Re:A Day in the Life of an ADHD suferer
on
Working with ADHD?
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· Score: 1
Yeah, that's where I was thinking of it from.
And, unlike preganncy, it might be reasonable to say "a little bit ADHD" or "a little bit autistic"...maybe, we don't know enough about the biology to say otherwise... (on the other hand, some think one's response to Ritalin is a bit of a litmus test, so who knows)
Re:A Day in the Life of an ADHD suferer
on
Working with ADHD?
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· Score: 1
I know this comment is gonna get buried, but hey:
I wonder if it's reasonable to think of ADHD as a boolean thing, or more of a spectrum. If there's not a clear bioneurological reason to think the former (i.e. a "magic gene" that's either there or not) then I vote for the latter, and think that it (along with Autism) might be "shadow syndromes" with a lot of people; still there, but a baby version of the "hard core" cases, and often treatable without meds, maybe even self-treatable as an act of concentration and will.
Or maybe I just want a reason to feel sorry for/proud about myself..."look what else I had to overcome to get where I am today!"
Anyway, don't have any real good job advice for you, except for me in terms of programming, it's kind of nice to have done a lot of different projects in different domains over the years.
Re:alternatives and cultural rant ahead...
on
Working with ADHD?
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· Score: 1
Huh. I know someone going with the "Fat Flush" program, a not-too-distant cousin of Atkins, though also with an emphasis on "detoxification" and keeping your liver happy. Some of the claims the author makes seem out there, but she claims that Nutrasweet in particular triggers an insulin reaction (makes me wonder what happens, if there's not actually much bloodsugar for it to interact with) in a way that, say, Sweet-n-Low doesn't. (She's not thrilled about Sweet-n-Low either, but it doesn't seem quite as bad.)
Does Wind Power Really Scale?
on
A Mighty Wind
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· Score: 1
Just wondering, say we put up enough windmills to handle, like, all of our electricity needs...which would probably be a pretty insane amount. At some point, do the wind patterns get changed enough so that the climate is signifigantly warped? Or is it really that close to being a "free lunch" if we can just put up enough of the dang windmills up?
I saw a few of the modern windmills for the first time in Germany recently. I was surprised at how slowly they were rotating, wouldn't have guessed they could be generating useful enough amounts of power at those speeds.
Oh yeah, come to think of it I did too (use functions etc in QBasic) I kind of get it mixed up, mostly I used BASIC on the Atari 8-bits and the C=64, the PC stuff came later for me.
It has a broken link to a longer article maybe? But still, I'd like to see some decent argument to support this rather bold claim. BASIC didn't have decent subroutines or objects, but it could get you down the road of starting to think about wehat you wanted to get done in a step by step fashion, and I think a lot of current great programmers cut their teeth on various versions of the language.
I've certainly seen more crap in "good" languages-- from folks who started in those languages! - then from people who have a long career that started in BASIC.
I hate these books for exactly as the reviewer says. Theyare not for dummies, they make you feel like a dummy.
I've had some ok results with "Dummies" books.
I think they'd appeal to me more if they were named "X with few assumptions about what you already know about X" rather than "X for Dummies", but the former isn't nearly as catchy.
Seriously, is anyone still using it for anything? I can kinda-sorta understand how it would be good as an intro to programming, but it's like tinkering with a Model T engine and working your way up to a V8 over the course of a few years. It strikes me as impractical for anyone seriously trying to learn.
Actually, that doesn't sound like such a terrible idea! Not to push the metaphor, but a lot of people who start straight into the V8 have NO idea what's going on under the hood... (I'm thinking more of people who do a lot of "programming via program wizards", more than V8 vs Model T, but still.)
Cars in the 70s, you could fix by yourself, and learn. Now everything is blackbox, just like other consumer electronics...
I never had a book, btw, so all I had to learn BASIC was a vague memory of LET and PRINT commands, and the help file. The help file was awesome. It is, to date, the only good docs I have ever seen from MS. After 6 years, I could do stuff in BASIC that my friends who started out in Pascal and C++ could not dream of doing. Why? Because their learning curve made it impossible.
That *was* a great help file.
