But a little... mechanical, don't you think? It gets stats about open source developers - whether your boss knows that you're doing this, whether you're getting paid for it, but it doesn't ask *why* you do it or how you got into it in the first place.
That would be a cool survey. I've always been curious about why other people like computer science. I love the thrill of programming, of being faced with a challenge and trying to figure out if I can pull it off. I like building things that other people will use, and I really like open source because I see other people volunteering time and effort to make cool software. I wonder what other people's reasons are.
(.. and the site could use a little usability tweaking, too. But it's okay.)
Slipping standards in the open-source world..;) Didn't Microsoft catch a lot of flak for having a single point of failure that other time that most of its sites went down?
When I couldn't get my Slashdot, I assumed the worse. High-profile hijacking. Aliens beaming up the OSDN headquarters. Servers sneakily migrated to Windows, which then promptly crashed.
Second, they want to contribute code to the open-source community.
I'd say go for it! <grin> And be glad that you have other open source geeks in your class. =)
I guess you can check with your department regarding their official stand on this, as people on Slashdot can offer advice, opinions and thoughts, but can't authoritatively decide anything in your situation. (I think.)
It seems that the GPL is allowed, but again - check with the university, and hope your uni isn't draconian enough to reject such a nice thing. =)
Run a web server like Apache, organize all of your docs under it, and use a search engine to index and search it! =) It can be just for you, on your hard disk..
Big companies are not likely to get support contracts from little startups.
Support is kinda like insurance. Most people wouldn't get insurance from companies that are just starting out and don't quite look ready yet.
Let's face it - Redhat is a pretty big company, but you don't see a mass stampede to Linux in the business world. (Although some business have seen the light - that's nice.)
No one wants to make a mistake. It's their jobs on the line, after all.
RTFM isn't the universally appropriate approach. It really depends on your learning style. Some people
learn better by paging through tons of documentation, often rereading things until they make sense.
This approach tends to be rather intimidating, so newbies get easily scared off. Others prefer to learn by talking
to people who are either also learning or already good at it. Still others prefer to jump right in,
learning Perl while using it in a project.
So, see, RTFM doesn't always work. We're way too biased towards the visually-oriented person who knows
how to read documentation and where to find the information he or she needs - a very useful skill, mind
you. We often fail to note that there are other, equally important alternatives.
You've probably read just about all the websites you're interested in. You won't be fighting with lots of people for bandwidth to high-traffic sites (unless they're in the wrong timezone), so this is a good time to set up a playlist of MP3s or start downloads. However, even this could get boring after a while.
You could try working on some programs. Pick an open-source project that you're interested in - sourceforge.net always has plenty of help-wanted listings - and give back to the community. =)
Or start reading, if you want. There are lots and lots of electronic books on the Net, and gutenberg's not the only place you can grab the full-text of books from. =)
There's also keeping up to date by reading through documentation and perhaps playing with a small development unit you have there. Remember, we have a weird industry - if you don't keep learning, you're going to get left behind. The graveyard shift's a perfect time to sit down and experiment with new stuff, although be careful - if you're sleepy and careless, you might screw things up. =)
Of course, there's always showing up on IRC, newsgroups and web-forums and helping out people for free.. <laugh>
If I remember correctly, you have all sorts of environmentalists quite upset that coral's being destroyed by irresponsible fishers, jewelry makers, tourists...
Using coral as a scaffold - I'm pretty sure the scientists can come up with a better idea, yes? Something that leaves the brightly-colored fish a place to play in? =)
Good work, mukul. It's nice that you're writing these things up - helps other people as well as trains writing skills. The Unix programming books cover fork in great detail, but your page is handy just in case I don't have a book around.. =)
Nifty eyecandy, but hey - if you get nailed because you didn't see the dark-gray enemy against, say, a charcoal background...
Kinda reminds me of that ASCII filter I heard about a while back. Never got to see it in action, but I find it amusing that people buy 3D graphics cards to make the rendering really scream, then... convert it to something that really looks 2D. (Clever hacking, though!)
