Real men of genius
Today we salute you Mr. vi editor coder guy. Mr. vi editor coder guy!
You type at lightning speed while while the rest of us squint our eyes in wonder. What the hell you just did to my file!?
You scour through code like a red-hot knife on butter now my file looks funny in Notepad!!
Thanks to you Mr. vi editor coder guy, you remind us, it's all about the code! Mr vi editor coder guy!
"Why the disproportionate emphasis on gas prices in our culture, then?"
The emphasis is not "disproportionate", it is just right. Most Americans depend on their "shiny metal boxes" to earn a living. Have you read a job application lately? Yeah the part that reads: "reliable transportation"
US not to long ago gave up on National mass transit scheme and opted for the Highway. Now we all dream of 3 cylinder Geo Metro 50 MPG.
A bigger brighter screen and wi-fi running is going to dry-up that
battery before you can say "blueberry pie".
Microsoft, as always, overlooks the KISS principle, which is Apple's trademark.
Hey MS, why don't just go ahead a throw in a voice recorder, FM Tunner and
an Organizer that synch with Outlook and downlaodable wallpapers $1.99 to personalize your Zune!?!!
"The idea is to legitimize peer-to-peer sharing in a healthy way that works for everybody," said J Allard, a Microsoft vice president in charge of the Zune product line."
This is the kind of mentality that makes may recoil in my sleep.
Somo moron in a suit trying to figure out how to "sell you" how many times you listen to a song or how many times you copy it. Or maybe sell you the tune and for premium services sell you the lyrics or some kind dload access like those damn ring-tones of a cell phone.
I truly hope that J Allard and his whole operation flunks for the non-creative unimaginative garbage they are trying to shovel up the road.
I totally agree: Each citizine and their Pee-Cees should welcome DRM as their right to become digital and be managed by the Artists wich are now digital too.
Q: The number one feature for Vista is....drumroll please.... A: Security. That somewhat elusive feature that drives Norton to be the number 1 shrinkwrap software out there is money in the bank for Microsoft.
How an over-hyped IDE with lot's of eye-candy and right click functions help a nim-witted developer to maintain bad code? Simple. Powerful IDE's give the birds-eye view and easy to use control for a novice to perform complex operations without need to understand the underlying effects of their actions. Is an illusion of control. Tools that manage complexity (for you) can and will lead you to a dead end street. They don't follow the KISS rule. Come to think of it super-specialize IDE tools breed out from the complexity created by poor designs. The more complex the project is, the more this tools shine. They make out of complexity your friend and companion, like a parasite. Bad programmers believe that large, complex and convoluted projects are OKAY! IDE's get you used to the awful reasoning that "if you don't see it, is not there". How many times I have seen the frustration of the GUI oriented user when is revealed that he/she cannot navigate with the happy mouse into the command with the cute icon that executes the needed operation...preposterous! IDE's are sensory and spatial oriented which is linked to more basic neural activity. CLI's environment are purely conceptual. Memory and high reasoning (abstraction) are a must, expected, and used heavily. But ultimately, is all about the code. If you find the code to be paramount. You cut the middle man and work it raw (vi), perhaps with a bit of color syntax but that's it.
There used to be a place where people used to find a balance between spending time with your family and living in a crime-ridden rat-hole without money for a yearly meaningful vacations and a competitive education for your kids. The place is called Suburbia. There's a problem. Millionaires are now moving to Suburbia because the long for little leagues and a down to earth families. Suburbia is turning unnafordable with taxes and obnoxious with the peer presure now endured by our upscaled new residents with their mac-mansions and the SUV's and thier uber-tight schedules of gym, soccer and ballet for their technology-jaded offsprings. There's a void there. It's the same void other cultures: Chinese, Latino, Black, you name. Turn away from and in opt to promote their own. That void is the recorded laugh-track of American Prime Time idiosincracy. We get it, we forget it.
I have all my music in mp3's in a PC with FC4 ext3 filesystem with monthly crontab mirror backup. But the front end is a mac-mini with OSX which connects to the music via NFS and services my i-pod. Also I have another front end, a laptop with Windows XP that connects via samba and services anothe i-pod. If I like a song, I buy the used CD and rip it in mp3 VBR using Linux grip.
