The steps in this article are not that far removed from learning any type of coding. Personally I'm more involved in the PHP/ASP scripting world, but most of the points regarding the learning process in this article would apply equally well. Swap Advogato for Evolt.org and talk about base server setups and scripting environments and you're there.
What I did find interesting, are the comments regarding mentoring. I've found that this role is normally taken by several people - it's pretty rare that someone will become an exclusive mentor to one person (imho). My experience is that often a small group of people (often within an online community) are seen as mentors to a fairly large group of people. Perhaps this is different in the more rarefied atmosphere of applications programming and Free Software / Open Source.
It's on its way to the States, but not expected until beginning of 2002 acording to this Nokia page (with specs and some nice pics too!)
http://www.nokia.com/phones/9290/index.html
Having just learnt a new language (Swedish) from scratch (well, I'm still learning of course, but I speak Swedish more or less fluently now), I would say that it's not terribly effective to learn just from books / tapes / programs. You really need to take a course or something at the very least.
Why? Well, there are so many small things which a more static learning resource won't cover. There are thousands of exceptions to grammar rules, pronunciations etc which aren't covered in textbooks. On top of that, you need someone you can ask questions.
With that aside, it's pretty difficult to give any tips for software without knowing which language someone is interested in. For Swedish, there are several learning programs for instance, though they are all Windows based as far as I know. On top of that there's a whole bunch of websites, but they mostly handle specific parts of the language. (Like this course in Swedish cursing for instance:
http://www.santesson.com/curshome.htm
The final tip I would give is pick a language that you truly feel motivated to learn - like learning programming languages, it's difficult to learn something if you don't have particular goals for learning it. I mean I've never felt the need to learn OO languages so although I've looked into both Java and C++ I've never actually ended up making any progress with them. Similarly I was awful at French when I was in school, but picked up Swedish within a couple of years.
This just gets my goat! As the pace of computing moves on at an ever increasing rate the patience of people wears ever thinner it seems. I don't know whether it's the press' fault, or what but Bluetooth is a technology that hasn't had time to develop yet. Of course, having made a song and dance about it over a year ago may have harmed the public perception of the technology, but it has probably also kick-started a huge amount of development and investment necessary to get the first products out the door.
A similar thing seems to have happened with WAP where the initial hype which has started innovation and development is now causing a backlash by people who don't have the patience, or the background to understand that technologies take time to develop.
<sarcasm>
... but then of course the entire Internet *did* spring up in the last 5 years so how hard can it be?
</sarcasm>
I was just about to sign up for a TPJ sub. I had it on my Christmas list and everything - I've gotta say I'm kinda glad nobody actually chose that item though!
I'll have to be content with the pile of back issues I've got. With any luck TPJ will come back in some other form. "Give the anarchist a cigarette"
I'm glad to see that unknown_lamer isn't *such* a lamer! Personally I don't think that IRC'ing with friends during one's free time is worse than sitting around drinking cider with one's friends - which what what I was doing when I was 15.
Good to see an appreciation for punks is still around:-)
Finally, I was glad to see a better explanation of MentalUnix. Personally I'm not sure that the project isn't too ambitious - but hey, if you can't try and ambitious project and fail spectacularly when your 15, when can you try one? (OK - so it might succeed too!).
Congrats to unknown_lamer for being more mature than the average Anonymous Coward!
This benchtest with the Intel optimised version of the Flask was mentioned in the original article. Try and RTFA before posting! "Give the anarchist a cigarette"
Heh! When I was at school (UK, 15 years ago!) I found out from my drama teacher that he had overheard the head master and the deputy head discussing whether I was on heroin or not! (At that point in my life I think I had maybe smoked dope twice but that was all).
Similar to your story, I was never really in any major trouble, but generally considered a bad influence and rebel by my teachers. At the same time, I was academically strong. They made me and a group of friends sign an agreement before our last two years (though we probably broke most of the conditions!).
Funnily enough, 15 years later I actually look back on school with quite good memories! I guess that all the bullshit that went down at the time was more stressful for me then than long term. Nowadays I tend to remember the fun side - getting away with bending the system:-)
My advice is just enjoy school and don't let the bastards grind you down. "Give the anarchist a cigarette"
Odd that this should come up. Just the other day I was considering that a customisation project to create a HAL-like workspace at home would be fun! Lots of formica, the malevolent glowing red eye, using some kind of voice recognition system to control some of the system's basic functions - you get the picture!
