Ok, Remember the Titans (imdb rating 7.5/10) was stupid, but this one (imdb rating 3.9/10) is wonderful? "Feel good" movies (even when they're apparently based on true stories) are bad now, but getting more raunchy and scatological than American Pie is a good thing?
The only reason this movie exists is because the Wayans brothers didn't get to it first. The real question is, is that because the Wayans brothers knew that it would be stupid?
TAB HUNTER? You mean to tell me that they so quickly ran out of satirical fodder that they had to go back....checks imdb...40 years (The Tab Hunter Show) for material? Do they really think that their audience, a bunch of 13yr olds who found pastry masturbation hysterical, are going to get such references? Most of the kids that will be going to see this probably get "She's All That" but never even saw "Pretty in Pink".
Oy. Look for Katz to next reveal that "A Beautiful Mind" sucks because there's no nudity.
Of course, there are different scales of failure. Some of them will get you fired, and there's not a whole lot you can do to fix it. Some will just get you a beating.
As for the philosophy bit, I have one of those "classic wisdom" posters on my wall that says:
Those who are victorious plan effectively and change decisively. They are like a great river that maintains its course but adjusts its flow...they have form but are formless. They are skilled in both planning and adapting and need not fear the result of a thousand battles; for they win in advance, defeating those that have already lost. - Sun Tzu." How I read that? If you have your long range vision and confidence in it, then you shouldn't fear temporary setbacks, but rather work through and around them.
I think that the best managers won't beat you up too bad for failure -- they will instead focus on "What needs to be done to prevent this from happening again?" and that's where you need to be able to jump in and offer constructive ideas (not criticism of your teammates). After all, if your site was down for 8 hours last night, then yelling about it for 8 hours will not make that outage not have happened. Odds are that they are getting yelled at by their bosses, too, so they know that after they vent their anger at you, they have to have something to bring back to the boss as an answer.
Memorize a few origami patterns. That'll keep you entertained with just a piece of paper. I often leave a few cranes scattered around particularly boring meetings. If anybody notices and asks, I tell them the story of the thousand cranes (legend coming out of WWII, I believe, has it that a girl dying of leukemia after fallout from the bomb tried to fold 1000 cranes because she believed that you got a wish granted. She got into the 600's, I believe). So when people ask how many I'm up to I say I'm not counting, I'm just releasing free wishes into the wild.
To make it a challenge for yourself, remember that classical origami does not allow for tearing,cutting, or using flat surfaces to get a good crease! Once you pick up the paper, it doesn't leave your hands until your creation is complete. And the no tearing rule makes it particularly challenging because most patterns want a square piece of paper, and most of the paper you'll encounter in the wild isn't square. Folding cranes out of business cards without tearing off the extra bit is a particular hobby I enjoy because with the thicker paper it's hard to get the head to come out right.
If you're really bored with that, and you want to play some tricks on your teachers, you can search around the net for some "adult" origami patterns to fold and leave on other people's desks.
When I see these books, I always cringe and then scan to see if I see my company's name mentioned. I don't think that it would be, of course, which is why I cringe. Thus far no mention, but like it says, most of the books are anonymous about it.
Oh, we understand why it's being done. Same reason I got a new security pass and there are guards at the door, or why we can't run Apache but they will block.EXE and.DLL attachments at the mail server to avoid viruses -- kneejerk reactions by management so high up that they don't even know how their company runs.
I get upset when I tell the help desk that my machine blue screened during an ftp, and he tells me that my case will go in the advanced pile because he didn't know I had an ftp application.
I get upset when I am trying to switch my company's content management over to XML, and they constantly ask me "Is there an XSL editor that is as good as the typical HTML editor?" and I can't evaluate them because I can't install them on my machine without changing the registry. From the company's perspective, of course, we don't do XML/XSL therefore there's no reason for me to install such tools...
Easy question : no. My group has our own Unix boxes and our own support group for most things except DNS changes and stuff like that and we still run into inefficiencies in getting routine things done on time. We do not have administration rights for our NT desktops in the sense that we can bring in our own OS upgrades, but we do have the freedom to install new applications. I can't see it working any other way.
If whoever is thinking about making such a decision is in charge of development, then get your resume in order because if I were you I wouldn't want to work under him much longer.