And on DOS computers, QBasic/QuickBasic was the one of the best cheap (both in terms of expense and time to learn) ways of MAKING GRAPHICS on the computer. A lot of C and Pascal was all stuck on multiplatform stdio...not much fun for a yung'un!
Seriously, I learned QBASIC, and it had me so brain damaged for so long that it took me forever to grasp PERL, and I've still never quite gotten Java, even though I took a college course on the subject. This same idea came up in the "what to start kids on for programming" article, and a lot of asked, what's all this about? How does it damage you? Yeah, you're thinking like a scripter rather than in subroutines or objects, but so? It's still an introduction to breaking up a process step by step....
Frankly, I wouldn't blame your difficulties in grokking Perl and then Java on BASIC...
There was a time where I would get one or two porn come-ons every time my computer wokeup and actived AIM. General a message contact request from a girls name plus a string of numbers. I haven't seen that happen for a number of months, I guess AOL took care of the problem?
Is there a way to see a given site's absolutely PageRank w/o using that toolbar? (as opposed to its relative PageRank of where it shows up on your search results.)
Well, just to continue our little mutual conversation and admiration society...
Tying into your original "simple VB on the start menu" idea, I taught a class in VB at Tufts (cool "x-college" program let even undergrads conceive and teach a for-credit pass/fail course) and it was pretty easy to show them how to use the graphic objects as "sprites" on the form. (Combined with simple rules for intertia, and you could easily get some interesting movement patterns).
Making games is, as you say, a big draw...of course, the gap between what one kind can do at home and what you buy in stores is MUCH wider than it was in the mid-80s, but on the other hand, many kids might be up for making the kind of minigames you see on the web... (tangent...wouldn't a novice-friendly version of something like flash or shockwave, but scripted and interactive, be cool in terms of what we're talking about here?)
I was into making games (like a "avoid the walls of a tunnel" game ala \____/
\__*_/ \____/
\____/
\____/ and also early forms of "artificial life". In Atari 8-bit Logo, I'd give little autonomous behviours to the 4 turtles (which looked like turtles on that system, not just triangles! Actually it was my first intro to "event based" programming, since you could set up little collision detection daemons.). Later on the C=64 I'd program one character "quick amoeba" type creatures that would swoop randomly, and pursue "food".
Ok, enough rambling! Fun little topic.
Re:The problem is the charging model
on
Is 3G Irrelevant?
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· Score: 1
Why do people always bash those who run servers? I run mail and web servers, yet I don't use much bandwidth.
I didn't mean to bash, friend...I thought I said the only people who would notice, and I think even you might notice a sever slashdotting. But who knows, maybe not even then if your site wasn't multimedia intensive.
I mean, there probably is a sense of "maybe the companies are right when they point X small percent of users use Y large percent of bandwidth, they're spoiling it for everyone" but you're correct in pointing out just running a server isn't enough to put you in a "badguy" category.
I tend to rent my webspace at about $10/mo myself, unlimited throughput, though I wouldn't mind having more control and doing it from home.
It's probably only "Apples and Oranges" because 3G stuff doesn't have enough range, is too expensive, doesn't have the throughput, etc. Think about it, if 3G was *really* good, and it was just as cheap and easy and powerful to stick a wireless modem onto a laptop than hook into your Wireless LAN, WiFi would be a niche product for people who were too paranoid to use VPNs or whatever...but that's not the way the technology is, so we have WiFi as a...I dunno, way of avoid excessive cable in your house and maybe getting 'Net access at Starbucks, and 3G for getting e-mail and text messages and maybe very limited web browsing on your handheld. Frankly, neither 3G nor WiFi is all that exciting or life changing.
Re:The problem is the charging model
on
Is 3G Irrelevant?
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· Score: 1
That's not stopping ISPs modifying their service so that they provide a bandwidth quota and excess charges for those that go over it. I suspect in ten years time, unlimited bandwidth will have been relegated to history. That could very well be, but I suspect those quotas will be large enough that people who aren't running servers or doing multimedia P2P won't notice.
Just got back from a brief visit to German and England (nice photogallery at if you like that sort of thing), 2 1/2 weeks.