I'm not likely to do it (lack of space / time / skills!) but it would almost certainly deserve a link from "The Quickies":-) "Give the anarchist a cigarette"
The story you remember hearing was about the early days of AOL when they installed a filtering program over all their software. It's primary purpose was to stop people creating "rude" usernames and/or swearing in chat rooms.
It slipped up however when a guy who was trying to register a user account kept getting his application refused by the system. He eventually worked out that it was due to him entering Scunthorpe in his address.
When he contacted the support desk, they evntually came up with the solution that he should use a misspelled form for the name such as Sconthorpe! They couldn't correct the problem in the filters until the next major revision of their software because it was so deeply ingrained in the code! This led to some great jokes about AOL being the company that took the cunt out of Scunthorpe:-p
"remember, Slash is coded in Perl, so the better Perl gets, in theory, the easier it should be to make Slash better"
... in Latin:-)
Nah seriously I'm in agreement. I try to be as language agnostic as possible, coding in perl and PHP on *nix and ASP using both VBScript and JavaScript as appropriate on MS platforms.
Conway sounds like a genius, although I have trouble imaginging the importance of Lingua::Romana::Perligata!
Coming from Sweden, I thought I would point out that here we have loads of e-businesses. Having said that, much of the online shopping I do comes from either the US or the UK, either because VAT is cheaper there (books sent from the UK cost almsot half the price of books in Seden) or because I'm buying items I can't get in Sweden (ThinkGeek).
It sounds to me like the problem has more to do with Canadian lack of national identity on the Web. Shame, as I would rather have a Canadian web than an American web, but that's digressing:-)
Seriously, it takes entrepeneurs to start e-businesses (Like the infamous Boo.com, Boxman or Letsbuyit.com which are large Swedish / UK successes). Who was the last successful Canadian entrepeneur? I don't mean any disrespect to Canada, but you guys are living in the shadow of the US. Talking to my Canadian friends, they are all in agreement that if you want to start a successful business as a Candian, you move to the States. "Give the anarchist a cigarette"
Hmmm, assuming this isn't just trawling, has it not occurred to you that there are plenty of working divers, who stay down a *lot* deeper than where it takes just a few minutes to come up again. Also there are divers who spend an awful lot of time underwater such as oil-rig divers etc, for whom having a computer to log faults etc would be very handy.
Not that I'm an expert or anything - deepest I've ever dived is when I've dropped the soap in my bathtub!
As materials such as metals and halogen are not used, the environmental load of the device is reduced (polymer consists of carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen and does not include any of the pollutants used in other batteries).
... and provides such a high energy density, it sounds lmaost infeasible. But then some of the most interesting new technologies I've been reading about in energy creation/storage all sound remarkably simple. Fuel Cells, flywheels and now Proton Polymer batteries.
It'll be interesting to see what new devices come out of the marriage of these technologies. Combine them with low-energy consumption chips such as Crusoe and we could easily be looking at all-day laptops, all month cellphones etc.
Ättika??! Pew! Det är en av de hemskaste saker i Sverige. Ni har ingen riktig vinägar. Oj men som en engelskman jag saknar vinägar:-)
Som tur har det ska jag besöker London om några veckor och jag kan köper tillräkligt med mina favorita vinägar laddat matvaror:-) (Heinz Slad Cream, Branston Pickle, Sarson Malt Vinegar mm.)
Ermmm, why? I mean it appears to me that they make flash memory upgrades for Palms. Useful sure, but has nothing to do with running Linux on the Palm does it? "Give the anarchist a cigarette"
You might want to start looking up some stuff about Autonomy. This is possibly the fastest growing tech company in the UK. They have a product that uses NLP to help with search solutions, agents, and knowledge management (to use the new-media-hype terms).
I have seen their products in action and they are *extremely* impressive. What might be of most interest to you is the way their algorithms work. Now I'm sure they won't release that info, but you may be able to glean enough info from their material to get on the right track. (Start here perhaps). Basically their technology is based on Bayesian algorithms (Bayes was an 18th century English cleric who came up with some cool ideas about NLP that couldn't be proven until recently when the computing power and information volume to make them work became available - how's *that* for far-sighted!) combined with Shannon's Information Theory. It is WAY powerful in practise!