It depends entirely on whether you have a goal in mind or are just in it for the excitement of the hack. Thus far I have skinned mine a little bit, gotten it to NFS mount a linux drive, and am in the process of modifying the channels to provide my wife and I with a quick glimpse and the morning traffic and weather. Rather than using the browser, which takes too long to come up and is loaded with too much information, I'm scraping out what I want and pushing it down the audrey so it comes up instantaneously.
I'm telling myself that once I'm "done" I will run some wire down to the kitchen or living room and put Audrey down there. But will I ever be done? Tough question. I could also turn her into a digital picture frame (already got that started). Or an MP3 player. A friend is making his into a voice mail system. You can easily find yourself in an endless quest to just keep hacking the thing.
The facts, though, are that its memory is currently very limited, and it's not the fastest beast in the world. And although you can run some QNX apps on it, many of them are just too darned big, and very few people are writing native Audrey apps. So until people start hardware hacking the thing to add memory or harddisk or whatever, you might find yourself saying "Eh. This would be cooler if it did X Y and Z already..."
Know what really, truly scares me about XP? This morning on the Howard Stern show he gave time to 3 callers (well, 2 actually because he got bored) to blatantly do a commercial. And when I changed the channel, another morning talk station was talking about it too! I mean, the hell?! Since when does the release of a new piece of software from the world's biggest software company suddenly mean everybody has to start plugging it?
On a good note, the first guy was so boring (talking about why XP is cool because it's on a 32bit kernel, not a 16bit one on top of DOS like Win98/ME) that Howard and crew got very bored. So he gave the second guy a chance, who pointed out the bit about having to register every machine, etc... to which Howard summed up "So let's all get together and not buy this thing." And that was the end of that. Gotta wonder if that third guy was gonna be pro or against Microsoft.
I think the biggest failing of the internet appliance is that they're usually billed as "get this instead of a full blown machine." Several reasons cause that to not work: some people *want* a full machine, and are afraid that the appliance won't do task Q that they're absolutely going to need (even though on the PC they never do it), some people *want* to have the freedom to choose their internet service independently of their device (people like to buy a PC first, and then buy a service, not be told "Hey, by buying this appliance you're committing yourself to a three year contract!"), and lastly, the damned price point. Like another poster said, Audrey rocks, but not for $500.
But you know what internet appliances can do? They can be supplemental to your own PC. How about a device that allows me to check my mail from the TV by using my existing connection? Or remote control my PC to start printing something, so that I can go upstairs later and just pick it up? How about a touch screen device that I have right on the table in the front hallway that can rapidly pull up a traffic or weather channel before I head out the door on the way to work (something I plan to make my Audrey do)? I don't want to surf on my tv or my touch panel. I have specific types of information that I want, and if I can find a supplemental device that will deliver those things to me quickly wherever I happen to be, then I'm gonna be all over it.
Ya know, I constantly hear about being able to easily get these cheap PCs. I'm gonna ask a stupid question -- WHERE? Every time I go look I can only ever see systems that are closer to like $800. I've desperately been looking to snag a cheap machine for a linux server, and had to rely on the kindness of strangers to give me castoffs, which often don't work (such as the current one that has a dead bios battery I can't seem to replace:().
But it seems like one way they could make money is to offer some sort drop off / email service where you turn in the camera, and then they email you the pictures. Of course, that means that you have to give them your valid email, thus automatically opting you in to whatever evil schemes they have in mind....:-/ I don't particularly love the idea, but I've also watched people with traditional cameras who rush to the 1hr place, and then gleefully proclaim "The pictures are ready! Let's go get them!" so to these people the idea of having the pictures show up right on your home PC would be a major win. It would never even occur to them what else it's costing them.
Duane
(Note, on that "automatically opt in" thing. While I don't agree with it, it's the logic that a "bulk email provider" friend of mine used on me once: register with a company and you are implicitly opting in. Yeah, sure. Glad she's out of work now:))
You're telling me that of all the people who might benefit from a digital camera, that the majority will see 4megapixels for "under a thousand" as the better buy? For a large part of the universe, "under a thousand" could very well mean "more than I paid for the whole PC in the first place". When the heck did our perspective on price get to be so...so....so Rain-Man? How much is geek toy X? Bout a thousand dollars.....