Hmm.. at least with this, people can get away with playing Quake on a schoolnight! Pop in a Dali or Picasso plugin, pretend it's Monet, or maybe one of the modern action-painters (all that blood spattering all over the place remind you of something?), and you can pass it off as... art research! Yeaah!
Parents might even think you're voluntarily picking up a little culture...
Algorithm-based programming contests tend to become a matter of who can see the underlying problem - is it shortest path? is it combinatorics? - then modifying one of the algorithms in Sedgewick for the constraints.
The time pressure tends to discourage you from thinking up a nice, neat, elegant solution when a quick brute-force hack will run in the specified time.
I have the greatest respect for the kind of problems at the ACM contests - that problemset archive is cool! But contests like that tend to encourage bad coding style (it looks pretty the first time around, but then you start kludging it to make your output look like the test output) and lack of input checking (all inputs assumed correct).
Links is a pretty good replacement for lynx. Links does tables, frames, threading _and_ downloading in the background, so if you're looking for a console browser, you might want to check it out as well. =)
I go to a lot of programming competitions, and it's really fun getting to meet other people who are into computers. That's at least one of the things I'll miss about real, face-to-face competitions - no swapping souvenirs and contact information, no playing cards after the contest... Sure, you could also socialize on the Net, but it just isn't the same, y'know?
As for the type of contest problems... Last year we joined the ACM regionals, which used C, C++, and Java. Most - no, actually, all of the problems were math- or theory-based problems that could be quickly hacked up in C. Java's only advantage is perhaps the huge library it comes with, but in contests like those, OOP is a hindrance rather than a benefit.
Compare this with application development contests in which you're told to write an app in a short period of time. It tests design, implementation and testing - real-world skills, yes? In the end I feel that I learn more from those contests because they more accurately simulate the real world.
See, I don't think employers are really going to care if you can code a quick, inefficient shortest-path algorithm in less than half an hour (although Dijkstra's is pretty cool.. =) ). However, coming up with a beautiful, _working_, complete program in a couple of days... Isn't that much more useful?
The closer you get to finding out where the bug is, the less you can reproduce the bug. Whenever you make a measurement, you disturb the system and alter the results.
So much for deterministic computers.
Not a helpful comment, I know. =)
This is pretty interesting. It's pretty hard to track down information about people, especially if they don't have much of a Net presence, or you simply don't have enough starting data. I'd really like to be able to turn up interesting data hidden several layers deep, and be able to search for things with a vague query that involves all sorts of peripheral identifiers. For people, it might be high school attended and current company, maybe other people they might know.
Hmm. Definitely interesting. Although I doubt it will be able to find my father's brother's nephew's cousin's former room-mate.;)
Oh, for the Semantic Web - I saw a couple of stories here before, but here's something that might be informative:
You're probably not going to find one online retailer that sells everything you want (although Amazon's trying very hard to do that!), so if you have webspace that you can actually program in, it might not be a bad idea to whip up a little wishlist site of your own. Search the Net for stuff that you like or just use a general description. Let visitors create accounts and check off items on your wishlist. =)
Might be nice if you can hook into the retailers' sites so that the items are automatically ordered and delivered to your address, but that might be pushing it. Anyway, have fun!
(Although you probably won't have time to make this - hmm. Convince some of your geek friends to do it for you in lieu of giving you a gift, maybe.)
Makes sense. Sudden, abrupt shifts to possibly untested methods can make things Really Weird. I'm thinking of focusing on educational metrics, but then that's still a very difficult and hard-to-define area.
Hmm. I suppose teacher training's one of the factors that ultimately affects the success of such a program. New curricula have to be really well thought-out. I'm a student - I have so much to learn about CS ed! =)
Hmm. Come here. Or anywhere - CS programs tend to be similar, so identify your main interests, look for professors that do research in these fields, and go where the geek cluster. Or something like that. =)
I'm into CS Ed, something that's not really paid a lot of attention yet here in the Philippines. I've been eyeing Monash University in Australia (activity, degree program, and proximity to Australasian educational conferences), Uppsala University in Sweden, and UCBerkeley.