I agree that it would be really cool to see some kind of automated moderation system based on this type of principle. I'd also *love* to see some Open Bayesian NLP work.
As someone who has taken a management role at a younger age, through default, I certainly hope that I can live up to the sort of image adapt has painted. As a manager, your job is as an interface (a driver of you will) between the suites and the techies.
A management job involves a certain amount of give and take and a lot of politics, but IMHO it is certainly possible to become a manager with a focus on the side of producing a good product by inspiring a team. If you are going to accept such a position, having come from a long-term techie side, make it clear that your strength is your deep knowledge and contact with the technical side of the company.
Sometimes as a manager, one has to make decisions that are going to be unpopular with your team, but if you have a reputation as an honest, approachable and understanding manager, those difficult decisions will be understood by your team.
Finally, don't loose touch of your technical side. While the management role I have includes little time for hacking, I run a couple of my own projects in my free time to keep my skills up to date.
Aim to become an inspiration to your team whilst being a bullshit filter for them and being on top of things for your superiors! It's a challenge, but hacking the method for these can be fun if you let it!
Errrrm, nice product as in nice hardware. I pretty much pointed out that their concept was cruddy and the software embodies the concept in this product.
You've pretty much gotta agree that a cheap barcode scanner that can be easily programmed is a nice idea. Sure there are alternatives, but some of us don't have Visors and want something cheap and cheerful that we can couple up to our Linux boxes and hack away at.
There's plenty of people out there looking to simplify the process of cataloguing books/CD's etc. "Give the anarchist a cigarette"
Slashdot Mirror
In future releases, Turek said the software will automatically try to fix minor operating system problems without alerting a human.
;-)
So if you BSOD it'll reformat your harddrive and install Linux in Windows' place
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
The steps in this article are not that far removed from learning any type of coding. Personally I'm more involved in the PHP/ASP scripting world, but most of the points regarding the learning process in this article would apply equally well. Swap Advogato for Evolt.org and talk about base server setups and scripting environments and you're there.
What I did find interesting, are the comments regarding mentoring. I've found that this role is normally taken by several people - it's pretty rare that someone will become an exclusive mentor to one person (imho). My experience is that often a small group of people (often within an online community) are seen as mentors to a fairly large group of people. Perhaps this is different in the more rarefied atmosphere of applications programming and Free Software / Open Source.
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
It's on its way to the States, but not expected until beginning of 2002 acording to this Nokia page (with specs and some nice pics too!)
http://www.nokia.com/phones/9290/index.html
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
It also means you cannot bring radios, programmable watches, calculators, (anything with memory) to work.
Could you bring a goldfish? I mean they've only got like a 7 second memory. That's gotta be pretty safe.
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
Hmmm! Sounds like it would definitely be cheaper for them to stuff a new drive into the box and *then* give it away to the school!
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
Having just learnt a new language (Swedish) from scratch (well, I'm still learning of course, but I speak Swedish more or less fluently now), I would say that it's not terribly effective to learn just from books / tapes / programs. You really need to take a course or something at the very least.
Why? Well, there are so many small things which a more static learning resource won't cover. There are thousands of exceptions to grammar rules, pronunciations etc which aren't covered in textbooks. On top of that, you need someone you can ask questions.
With that aside, it's pretty difficult to give any tips for software without knowing which language someone is interested in. For Swedish, there are several learning programs for instance, though they are all Windows based as far as I know. On top of that there's a whole bunch of websites, but they mostly handle specific parts of the language. (Like this course in Swedish cursing for instance:
http://www.santesson.com/curshome.htm
The final tip I would give is pick a language that you truly feel motivated to learn - like learning programming languages, it's difficult to learn something if you don't have particular goals for learning it. I mean I've never felt the need to learn OO languages so although I've looked into both Java and C++ I've never actually ended up making any progress with them. Similarly I was awful at French when I was in school, but picked up Swedish within a couple of years.
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
That was a pretty innovative wisecrack.