We got my dad his digital camera about 4 years ago. Cost like $400. I'm sure its resolution is a tiny fraction of what can be done now. But he's gotten 4 years out of it and is still going strong. He's still the hit of the family parties. Still the only one in the immediate fam that even has one. If we're at a point now where the disposal version can do even a piece of what his can, I'm sure they will be an instant best seller, not a novelty.
Worcester Polytech (WPI) in Massachusetts used to be entirely about projects. You have a series of multi-year projects that take up a number of class units toward your final grade. Toward the "well rounded education" approach there is a sufficiency project (humanities), interactive (social sciences), and your major qualifying project which is of course in your major. You choose an MQP usually by the beginning of your second year, if you're lucky, and find an advisor who'll accept the project as valid. He then would often assign you your project partners, and you had up to the next 3 years to make it work.
Once upon a time this was the only system WPI had -- classes were really only for learning what you needed to know in order to make progress on your project, forget about grades. But toward the end of the 70's they started to get pressured to come up with a system that would more easily allow students to transfer credit when leaving the school. By the time I arrived in 87 they were shifting away from the 2grade (AD/AC) system they had developed into three grade (ABC), but the projects are still central to your grade. If you spend 16 class units on your project and get an A on it, then 16 A credits go onto your final transcript. Not bad. And by the way you don't "fail" courses at WPI, you simply receive "no record" that you ever took the course.
When the teachers and students both agreed to this system, it worked well. Many's the time a student would fail a course because he was working too hard on his project, only to have the teacher let him squeak by because the teachers knew that the class grades were a formality. I deliberately failed one class because the teacher had set it up so that the project work (writing code) was about 40% of the grade, while the two exams were 60%. I aced all the code and failed the exams, on purpose, and told her "I came here to learn how to write code, not how to memorize answers out of a book so you can write an arbitrary letter next to my name in your book." I got a 67 in that class, which is failing at WPI, but she gave me a C anyway.
Did you sometimes hate your partners? Of course. Just like in real life. Did your partners sometimes get credit for work they didn't deserve? Yup. There's no good fix for that problem, that I can see. But whether your project works perfectly or fails miserably, it's all good lessons for the real world. I have many stories from college projects that I still use with my employees today (and none of them start with "This one time, when I was hammered.....")
For the record, my humanities project was an examination of the approach to the tragic hero in Shakespeare (Hamlet), O'Neill (Long Day's Journey), and Miller (Salesman). My major qualifying project was teh development of natural language software for educational purposes, and my interactive project was to gather a day long workshop of teachers and discuss the impact of "highly networked sources of data and information" on how children would use the computer in the classroom, specifically social studies. Did that in 1990. So the projects were no small potatoes.
At JavaONE this year they had a big demo where they spoke of a JavaVM being part of the PS2 and I wanna say they said something about around Christmas time. The guy showed some interesting demos of going into a chat room and sending out requests to play some networked games.
If you can internalize what XML is and what it's good for, you'll have a good jump on the future of web technologies like XSL, JSP, SOAP, web services, etc... I know programmers with years of experience who still ask me to explain why XML is any better than just rolling your own file format.
When you hear "platform" think "body of work that exists in the language that is available for your use" (regardless of who writes or sponsors it). Years ago if I interviewed somebody for a C++ job and asked them if they'd ever used the wxWindows library or the RogueWave++ library I would not have thought of it as a C++ platform question. It simply would have given me an idea about the variety of experience they have with the language. If I need Swing programmers then I don't really care if they have JNDI experience.
Having said that, relevant experience is important. If I'm doing all server work, and I have one guy with 5 years doing all Swing and client side GUI stuff, and another guy with 5 years doing J2EE, then you can call it language or platform all you want, but I call it relevant experience. That's nothing new. The same rules apply as they always have -- sure, maybe the Swing guy has enough experience with the language that he can get up to speed in the new domain, but I will likely save time by hiring the guy who is more familiar with the platform. However, if my 5yr swing guy is up against a 6month J2EE guy, then I would be more likely to take the gamble on the Swing guy.
I'm sorely tempted to write my ISP (ATT/Roadrunner) and say "Look, guys, do the math. Every Windows machine you have propagates X connections. Every Linux machine you let run propagates *0*. Shouldn't you consider officially encouraging people to run Linux?" But I expect that if I do that, they'll miss the point entirely and say "You're running Linux? Gasp! You're in violation of the terms of service!" It bugs me, because this seems like such a clear argument. Note that I didn't even say "make" people run it, just encourage. More Linux means less viruses. Seems like ISPs would think that's a good idea.
