex your hands around -- get them off the darned keyboard! In my experience, keep them off the damned mouse too -- them darned scroller-wheel things are horrid for CTS if you ask me. They put all the stress on a few tendons in one hand that yank on the middle finger in the downward direction. The middle finger was meant to be pulled the other way, in the same motion that you'd give your boss when you yell, "I'm not taking a break, I'm refactoring!".
Just my two cents. I've had symptons bad enough that I'd drop stuff when I held it in my right hand. I changed my habbits, and I changed job too -- but not just because of the CTS. The job wasn't right, I could code for 8 hours straight doing stuff I knew like the back of my hand 7 years ago. That's not programming, that code-monkeying for a year straight. That'll hurt your tendons AND your pride.
Maybe they can merge their efforts. A browser with a SQL interface instead of just a URL interface:
select * from www.slashdot.org where article_dup_count < 0;
I'm game.
I've always wondered how much energy I loose to my keyboard every week actually. I grew up on the old IBM Model-M keyboards with the heavy duty springs, so I tend to type rather hard. I've actually had people think I was hitting something just from my prissy little Dell QuietKey keyboard bouncing up and down on the desk as I hack away at something.
So, if we took the pressure required to do a keypress on a Model-M, add 25% to that for good measure (gotta make sure that key is down) then sustract the pressure required for a new QuietKey keyboard, multiply that by 115,200 times in a day (4 hours at 80wpm, 5 chars per word and one space/return after it)... what would we get? Probably nothing useful, but it could perhaps power a tiny little fan on my monitor just for the geek factor. Maybe re-charge a couple sets of AA batteries over a week?
When's the last time you saw an 80 year old woman fart and think it was funny? I don't get it, but a good fart just never seems to get old. When you're 5 it's funny, and I've even seen a 96 year old man let one rip and chuckle about it... 'cuz we all had to smell it.
Something's horribly goofed up in our (men's) brains here. It seems as though we never get too old to laugh at a fart or a monkey doing something stupid. Monkeys are great.
I've always wanted to see this happen to a webserver of mine, so bring it on. 768k DSL up/down on a AMD K6-2 400mhz w/ 128MB of RAM on IDE drives. Lets watch her die...
Screenshots with the new font setup
There's a Slashdot homepage shot, a Google results shot, and one of my Gnome Control Center.
If you're using a Mozilla browser you really should just use their text zooming feature. Unlike IE it actually works when you tell it to largen up the page. I'm in galeon now, which has a quick little up/down arrow clicky thing on it that lets me do it, Phoenix/Firebird/??? has ctrl++ and ctrl+-, but I entirely forget what stock Mozilla uses.
It's handy, as my eyesight isn't the best and spending 12 hours a day in front of a monitor will -really- stress them out. A quick mutter of "damn designers" when I hit a page that's forcing small font sizes, a couple of keystrokes, and I can read the darned thing. Sometimes the formatting gets a little goofed up, but that doesn't really bother me.
I'm geeked -- my screen has NEVER been this readable before. I might surf the web all day just to drool at how purdy my screen is now.
Thanks guys.
For me, a six pack of beer would do nicely. It may not fix the actual "problem" but it sure would improve relations between the help desk and the supported customers/users really.
We all know the bloke that called in a computer problem didnt' -really- want to work that day -- he just called the problem in because he'd look unfit if he didn't. So, puddle in there with your backpack, tell the guy you can fix it in 5 minutes if he wants, but if it's okay with him you'll sit there and kill a sixer with him. We geeks are all to often accused of being unsocial, so lets fix the problem -and- the computer glitch at the same time. Plop down, crack open a few cold ones, and the two of you can bitch about how much your job sucks. When there beer's gone, you crack open the -real- gear, fix the crap, and head on your way.
Guarantee you'll be the #1 requested support guy in a short time too.
but I'm afraid no code is perfect.
Ah yes.. the sign of another person who has never worked with me.