One thing very obvious to the tourist (at least one trying to get a feel for the culture and maybe staying with a resident, rather than hotel'ing it) is retail wise, Europe is more storeworker-friendly than consumer-oriented. Many shops close very early, the culture just isn't geared towards meeting a potential buyer's needs NOW like it is in the USA.
I can't disagree with a lot of what you said. Quality of life is a huge issue, and I myself am getting a bit burned out on the quest for salary maintenence. I think I'd have a lot more freedom if I didn't always have to sweat healthcare and retirement; on the other hand, there's always the risk I'd turn into a lazy (or rather, "even lazier") SOB, which is one of the arguments against.
On the one hand, I think Europe might have a better sense of priorities. On the other hand, a lot of positive and dynamic things come from the USA's work attitude. Gripping hand, I'm not well equipped to make a big life change to another part of this country, nevermind another nation, so here I'll probably stay, and just be glad I get 4 weeks offa work with my current job.
I wouldn't even mind the line-numbered versions. Obviously structered programming languages are far superior in every way, but I think anything that gets them into programming is cool! The kids that are into it will soon seek out more powerful languages anyway.
I think I agree with you, the line number thing was just my nod to the general belief...but I remember looking over an AmigaBasic code listing in a magazine and thinking "wow, how does that work without line numbers"? I guess there's scripting/line number programming, subroutine programming, and OO, (in that order) and being good at a lower level probably won't make the next levels more difficult...probably the opposite.
It's almost like... I don't have two craps about how crappy or uncrappy the language is, I just care about how easy "hello world" is. Ya know? Does that make sense? I want minimum entry barrier to a "hello world" program as my #1 critera for this mythical programming feature because if kids find it fun, they'll discover the rest on their own... but the crucial step is getting them to try it in the first place! Just IMHO.:)
Good point, but I think "Hello World" is a bit too simple. A "What's Your Name?" / "Hello "+NAME is better, since it gets into Input and Output. (After all, a Hello World webpage is trivial and INCREDIBLY pointless.)
And to really interest kids...how easy is it to put a biggish dot on screen and move it around? Once you've got that, plus maybe some kbd or controller input, you've given a kid all he or she needs to really have some fun tooling around.
The trouble with Javascript is that it doesn't provide a screen to draw on. (Though, come to think of it, I guess if they get into it, they might be able to move graphics around as a primitive form of Sprites...still pretty poor I/O.)
Of course, they might end up with some mutant hybrid like my own gamebuttons, games each entirely self-contained in a single HTML form pushbutton for Input and Output.
That's a pretty cool idea, and probably one of the few workable ones. I don't see MS doing that, but we can hope.
It's interesting to think of the history of it:
Booting into BASIC was a godsend for budding programmers. I really wonder what the lack of that will lead to. (And blah blah blah "BASIC considered harmful"...I think the non-line-numbered versions are fine.)
I never got to use 'em but I suspect it's too bad HyperCard fell by the wayside. I think that's the closest WIMP-based computers have come to a useful languge that beginners were exposed to and could do useful stuff in.
These days, most kids will be exposed to the web, and the smart ones will realize "hey--this is pretty easy" and do interesting stuff. That tends to be more design than programming...and server side programming (from a kids point of view) is hampered by the lack of a screen to draw on. I think kids like to make THINGS on a screen, sprites, or 3D if it was easier.
I think DarkBasic or GameMaker or something like that might be a good bet for grownups who wanted to get a kid started who seems to have potential for this kind of thing.
It ticks me off with the quickies, since every other link is a mailto: link. How often do people use that, and would you want a slashdot effect directly to your inbox? Thanks to the wonder of spam, we all get the slashdot effect directly to our inbox anyway.
But even not on slashdot, mailto: links that look like useful informatin are very annoying.
Don't make links to individual articles look like links to the root of websites:the PKWare and WinZip links make sense, the IDG.NET link does not. "tells us" would have been much better for linkifying, or, in order to make a bigger link (thus quietly indicating what is the "most imporant" link in the summary) the entire phrase "IDG.NET tells us".
I know these sound like stupid nitpicks, but it's good from a usability standpoint. Many posts have similar bad linking style, making it more time consuming to figure out what the relevant links are.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that's where I was thinking of it from.