I know that 20 years down the road there's a pretty good chance I will want to hear PF "Careful with that Axe Eugene"
I don't know what app or what what OS or what music player is going to do it.
But what I know is that neither Apple or Microsoft or Sony or EMI will decide or monitor what I do with MY MUSIC!
"The world weighs on my shoulders But what am I to do? You sometimes drive me crazy But I worry about you I know it makes no difference To what you're going through But I see the tip of the iceberg And I worry about you..."
That is because the Windows interface is designed to be used with a Mouse, not a stylus. Theres a very simple game in the Nintendo DS Mario 64 where a flower appears and you start plucking the petals away with the stylus (love-me, love-me-not). That was it. The effect of plucking the petal with the stylus and when release (lift the stylus) the petal gently floats down or you can even toss-it sideways. Nintendo knows that something big happens when machines start understanding and mimicking the human movement and not all the way around.
To understand the power of a simpler human-computer interface one can see as an example the Nintendo DS. I have handed the gadget to people that never in their lives have use one or a computer for that matter (brain-age game). And by using the stylus and the touch-screen they get to play with it almost immediately. The mouse needs to be replaced by a touch screen with a stylus.
If by regulation they means making a law against disclosing security holes on regulated software, it follows the security by obscurity dogma. Which might not have anything to do with Open Source as a cause. Yet, by design, would make impossible for Open Source to fulfill this "security by obscurity" requirement.
As for the "patch culture" head-liner. The term patch was is commonly associated with Open Source and it's inherent quality for any piece of software to deviate from the original distribution giving away or handing over the control/security from the creator to the user. From a contractual point of view, that removes any security liability from the creator. And that is exactly what vendors like Oracle charge dearly, for the assumed responsability/liability they want to uphold..and charge accordingly.
Regulation is the shot-gun approach. The solution should be for Oracle to sell their security AS-IS. Stop touting and charging for solutions that security-wise or may not be better than it's counterpart.
To my left I have a gameboy advance SP with Mario Bros 3. Loaded. To my right I have a wintel PC runnig Windows XP.
Both are chunks of hardware with some software loaded on it. Both are mine and I have years and years using them. One needs zero maintenance and is pretty much bug free and the other one needs more nursing than a premature crack baby.
The gameboy in my own personal experience is bug-free because: a) it's small in size and functionality. b) It only tries to do one thing right (play games).
The PC in my own personal experience is the paragon and birthplace of bugs because: a) it's too big in size and resources for the bottom-line end-funtionality. c) It does a million things half-ass.
Over specialization results in a slow death. Over flexibility results in unpredictability and possibly, sudden death.
"..this ingredients that make the human body and mind. Like all the components that make up me as an individual with my own personality. Sure I have a face and voice to distinguish myself from others. But my thoughts and memories are unique only to me. And I carry a sense of my own destiny. Each of those things are just a small part of it. I collect information to use in my own way. All of that blends to create a mixture that forms me and gives rise to my conscience. I feel confined only free to expand myself within boundaries."
"Truthiness is the quality by which a person purports to know something emotionally or instinctively, without regard to evidence or to what the person might conclude from intellectual examination. Stephen Colbert popularized the word during the first episode (October 17, 2005) of his satirical television program The Colbert Report, as the subject of a segment called "The Wørd.""
What our government and half of the voting population considers to have a lot of truthiness:
"Pollution can always be reversible and not only is under control but over-hyped" "The USA Leading (aka ""protecting"") the free and the not-so-free world is God's plan"
If I start liking Taco Bell, watching American Idol blowing all my savings on video games and hanging at the Mall after hours, my particle velocity will increase allowing a potential collisions to occur without disturbing Eisenberg's Principle or my Bean Burrito for that matter. The forehead tribal tattoo and my mom picking me up in the mini-van left my particle in a stationary pattern.
It depends what's your goal. If you want to endoctrinate the children provide 1 OS. And make them proficient in 1 OS. If you want to teach (impart) education, install more than 2 OS's and integrate services among them. Teach students to think OUTSIDE the BOX...Literally.
okay kde developers log this: A great deal of kde users are heavy shell users (xterm,konsole,whatever) I wish some kind of terminal apps could be held as a widget on the desktop showing the actual text being displayed in the terminal (shrunk but visible and legible) and upon clicking or roll-over restores itself.