Why design software with error handling I ask? Why not just write your code to not have errors? Much simpler if you ask me. Only pussies catch exceptions and deal with them. Real Programmers never throw an exception, therefore we are the exception.
Then agian, maybe it's shit like that that gets me weird looks in design meetings.
Microsoft also publishes a tool that will automatically identify
/s
any known security vulnerabilites that need to be patched, but I
can't find the link off hand.
It's pretty easy to find out what MS software needs patching really. Just take a bare minimum install of an MS OS of your choice and do the following from a command prompt:
cd \
dir *.*
See the list? Yeah. That needs patching.
Wow, I'm not sure who in the world moderated you up for that "Interesting" post, but they must have been drinking heavily.
1) The CD standard is published. There is no reverse engineering rquired to understand it.
2) CD's aren't encrypted in any way, shape or form.
3) CSS is something used on DVD's containing copyrighted video. Now, while a DVD and a CD are the same physical size I hope you realize that they're actually very different in their implementation.
Nah, by far the funniest part is this:
The bit field is laid out as follows:
0
+-+
|E|
+-+
I laughed out loud on that one. Reminds me of those books Mr. Bunny's Guide to ActiveX and Mr. Bunnies Big Cup 'o Java
Screenshots will be provided for developers trying to follow along but don't have monitors
People like you generally hate factual data, but I'll spit some out anyway:
England's story
Gun Death Stats... Please note on this page that Norway has a 32% ownership rate vs the US's 39%. By your calculations they should have nearly the same death rate as the US by firearms (homicides that is) but they're about 1/6th the US.
Keep trying, you'll find a stat the proves your point someday I guess.
I'm sure he was licensed and legally allowed to be carrying, right?
Probably not.
Just my two cents. I see this a lot on projects and they're dead ringers that what I'm about to embark into is just a sheer mess.
If garabage collecters can be "sanitation engineers"...
Personally, I'd rather they called themselves Sanitation Engineers or more properly Sanitation Solution Implentors. I get horribly confused when I see "garbage collectors" and begin thinking of Java's memory reclaiming capatiblities. The term's been watered down too much, and no longer has a proper definition in my mind.
So are code mumbling sysadmins like me really programmers? I'm certainly not a code monkey, although I use _no_ form of design methodology. Hack first, ask questions later.
This is going to sound like a flame, but it's not really meant to be one.
No, you're not a proper programmer, your a two-bit hacker when it comes to programming. Before anybody turns their eyes off, let me explain.
I'd wager, because you're a SysAdmin, that your typical coding work will not exceed 500 lines in any given project; and most of them probably fit between 50 and 250 lines. I don't consider LOC to be the ultimate guide to code complexity, but you can clearly see a difference in a 250 line project and a 100,000 line one. The person that doesn't, is in a sorry state when their 100,000 lines of code are in app.h and app.c.
A SysAdmin that codes with the "Hack first, ask questions later" is a poor programmer -- but most likely a damned good sysadmin. You're writing an app that fills a gap that exists right now, and needs to be fixed right now. You get the job done, and fix it when/if it breaks down the road due to unforseen circumstances. That's perfectly acceptable to me, given that you're not a proper programmer, and nor should you be. If the problem is more complex than 500 lines it should be turned over to a proper development team.
The problem arises though, when two-bit hackers think they're programmers and begin writing code with that same mindset for large systems. Oh my, the pure shit I've seen in my life -- and it's a fairly short one. A VBScript web application that use an include statement to pull in 600 Dim statements, which then proceeded through 3,000 lines of code that had not a single function it; just one giant glob of instructions. No logical seperation. I've seen web applications that were properly seperated into different Perl modules for different functions. Although, none of them called each other for common functions, and nearly every one of them had a single main() function in them that spanned anywhere from 300 to 3,000 lines of code. That's not good.
You know enough to code for your sys admin job, and that makes you a damned good sys admin, but please, for the Love of God don't try and jump into programming until you've got a really good handle on the basics of how semi-large projects should work.