And, unlike preganncy, it might be reasonable to say "a little bit ADHD" or "a little bit autistic"...maybe, we don't know enough about the biology to say otherwise... (on the other hand, some think one's response to Ritalin is a bit of a litmus test, so who knows)
I know this comment is gonna get buried, but hey:
I wonder if it's reasonable to think of ADHD as a boolean thing, or more of a spectrum. If there's not a clear bioneurological reason to think the former (i.e. a "magic gene" that's either there or not) then I vote for the latter, and think that it (along with Autism) might be "shadow syndromes" with a lot of people; still there, but a baby version of the "hard core" cases, and often treatable without meds, maybe even self-treatable as an act of concentration and will.
Or maybe I just want a reason to feel sorry for/proud about myself..."look what else I had to overcome to get where I am today!"
Anyway, don't have any real good job advice for you, except for me in terms of programming, it's kind of nice to have done a lot of different projects in different domains over the years.
Huh. I know someone going with the "Fat Flush" program, a not-too-distant cousin of Atkins, though also with an emphasis on "detoxification" and keeping your liver happy. Some of the claims the author makes seem out there, but she claims that Nutrasweet in particular triggers an insulin reaction (makes me wonder what happens, if there's not actually much bloodsugar for it to interact with) in a way that, say, Sweet-n-Low doesn't. (She's not thrilled about Sweet-n-Low either, but it doesn't seem quite as bad.)
Just wondering, say we put up enough windmills to handle, like, all of our electricity needs...which would probably be a pretty insane amount. At some point, do the wind patterns get changed enough so that the climate is signifigantly warped? Or is it really that close to being a "free lunch" if we can just put up enough of the dang windmills up?
I saw a few of the modern windmills for the first time in Germany recently. I was surprised at how slowly they were rotating, wouldn't have guessed they could be generating useful enough amounts of power at those speeds.
I have several aim accounts and i've never seen that. I think you chat with the wrong people...
Actually, I think I put my AIM nick in a few too many publicly accessible website profiles, but thanks for your concern.
Oh yeah, come to think of it I did too (use functions etc in QBasic) I kind of get it mixed up, mostly I used BASIC on the Atari 8-bits and the C=64, the PC stuff came later for me.
Google came up with
this page at.
It has a broken link to a longer article maybe? But still, I'd like to see some decent argument to support this rather bold claim. BASIC didn't have decent subroutines or objects, but it could get you down the road of starting to think about wehat you wanted to get done in a step by step fashion, and I think a lot of current great programmers cut their teeth on various versions of the language.
I've certainly seen more crap in "good" languages-- from folks who started in those languages! - then from people who have a long career that started in BASIC.
I hate these books for exactly as the reviewer says. Theyare not for dummies, they make you feel like a dummy.
I've had some ok results with "Dummies" books.
I think they'd appeal to me more if they were named "X with few assumptions about what you already know about X" rather than "X for Dummies", but the former isn't nearly as catchy.
Seriously, is anyone still using it for anything? I can kinda-sorta understand how it would be good as an intro to programming, but it's like tinkering with a Model T engine and working your way up to a V8 over the course of a few years. It strikes me as impractical for anyone seriously trying to learn.
Actually, that doesn't sound like such a terrible idea! Not to push the metaphor, but a lot of people who start straight into the V8 have NO idea what's going on under the hood... (I'm thinking more of people who do a lot of "programming via program wizards", more than V8 vs Model T, but still.)
Cars in the 70s, you could fix by yourself, and learn. Now everything is blackbox, just like other consumer electronics...
I never had a book, btw, so all I had to learn BASIC was a vague memory of LET and PRINT commands, and the help file. The help file was awesome. It is, to date, the only good docs I have ever seen from MS. After 6 years, I could do stuff in BASIC that my friends who started out in Pascal and C++ could not dream of doing. Why? Because their learning curve made it impossible.
That *was* a great help file.
And on DOS computers, QBasic/QuickBasic was the one of the best cheap (both in terms of expense and time to learn) ways of MAKING GRAPHICS on the computer. A lot of C and Pascal was all stuck on multiplatform stdio...not much fun for a yung'un!