I think that you can scratch a personal itch by joining an existing project, quite often. Just because you didn't get to start it from scratch (ooo! pun intended!!) doesn't mean you have to ignore the fact that someone else might already be 60% of the way toward your perfect solution. Your itch might be "Wow, I wish project Z had feature Q."
That is, of course, unless the itch you're trying to scratch is a need for credit, in which case freshmeat needs to create a new category called "Projects that are only being created so that person X can put his name on it and hope someone else develops it into something that he can take credit for".
People are still using Karel the Robot? Holy Hell, that brings back memories. I used that circa 1985 on some sort of PDP-something that the highschool had in the basement. The funny thing is I was just talking to a guy about it on the train this morning:). "Hey, there's a turn right but where's turn left?" "Oh, that's the first lesson, write a procedure to turn left by turning right three times." Ick. Pickbeeper!
Lots of kids learned to code this way. Back in the days of Pascal in my high school I found Tom Poindexter's C-Robots and learned C that way (thinking it was pretty much just Pascal with some shortcut characters like braces instead of BEGIN/END). It's a funny coincidence that someone introduced you to the game within a day that somebody interviewed the guy behind the game at kuro5hin, however.:)
They just announced a cheaper $800 model that looks a little more "Hello Kitty" than the previous ones, just fyi. Probably to compete with Tiger's i-Cybie that'll be $200.
Duane
Think of it this way -- if 90% of my time I generate the same 100 lines of code, and a GUI gives me a button that will generate those lines for me, then it is faster for me to do it that way then to type it into a text editor every time. However, I think that's where the mistake likes -- GUI people tend to think that us CLI people are always typing shit into Emacs. They don't realize that most of your editors can do the same kind of code generation that a GUI can do. I think the only thing the GUIs have ever been better at is situations where you want to visualize what you're building without lots of compiling loops in between - such as screen painting, in the Java world. It's very hard to get a layout manager just right when you have to compile and run every time just to see it.
Slashdot Mirror
The only reason this movie exists is because the Wayans brothers didn't get to it first. The real question is, is that because the Wayans brothers knew that it would be stupid?
TAB HUNTER? You mean to tell me that they so quickly ran out of satirical fodder that they had to go back....checks imdb...40 years (The Tab Hunter Show) for material? Do they really think that their audience, a bunch of 13yr olds who found pastry masturbation hysterical, are going to get such references? Most of the kids that will be going to see this probably get "She's All That" but never even saw "Pretty in Pink".
Oy. Look for Katz to next reveal that "A Beautiful Mind" sucks because there's no nudity.
VAR B
INPUT A
INPUT B
C=A+B
PRINT C
GOTO 3
Can we get even more lightweight?
Sure. Why do you have to specifically declare variables? And why have a special syntax for "input a", why not just have input return it's own value?
(print (+ (read) (read)))
Heyyy, that looks familiar....:)
As for the philosophy bit, I have one of those "classic wisdom" posters on my wall that says: Those who are victorious plan effectively and change decisively. They are like a great river that maintains its course but adjusts its flow...they have form but are formless. They are skilled in both planning and adapting and need not fear the result of a thousand battles; for they win in advance, defeating those that have already lost. - Sun Tzu." How I read that? If you have your long range vision and confidence in it, then you shouldn't fear temporary setbacks, but rather work through and around them.
I think that the best managers won't beat you up too bad for failure -- they will instead focus on "What needs to be done to prevent this from happening again?" and that's where you need to be able to jump in and offer constructive ideas (not criticism of your teammates). After all, if your site was down for 8 hours last night, then yelling about it for 8 hours will not make that outage not have happened. Odds are that they are getting yelled at by their bosses, too, so they know that after they vent their anger at you, they have to have something to bring back to the boss as an answer.
To make it a challenge for yourself, remember that classical origami does not allow for tearing ,cutting, or using flat surfaces to get a good crease! Once you pick up the paper, it doesn't leave your hands until your creation is complete. And the no tearing rule makes it particularly challenging because most patterns want a square piece of paper, and most of the paper you'll encounter in the wild isn't square. Folding cranes out of business cards without tearing off the extra bit is a particular hobby I enjoy because with the thicker paper it's hard to get the head to come out right.