I want to do this now! <laugh> I'm also finishing my second year of college, and I want to get started on research and things like that. We don't really have a lot of research opportunities in the Philippines, and my teachers are working on different things. I guess I'll put aside my CS ed interests first and work on networks or programmming, but I'd really love international collaboration, maybe a foreign exchange program or two.
Hope you find the program of your dreams. Maybe you can make one. =)
Slashdot Mirror
That would be a cool survey. I've always been curious about why other people like computer science. I love the thrill of programming, of being faced with a challenge and trying to figure out if I can pull it off. I like building things that other people will use, and I really like open source because I see other people volunteering time and effort to make cool software. I wonder what other people's reasons are.
(.. and the site could use a little usability tweaking, too. But it's okay.)
When I couldn't get my Slashdot, I assumed the worse. High-profile hijacking. Aliens beaming up the OSDN headquarters. Servers sneakily migrated to Windows, which then promptly crashed.
Kidding aside, I'm glad Slashdot is back up.
Second, they want to contribute code to the open-source community.
I'd say go for it! <grin> And be glad that you have other open source geeks in your class. =)
I guess you can check with your department regarding their official stand on this, as people on Slashdot can offer advice, opinions and thoughts, but can't authoritatively decide anything in your situation. (I think.)
It seems that the GPL is allowed, but again - check with the university, and hope your uni isn't draconian enough to reject such a nice thing. =)
Run a web server like Apache, organize all of your docs under it, and use a search engine to index and search it! =) It can be just for you, on your hard disk..
People are still dissing Java in IRC channels, but hey, Java has its uses. =)
Support is kinda like insurance. Most people wouldn't get insurance from companies that are just starting out and don't quite look ready yet.
Let's face it - Redhat is a pretty big company, but you don't see a mass stampede to Linux in the business world. (Although some business have seen the light - that's nice.)
No one wants to make a mistake. It's their jobs on the line, after all.
So, see, RTFM doesn't always work. We're way too biased towards the visually-oriented person who knows how to read documentation and where to find the information he or she needs - a very useful skill, mind you. We often fail to note that there are other, equally important alternatives.
Hmm... Mars crawlers, spaceships... The possibilities are unlimited!
You could try working on some programs. Pick an open-source project that you're interested in - sourceforge.net always has plenty of help-wanted listings - and give back to the community. =)
Or start reading, if you want. There are lots and lots of electronic books on the Net, and gutenberg's not the only place you can grab the full-text of books from. =)
There's also keeping up to date by reading through documentation and perhaps playing with a small development unit you have there. Remember, we have a weird industry - if you don't keep learning, you're going to get left behind. The graveyard shift's a perfect time to sit down and experiment with new stuff, although be careful - if you're sleepy and careless, you might screw things up. =)
Of course, there's always showing up on IRC, newsgroups and web-forums and helping out people for free.. <laugh>
Interesting.
#include <disclaimer.h> - I'm a computer science person, I haven't done much of physics or bio lately. =)
Using coral as a scaffold - I'm pretty sure the scientists can come up with a better idea, yes? Something that leaves the brightly-colored fish a place to play in? =)
This kind of worm would probably get in through a known exploit and then patch the exploit behind it... kinda screws up software darwinism, yes?
Good work, mukul. It's nice that you're writing these things up - helps other people as well as trains writing skills. The Unix programming books cover fork in great detail, but your page is handy just in case I don't have a book around.. =)
Kinda reminds me of that ASCII filter I heard about a while back. Never got to see it in action, but I find it amusing that people buy 3D graphics cards to make the rendering really scream, then... convert it to something that really looks 2D. (Clever hacking, though!)
Hmm.. at least with this, people can get away with playing Quake on a schoolnight! Pop in a Dali or Picasso plugin, pretend it's Monet, or maybe one of the modern action-painters (all that blood spattering all over the place remind you of something?), and you can pass it off as... art research! Yeaah!