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
This just gets my goat! As the pace of computing moves on at an ever increasing rate the patience of people wears ever thinner it seems. I don't know whether it's the press' fault, or what but Bluetooth is a technology that hasn't had time to develop yet. Of course, having made a song and dance about it over a year ago may have harmed the public perception of the technology, but it has probably also kick-started a huge amount of development and investment necessary to get the first products out the door.
A similar thing seems to have happened with WAP where the initial hype which has started innovation and development is now causing a backlash by people who don't have the patience, or the background to understand that technologies take time to develop.
<sarcasm>
... but then of course the entire Internet *did* spring up in the last 5 years so how hard can it be?
</sarcasm>
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
I was just about to sign up for a TPJ sub. I had it on my Christmas list and everything - I've gotta say I'm kinda glad nobody actually chose that item though!
I'll have to be content with the pile of back issues I've got. With any luck TPJ will come back in some other form.
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
I'm glad to see that unknown_lamer isn't *such* a lamer! Personally I don't think that IRC'ing with friends during one's free time is worse than sitting around drinking cider with one's friends - which what what I was doing when I was 15.
:-)
Good to see an appreciation for punks is still around
Finally, I was glad to see a better explanation of MentalUnix. Personally I'm not sure that the project isn't too ambitious - but hey, if you can't try and ambitious project and fail spectacularly when your 15, when can you try one? (OK - so it might succeed too!).
Congrats to unknown_lamer for being more mature than the average Anonymous Coward!
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
This benchtest with the Intel optimised version of the Flask was mentioned in the original article. Try and RTFA before posting!
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
Heh! When I was at school (UK, 15 years ago!) I found out from my drama teacher that he had overheard the head master and the deputy head discussing whether I was on heroin or not! (At that point in my life I think I had maybe smoked dope twice but that was all).
:-)
Similar to your story, I was never really in any major trouble, but generally considered a bad influence and rebel by my teachers. At the same time, I was academically strong. They made me and a group of friends sign an agreement before our last two years (though we probably broke most of the conditions!).
Funnily enough, 15 years later I actually look back on school with quite good memories! I guess that all the bullshit that went down at the time was more stressful for me then than long term. Nowadays I tend to remember the fun side - getting away with bending the system
My advice is just enjoy school and don't let the bastards grind you down.
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
Odd that this should come up. Just the other day I was considering that a customisation project to create a HAL-like workspace at home would be fun! Lots of formica, the malevolent glowing red eye, using some kind of voice recognition system to control some of the system's basic functions - you get the picture!
:-)
I'm not likely to do it (lack of space / time / skills!) but it would almost certainly deserve a link from "The Quickies"
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
The story you remember hearing was about the early days of AOL when they installed a filtering program over all their software. It's primary purpose was to stop people creating "rude" usernames and/or swearing in chat rooms.
:-p
It slipped up however when a guy who was trying to register a user account kept getting his application refused by the system. He eventually worked out that it was due to him entering Scunthorpe in his address.
When he contacted the support desk, they evntually came up with the solution that he should use a misspelled form for the name such as Sconthorpe! They couldn't correct the problem in the filters until the next major revision of their software because it was so deeply ingrained in the code! This led to some great jokes about AOL being the company that took the cunt out of Scunthorpe
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
"remember, Slash is coded in Perl, so the better Perl gets, in theory, the easier it should be to make Slash better"
:-)
... in Latin
Nah seriously I'm in agreement. I try to be as language agnostic as possible, coding in perl and PHP on *nix and ASP using both VBScript and JavaScript as appropriate on MS platforms.
Conway sounds like a genius, although I have trouble imaginging the importance of Lingua::Romana::Perligata!
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
Hey - I said *start* ebusinesses, not manage them successfully :-)
:-)
(Notice the use of the word infamous) What these do have in common though apart from all being no more, is high visibility.
You made me laugh though
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
Coming from Sweden, I thought I would point out that here we have loads of e-businesses. Having said that, much of the online shopping I do comes from either the US or the UK, either because VAT is cheaper there (books sent from the UK cost almsot half the price of books in Seden) or because I'm buying items I can't get in Sweden (ThinkGeek).