Seriously, I learned QBASIC, and it had me so brain damaged for so long that it took me forever to grasp PERL, and I've still never quite gotten Java, even though I took a college course on the subject.
This same idea came up in the "what to start kids on for programming" article, and a lot of asked, what's all this about? How does it damage you? Yeah, you're thinking like a scripter rather than in subroutines or objects, but so? It's still an introduction to breaking up a process step by step....
Frankly, I wouldn't blame your difficulties in grokking Perl and then Java on BASIC...
There was a time where I would get one or two porn come-ons every time my computer wokeup and actived AIM. General a message contact request from a girls name plus a string of numbers. I haven't seen that happen for a number of months, I guess AOL took care of the problem?
Is there a way to see a given site's absolutely PageRank w/o using that toolbar? (as opposed to its relative PageRank of where it shows up on your search results.)
Frankly, right now I suspect video games can be a pretty big culprit.
I think the PS2 dual shock, with their weird, analog-but-shouldn't-be buttons, are particularly bad, since the tactile feedback is so poor.
Endless games of Tetris Attack / Pokemon Puzzle League prolly don't help though, and that's all Nintendo...
Well, just to continue our little mutual conversation and admiration society...
Tying into your original "simple VB on the start menu" idea, I taught a class in VB at Tufts (cool "x-college" program let even undergrads conceive and teach a for-credit pass/fail course) and it was pretty easy to show them how to use the graphic objects as "sprites" on the form. (Combined with simple rules for intertia, and you could easily get some interesting movement patterns).
Making games is, as you say, a big draw...of course, the gap between what one kind can do at home and what you buy in stores is MUCH wider than it was in the mid-80s, but on the other hand, many kids might be up for making the kind of minigames you see on the web... (tangent...wouldn't a novice-friendly version of something like flash or shockwave, but scripted and interactive, be cool in terms of what we're talking about here?)
I was into making games (like a "avoid the walls of a tunnel" game ala
\____/
\__*_/
\____/
\____/
\____/
and also early forms of "artificial life". In Atari 8-bit Logo, I'd give little autonomous behviours to the 4 turtles (which looked like turtles on that system, not just triangles! Actually it was my first intro to "event based" programming, since you could set up little collision detection daemons.). Later on the C=64 I'd program one character "quick amoeba" type creatures that would swoop randomly, and pursue "food".
Ok, enough rambling! Fun little topic.
Why do people always bash those who run servers? I run mail and web servers, yet I don't use much bandwidth.
I didn't mean to bash, friend...I thought I said the only people who would notice, and I think even you might notice a sever slashdotting. But who knows, maybe not even then if your site wasn't multimedia intensive.
I mean, there probably is a sense of "maybe the companies are right when they point X small percent of users use Y large percent of bandwidth, they're spoiling it for everyone" but you're correct in pointing out just running a server isn't enough to put you in a "badguy" category.
I tend to rent my webspace at about $10/mo myself, unlimited throughput, though I wouldn't mind having more control and doing it from home.
It's probably only "Apples and Oranges" because 3G stuff doesn't have enough range, is too expensive, doesn't have the throughput, etc. Think about it, if 3G was *really* good, and it was just as cheap and easy and powerful to stick a wireless modem onto a laptop than hook into your Wireless LAN, WiFi would be a niche product for people who were too paranoid to use VPNs or whatever...but that's not the way the technology is, so we have WiFi as a...I dunno, way of avoid excessive cable in your house and maybe getting 'Net access at Starbucks, and 3G for getting e-mail and text messages and maybe very limited web browsing on your handheld. Frankly, neither 3G nor WiFi is all that exciting or life changing.
That's not stopping ISPs modifying their service so that they provide a bandwidth quota and excess charges for those that go over it. I suspect in ten years time, unlimited bandwidth will have been relegated to history.
That could very well be, but I suspect those quotas will be large enough that people who aren't running servers or doing multimedia P2P won't notice.
Just got back from a brief visit to German and England (nice photogallery at if you like that sort of thing), 2 1/2 weeks.
One thing very obvious to the tourist (at least one trying to get a feel for the culture and maybe staying with a resident, rather than hotel'ing it) is retail wise, Europe is more storeworker-friendly than consumer-oriented. Many shops close very early, the culture just isn't geared towards meeting a potential buyer's needs NOW like it is in the USA.