If you're really bored with that, and you want to play some tricks on your teachers, you can search around the net for some "adult" origami patterns to fold and leave on other people's desks.
When I see these books, I always cringe and then scan to see if I see my company's name mentioned. I don't think that it would be, of course, which is why I cringe. Thus far no mention, but like it says, most of the books are anonymous about it.
I get upset when I tell the help desk that my machine blue screened during an ftp, and he tells me that my case will go in the advanced pile because he didn't know I had an ftp application.
I get upset when I am trying to switch my company's content management over to XML, and they constantly ask me "Is there an XSL editor that is as good as the typical HTML editor?" and I can't evaluate them because I can't install them on my machine without changing the registry. From the company's perspective, of course, we don't do XML/XSL therefore there's no reason for me to install such tools...
Damn, I just fed the troll, didn't I. :-/
If whoever is thinking about making such a decision is in charge of development, then get your resume in order because if I were you I wouldn't want to work under him much longer.
I'm telling myself that once I'm "done" I will run some wire down to the kitchen or living room and put Audrey down there. But will I ever be done? Tough question. I could also turn her into a digital picture frame (already got that started). Or an MP3 player. A friend is making his into a voice mail system. You can easily find yourself in an endless quest to just keep hacking the thing.
The facts, though, are that its memory is currently very limited, and it's not the fastest beast in the world. And although you can run some QNX apps on it, many of them are just too darned big, and very few people are writing native Audrey apps. So until people start hardware hacking the thing to add memory or harddisk or whatever, you might find yourself saying "Eh. This would be cooler if it did X Y and Z already..."
On a good note, the first guy was so boring (talking about why XP is cool because it's on a 32bit kernel, not a 16bit one on top of DOS like Win98/ME) that Howard and crew got very bored. So he gave the second guy a chance, who pointed out the bit about having to register every machine, etc... to which Howard summed up "So let's all get together and not buy this thing." And that was the end of that. Gotta wonder if that third guy was gonna be pro or against Microsoft.
But you know what internet appliances can do? They can be supplemental to your own PC. How about a device that allows me to check my mail from the TV by using my existing connection? Or remote control my PC to start printing something, so that I can go upstairs later and just pick it up? How about a touch screen device that I have right on the table in the front hallway that can rapidly pull up a traffic or weather channel before I head out the door on the way to work (something I plan to make my Audrey do)? I don't want to surf on my tv or my touch panel. I have specific types of information that I want, and if I can find a supplemental device that will deliver those things to me quickly wherever I happen to be, then I'm gonna be all over it.
Ya know, I constantly hear about being able to easily get these cheap PCs. I'm gonna ask a stupid question -- WHERE? Every time I go look I can only ever see systems that are closer to like $800. I've desperately been looking to snag a cheap machine for a linux server, and had to rely on the kindness of strangers to give me castoffs, which often don't work (such as the current one that has a dead bios battery I can't seem to replace :().
Duane
(Note, on that "automatically opt in" thing. While I don't agree with it, it's the logic that a "bulk email provider" friend of mine used on me once: register with a company and you are implicitly opting in. Yeah, sure. Glad she's out of work now :))
We got my dad his digital camera about 4 years ago. Cost like $400. I'm sure its resolution is a tiny fraction of what can be done now. But he's gotten 4 years out of it and is still going strong. He's still the hit of the family parties. Still the only one in the immediate fam that even has one. If we're at a point now where the disposal version can do even a piece of what his can, I'm sure they will be an instant best seller, not a novelty.
Once upon a time this was the only system WPI had -- classes were really only for learning what you needed to know in order to make progress on your project, forget about grades. But toward the end of the 70's they started to get pressured to come up with a system that would more easily allow students to transfer credit when leaving the school. By the time I arrived in 87 they were shifting away from the 2grade (AD/AC) system they had developed into three grade (ABC), but the projects are still central to your grade. If you spend 16 class units on your project and get an A on it, then 16 A credits go onto your final transcript. Not bad. And by the way you don't "fail" courses at WPI, you simply receive "no record" that you ever took the course.
When the teachers and students both agreed to this system, it worked well. Many's the time a student would fail a course because he was working too hard on his project, only to have the teacher let him squeak by because the teachers knew that the class grades were a formality. I deliberately failed one class because the teacher had set it up so that the project work (writing code) was about 40% of the grade, while the two exams were 60%. I aced all the code and failed the exams, on purpose, and told her "I came here to learn how to write code, not how to memorize answers out of a book so you can write an arbitrary letter next to my name in your book." I got a 67 in that class, which is failing at WPI, but she gave me a C anyway.