:-)
It sounds to me like the problem has more to do with Canadian lack of national identity on the Web. Shame, as I would rather have a Canadian web than an American web, but that's digressing
Seriously, it takes entrepeneurs to start e-businesses (Like the infamous Boo.com, Boxman or Letsbuyit.com which are large Swedish / UK successes). Who was the last successful Canadian entrepeneur? I don't mean any disrespect to Canada, but you guys are living in the shadow of the US. Talking to my Canadian friends, they are all in agreement that if you want to start a successful business as a Candian, you move to the States.
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
Hmmm, assuming this isn't just trawling, has it not occurred to you that there are plenty of working divers, who stay down a *lot* deeper than where it takes just a few minutes to come up again. Also there are divers who spend an awful lot of time underwater such as oil-rig divers etc, for whom having a computer to log faults etc would be very handy.
Not that I'm an expert or anything - deepest I've ever dived is when I've dropped the soap in my bathtub!
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
That it is constructed of such simple materials;
As materials such as metals and halogen are not used, the environmental load of the device is reduced (polymer consists of carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen and does not include any of the pollutants used in other batteries).
... and provides such a high energy density, it sounds lmaost infeasible. But then some of the most interesting new technologies I've been reading about in energy creation/storage all sound remarkably simple. Fuel Cells, flywheels and now Proton Polymer batteries.
It'll be interesting to see what new devices come out of the marriage of these technologies. Combine them with low-energy consumption chips such as Crusoe and we could easily be looking at all-day laptops, all month cellphones etc.
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
Whoah! You gotta love a project with a cute little pockert sized penguin like that!
Pokeguin anyone?
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
Ättika??! Pew! Det är en av de hemskaste saker i Sverige. Ni har ingen riktig vinägar. Oj men som en engelskman jag saknar vinägar :-)
:-) (Heinz Slad Cream, Branston Pickle, Sarson Malt Vinegar mm.)
Som tur har det ska jag besöker London om några veckor och jag kan köper tillräkligt med mina favorita vinägar laddat matvaror
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
Ermmm, why? I mean it appears to me that they make flash memory upgrades for Palms. Useful sure, but has nothing to do with running Linux on the Palm does it?
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
You might want to start looking up some stuff about Autonomy. This is possibly the fastest growing tech company in the UK. They have a product that uses NLP to help with search solutions, agents, and knowledge management (to use the new-media-hype terms).
I have seen their products in action and they are *extremely* impressive. What might be of most interest to you is the way their algorithms work. Now I'm sure they won't release that info, but you may be able to glean enough info from their material to get on the right track. (Start here perhaps). Basically their technology is based on Bayesian algorithms (Bayes was an 18th century English cleric who came up with some cool ideas about NLP that couldn't be proven until recently when the computing power and information volume to make them work became available - how's *that* for far-sighted!) combined with Shannon's Information Theory. It is WAY powerful in practise!
I agree that it would be really cool to see some kind of automated moderation system based on this type of principle. I'd also *love* to see some Open Bayesian NLP work.
Good luck with the experiment.
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
Hear hear!
As someone who has taken a management role at a younger age, through default, I certainly hope that I can live up to the sort of image adapt has painted. As a manager, your job is as an interface (a driver of you will) between the suites and the techies.
A management job involves a certain amount of give and take and a lot of politics, but IMHO it is certainly possible to become a manager with a focus on the side of producing a good product by inspiring a team. If you are going to accept such a position, having come from a long-term techie side, make it clear that your strength is your deep knowledge and contact with the technical side of the company.
Sometimes as a manager, one has to make decisions that are going to be unpopular with your team, but if you have a reputation as an honest, approachable and understanding manager, those difficult decisions will be understood by your team.
Finally, don't loose touch of your technical side. While the management role I have includes little time for hacking, I run a couple of my own projects in my free time to keep my skills up to date.
Aim to become an inspiration to your team whilst being a bullshit filter for them and being on top of things for your superiors! It's a challenge, but hacking the method for these can be fun if you let it!
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
Errrrm, nice product as in nice hardware. I pretty much pointed out that their concept was cruddy and the software embodies the concept in this product.
You've pretty much gotta agree that a cheap barcode scanner that can be easily programmed is a nice idea. Sure there are alternatives, but some of us don't have Visors and want something cheap and cheerful that we can couple up to our Linux boxes and hack away at.
There's plenty of people out there looking to simplify the process of cataloguing books/CD's etc.
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"