I can't disagree with a lot of what you said. Quality of life is a huge issue, and I myself am getting a bit burned out on the quest for salary maintenence. I think I'd have a lot more freedom if I didn't always have to sweat healthcare and retirement; on the other hand, there's always the risk I'd turn into a lazy (or rather, "even lazier") SOB, which is one of the arguments against.
On the one hand, I think Europe might have a better sense of priorities. On the other hand, a lot of positive and dynamic things come from the USA's work attitude. Gripping hand, I'm not well equipped to make a big life change to another part of this country, nevermind another nation, so here I'll probably stay, and just be glad I get 4 weeks offa work with my current job.
I wouldn't even mind the line-numbered versions. Obviously structered programming languages are far superior in every way, but I think anything that gets them into programming is cool! The kids that are into it will soon seek out more powerful languages anyway.
:)
I think I agree with you, the line number thing was just my nod to the general belief...but I remember looking over an AmigaBasic code listing in a magazine and thinking "wow, how does that work without line numbers"? I guess there's scripting/line number programming, subroutine programming, and OO, (in that order) and being good at a lower level probably won't make the next levels more difficult...probably the opposite.
It's almost like... I don't have two craps about how crappy or uncrappy the language is, I just care about how easy "hello world" is. Ya know? Does that make sense? I want minimum entry barrier to a "hello world" program as my #1 critera for this mythical programming feature because if kids find it fun, they'll discover the rest on their own... but the crucial step is getting them to try it in the first place! Just IMHO.
Good point, but I think "Hello World" is a bit too simple. A "What's Your Name?" / "Hello "+NAME is better, since it gets into Input and Output. (After all, a Hello World webpage is trivial and INCREDIBLY pointless.)
And to really interest kids...how easy is it to put a biggish dot on screen and move it around? Once you've got that, plus maybe some kbd or controller input, you've given a kid all he or she needs to really have some fun tooling around.
The trouble with Javascript is that it doesn't provide a screen to draw on. (Though, come to think of it, I guess if they get into it, they might be able to move graphics around as a primitive form of Sprites...still pretty poor I/O.)
Of course, they might end up with some mutant hybrid like my own gamebuttons, games each entirely self-contained in a single HTML form pushbutton for Input and Output.
PocketC for Palm and PocketPC has been a lot of fun for me...I can code, compile, and run all on the go.
That's a pretty cool idea, and probably one of the few workable ones. I don't see MS doing that, but we can hope.
It's interesting to think of the history of it:
Booting into BASIC was a godsend for budding programmers. I really wonder what the lack of that will lead to. (And blah blah blah "BASIC considered harmful"...I think the non-line-numbered versions are fine.)
I never got to use 'em but I suspect it's too bad HyperCard fell by the wayside. I think that's the closest WIMP-based computers have come to a useful languge that beginners were exposed to and could do useful stuff in.
These days, most kids will be exposed to the web, and the smart ones will realize "hey--this is pretty easy" and do interesting stuff. That tends to be more design than programming...and server side programming (from a kids point of view) is hampered by the lack of a screen to draw on. I think kids like to make THINGS on a screen, sprites, or 3D if it was easier.
I think DarkBasic or GameMaker or something like that might be a good bet for grownups who wanted to get a kid started who seems to have potential for this kind of thing.
It ticks me off with the quickies, since every other link is a mailto: link. How often do people use that, and would you want a slashdot effect directly to your inbox?
Thanks to the wonder of spam, we all get the slashdot effect directly to our inbox anyway.
But even not on slashdot, mailto: links that look like useful informatin are very annoying.
Don't make links to individual articles look like links to the root of websites:the PKWare and WinZip links make sense, the IDG.NET link does not. "tells us" would have been much better for linkifying, or, in order to make a bigger link (thus quietly indicating what is the "most imporant" link in the summary) the entire phrase "IDG.NET tells us".
I know these sound like stupid nitpicks, but it's good from a usability standpoint. Many posts have similar bad linking style, making it more time consuming to figure out what the relevant links are.