And here's the kick-ass feature. a F-key expose that gives you all your terminals with the actual text displayed in real time and a history scroll bar that scrolls the history a typed commands not the displayed text. You roll over the terminals on expose and the take over the whole screen for 1 second and if you keep moving the mouse, returns to expose, if you stop moving the mouse the terminal remains in full-screen mode, if you right-click the terminal stays in full-screen mode. You press F-key and return to expose.
wait wait wait, when you select expose, the terminals are displayed and take over the whole screen from left to right top bottom in chronological last-selected time (like alt-tab) and you press anoter F-key and all terminals show the last 10 commands executed with the return text ALL IN SLOW MOTION!!
Now you picture this: You arrive at 9 AM with your coffee and your bagel all grogy, sit in front of your screen, log-in, press terminal expose, press history and voila! you get to see a little movie of all the crap you were doing the night before..kewl eh?
It's the process what makes a code rebust and manageable, not the language. Here's some tid-bits.
Design...Code independent. (XML, UML) Design...Modular . ( Natural/Logic decomposition of elements) Design...By Contract. (Sign the dotted line, read the fine print)
Code...Follow the semantics design. Code on tiers. Upper tier strictly follow design, same naming convention same logic..lower tier uses generic tools, api's for portability (ADT's, STL, POSIX).
Test...Traceable...Preconditions..Postcondtions.. al modules are accompanied by a test suite and or third party test suite. Test...black box, third party. Don't preach to the choir. Test...Metrics metrics metrics. Test early, test often, catch the problems before the catch you.
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Real men of genius
Today we salute you Mr. vi editor coder guy.
Mr. vi editor coder guy!
You type at lightning speed while while the rest of us squint our eyes in wonder.
What the hell you just did to my file!?
You scour through code like a red-hot knife on butter
now my file looks funny in Notepad!!
Thanks to you Mr. vi editor coder guy, you remind us, it's all about the code!
Mr vi editor coder guy!
"Why the disproportionate emphasis on gas prices in our culture, then?"
The emphasis is not "disproportionate", it is just right.
Most Americans depend on their "shiny metal boxes" to earn a living.
Have you read a job application lately? Yeah the part that reads:
"reliable transportation"
US not to long ago gave up on National mass transit scheme
and opted for the Highway.
Now we all dream of 3 cylinder Geo Metro 50 MPG.
A bigger brighter screen and wi-fi running is going to dry-up that
battery before you can say "blueberry pie".
Microsoft, as always, overlooks the KISS principle, which is Apple's trademark.
Hey MS, why don't just go ahead a throw in a voice recorder, FM Tunner and
an Organizer that synch with Outlook and downlaodable wallpapers $1.99 to personalize your Zune!?!!
From the press release:
"The idea is to legitimize peer-to-peer sharing in a healthy way that works for everybody," said J Allard, a Microsoft vice president in charge of the Zune product line."
This is the kind of mentality that makes may recoil in my sleep.
Somo moron in a suit trying to figure out how to "sell you" how many times you listen to a song or how many times you copy it. Or maybe sell you the tune and for premium services sell you the lyrics or some kind dload access like those damn ring-tones of a cell phone.
I truly hope that J Allard and his whole operation flunks for the non-creative unimaginative garbage they are trying to shovel up the road.
I totally agree:
Each citizine and their Pee-Cees should welcome
DRM as their right to become digital and be managed
by the Artists wich are now digital too.
Q: The number one feature for Vista is....drumroll please....
A: Security.
That somewhat elusive feature that drives Norton to be the number 1 shrinkwrap
software out there is money in the bank for Microsoft.
And that will be it.
How an over-hyped IDE with lot's of eye-candy and right click functions help a nim-witted developer to maintain bad code?
Simple.
Powerful IDE's give the birds-eye view and easy to use control for a novice to perform complex operations without need to understand the underlying effects of their actions.
Is an illusion of control. Tools that manage complexity (for you) can and will lead you to a dead end street. They don't follow the KISS rule. Come to think of it super-specialize IDE tools breed out from the complexity created by poor designs. The more complex the project is, the more this tools shine. They make out of complexity your friend and companion, like a parasite. Bad programmers believe that large, complex and convoluted projects are OKAY! IDE's get you used to the awful reasoning that "if you don't see it, is not there". How many times I have seen the frustration of the GUI oriented user when is revealed that he/she cannot navigate with the happy mouse into the command with the cute icon that executes the needed operation...preposterous!