Did you sometimes hate your partners? Of course. Just like in real life. Did your partners sometimes get credit for work they didn't deserve? Yup. There's no good fix for that problem, that I can see. But whether your project works perfectly or fails miserably, it's all good lessons for the real world. I have many stories from college projects that I still use with my employees today (and none of them start with "This one time, when I was hammered.....")
For the record, my humanities project was an examination of the approach to the tragic hero in Shakespeare (Hamlet), O'Neill (Long Day's Journey), and Miller (Salesman). My major qualifying project was teh development of natural language software for educational purposes, and my interactive project was to gather a day long workshop of teachers and discuss the impact of "highly networked sources of data and information" on how children would use the computer in the classroom, specifically social studies. Did that in 1990. So the projects were no small potatoes.
d
The five finger discount story went up at 7:54am. Your story on the same subject is up at 9:45. God you type fast!
At JavaONE this year they had a big demo where they spoke of a JavaVM being part of the PS2 and I wanna say they said something about around Christmas time. The guy showed some interesting demos of going into a chat room and sending out requests to play some networked games.
If you can internalize what XML is and what it's good for, you'll have a good jump on the future of web technologies like XSL, JSP, SOAP, web services, etc... I know programmers with years of experience who still ask me to explain why XML is any better than just rolling your own file format.
Having said that, relevant experience is important. If I'm doing all server work, and I have one guy with 5 years doing all Swing and client side GUI stuff, and another guy with 5 years doing J2EE, then you can call it language or platform all you want, but I call it relevant experience. That's nothing new. The same rules apply as they always have -- sure, maybe the Swing guy has enough experience with the language that he can get up to speed in the new domain, but I will likely save time by hiring the guy who is more familiar with the platform. However, if my 5yr swing guy is up against a 6month J2EE guy, then I would be more likely to take the gamble on the Swing guy.
I'm sorely tempted to write my ISP (ATT/Roadrunner) and say "Look, guys, do the math. Every Windows machine you have propagates X connections. Every Linux machine you let run propagates *0*. Shouldn't you consider officially encouraging people to run Linux?" But I expect that if I do that, they'll miss the point entirely and say "You're running Linux? Gasp! You're in violation of the terms of service!" It bugs me, because this seems like such a clear argument. Note that I didn't even say "make" people run it, just encourage. More Linux means less viruses. Seems like ISPs would think that's a good idea.
That is, of course, unless the itch you're trying to scratch is a need for credit, in which case freshmeat needs to create a new category called "Projects that are only being created so that person X can put his name on it and hope someone else develops it into something that he can take credit for".
No, this guy posts this a few times a day. Has been doing it for weeks. I don't know why he thinks it's funny.
People are still using Karel the Robot? Holy Hell, that brings back memories. I used that circa 1985 on some sort of PDP-something that the highschool had in the basement. The funny thing is I was just talking to a guy about it on the train this morning :). "Hey, there's a turn right but where's turn left?" "Oh, that's the first lesson, write a procedure to turn left by turning right three times." Ick. Pickbeeper!
Lots of kids learned to code this way. Back in the days of Pascal in my high school I found Tom Poindexter's C-Robots and learned C that way (thinking it was pretty much just Pascal with some shortcut characters like braces instead of BEGIN/END). It's a funny coincidence that someone introduced you to the game within a day that somebody interviewed the guy behind the game at kuro5hin, however. :)
They just announced a cheaper $800 model that looks a little more "Hello Kitty" than the previous ones, just fyi. Probably to compete with Tiger's i-Cybie that'll be $200. Duane
Think of it this way -- if 90% of my time I generate the same 100 lines of code, and a GUI gives me a button that will generate those lines for me, then it is faster for me to do it that way then to type it into a text editor every time. However, I think that's where the mistake likes -- GUI people tend to think that us CLI people are always typing shit into Emacs. They don't realize that most of your editors can do the same kind of code generation that a GUI can do. I think the only thing the GUIs have ever been better at is situations where you want to visualize what you're building without lots of compiling loops in between - such as screen painting, in the Java world. It's very hard to get a layout manager just right when you have to compile and run every time just to see it.