Parents might even think you're voluntarily picking up a little culture...
Algorithm-based programming contests tend to become a matter of who can see the underlying problem - is it shortest path? is it combinatorics? - then modifying one of the algorithms in Sedgewick for the constraints.
The time pressure tends to discourage you from thinking up a nice, neat, elegant solution when a quick brute-force hack will run in the specified time.
I have the greatest respect for the kind of problems at the ACM contests - that problemset archive is cool! But contests like that tend to encourage bad coding style (it looks pretty the first time around, but then you start kludging it to make your output look like the test output) and lack of input checking (all inputs assumed correct).
Oh, well, it's really a personal thing I guess.
Links is a pretty good replacement for lynx. Links does tables, frames, threading _and_ downloading in the background, so if you're looking for a console browser, you might want to check it out as well. =)
As for the type of contest problems... Last year we joined the ACM regionals, which used C, C++, and Java. Most - no, actually, all of the problems were math- or theory-based problems that could be quickly hacked up in C. Java's only advantage is perhaps the huge library it comes with, but in contests like those, OOP is a hindrance rather than a benefit.
Compare this with application development contests in which you're told to write an app in a short period of time. It tests design, implementation and testing - real-world skills, yes? In the end I feel that I learn more from those contests because they more accurately simulate the real world.
See, I don't think employers are really going to care if you can code a quick, inefficient shortest-path algorithm in less than half an hour (although Dijkstra's is pretty cool.. =) ). However, coming up with a beautiful, _working_, complete program in a couple of days... Isn't that much more useful?
What's next? Delphion will probably patent their patent-searching engine. =)
And wouldn't get the movie reference either, I suppose. <wry grin>
The closer you get to finding out where the bug is, the less you can reproduce the bug. Whenever you make a measurement, you disturb the system and alter the results. So much for deterministic computers. Not a helpful comment, I know. =)
This is pretty interesting. It's pretty hard to track down information about people, especially if they don't have much of a Net presence, or you simply don't have enough starting data. I'd really like to be able to turn up interesting data hidden several layers deep, and be able to search for things with a vague query that involves all sorts of peripheral identifiers. For people, it might be high school attended and current company, maybe other people they might know.
Hmm. Definitely interesting. Although I doubt it will be able to find my father's brother's nephew's cousin's former room-mate. ;)
Oh, for the Semantic Web - I saw a couple of stories here before, but here's something that might be informative:
Semantic Web Roadmap (http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Semantic.html) - also by Tim Berners-Lee, last modified 1998/10/14.
There's a very good reference on Call Center, Bug Tracking and Project Management Tools for Linux at http://linas.org/linux/pm.html. It has helpful comments, too.
You're probably not going to find one online retailer that sells everything you want (although Amazon's trying very hard to do that!), so if you have webspace that you can actually program in, it might not be a bad idea to whip up a little wishlist site of your own. Search the Net for stuff that you like or just use a general description. Let visitors create accounts and check off items on your wishlist. =)
Might be nice if you can hook into the retailers' sites so that the items are automatically ordered and delivered to your address, but that might be pushing it. Anyway, have fun!
(Although you probably won't have time to make this - hmm. Convince some of your geek friends to do it for you in lieu of giving you a gift, maybe.)
Hmm. I suppose teacher training's one of the factors that ultimately affects the success of such a program. New curricula have to be really well thought-out. I'm a student - I have so much to learn about CS ed! =)
I'm into CS Ed, something that's not really paid a lot of attention yet here in the Philippines. I've been eyeing Monash University in Australia (activity, degree program, and proximity to Australasian educational conferences), Uppsala University in Sweden, and UCBerkeley.
I want to do this now! <laugh> I'm also finishing my second year of college, and I want to get started on research and things like that. We don't really have a lot of research opportunities in the Philippines, and my teachers are working on different things. I guess I'll put aside my CS ed interests first and work on networks or programmming, but I'd really love international collaboration, maybe a foreign exchange program or two.
Hope you find the program of your dreams. Maybe you can make one. =)