IDE's are sensory and spatial oriented which is linked to more basic neural activity.
CLI's environment are purely conceptual. Memory and high reasoning (abstraction) are a must, expected, and used heavily.
But ultimately, is all about the code. If you find the code to be paramount. You cut the middle man and work it raw (vi), perhaps with a bit of color syntax but that's it.
We are all familiar with the life and work of Pablo Picasso.
There used to be a place where people used to find a balance between spending time with your family and living in a crime-ridden rat-hole without money for a yearly meaningful vacations and a competitive education for your kids.
The place is called Suburbia.
There's a problem. Millionaires are now moving to Suburbia because the long for little leagues and a down to earth families.
Suburbia is turning unnafordable with taxes and obnoxious with the peer presure now endured by our upscaled new residents with their mac-mansions and the SUV's and thier uber-tight schedules of gym, soccer and ballet for their technology-jaded offsprings.
There's a void there.
It's the same void other cultures: Chinese, Latino, Black, you name. Turn away from and in opt to promote their own.
That void is the recorded laugh-track of American Prime Time idiosincracy. We get it, we forget it.
I have all my music in mp3's in a PC with FC4 ext3 filesystem with monthly crontab mirror backup.
But the front end is a mac-mini with OSX which connects to the music via NFS and services my i-pod.
Also I have another front end, a laptop with Windows XP that connects via samba and services anothe i-pod.
If I like a song, I buy the used CD and rip it in mp3 VBR using Linux grip.
I know that 20 years down the road there's a pretty good chance I will want to hear
PF "Careful with that Axe Eugene"
I don't know what app or what what OS or what music player is going to do it.
But what I know is that neither Apple or Microsoft or Sony or EMI will decide
or monitor what I do with MY MUSIC!
Sticking to one or two distro's of Linux is somewhat an oxymoron. The one-size-fits-all philosophy encumbers education in principle.
"The world weighs on my shoulders
But what am I to do?
You sometimes drive me crazy
But I worry about you
I know it makes no difference
To what you're going through
But I see the tip of the iceberg
And I worry about you..."
Well, you start the first 2 years as psychology, drama, or english major and then switch to engineering department in your sophomore year.
I'm with you. Specially the part that somehow starts inserting some effing product like McDonadls and M&Ms.
That is because the Windows interface is designed to be used with a Mouse, not a stylus.
Theres a very simple game in the Nintendo DS Mario 64 where a flower appears and you start plucking the petals away with the stylus (love-me, love-me-not). That was it. The effect of plucking the petal with the stylus and when release (lift the stylus) the petal gently floats down or you can even toss-it sideways. Nintendo knows that something big happens when machines start understanding and mimicking the human movement and not all the way around.
To understand the power of a simpler human-computer interface one can see as an example the Nintendo DS. I have handed the gadget to people that never in their lives have use one or a computer for that matter (brain-age game). And by using the stylus and the touch-screen they get to play with it almost immediately.
The mouse needs to be replaced by a touch screen with a stylus.
Can't give up Texas, Texas alredy gave up on you.
If by regulation they means making a law against disclosing security holes on regulated software, it follows the security by obscurity dogma. Which might not have anything to do with Open Source as a cause. Yet, by design, would make impossible for Open Source to fulfill this "security by obscurity" requirement.
As for the "patch culture" head-liner. The term patch was is commonly associated with Open Source and it's inherent quality for any piece of software to deviate from the original distribution giving away or handing over the control/security from the creator to the user. From a contractual point of view, that removes any security liability from the creator. And that is exactly what vendors like Oracle charge dearly, for the assumed responsability/liability they want to uphold..and charge accordingly.
Regulation is the shot-gun approach. The solution should be for Oracle to sell their security AS-IS. Stop touting and charging for solutions that security-wise or may not be better than it's counterpart.
To my left I have a gameboy advance SP with Mario Bros 3. Loaded.
To my right I have a wintel PC runnig Windows XP.
Both are chunks of hardware with some software loaded on it.
Both are mine and I have years and years using them.
One needs zero maintenance and is pretty much bug free and
the other one needs more nursing than a premature crack baby.
The gameboy in my own personal experience is bug-free because:
a) it's small in size and functionality.
b) It only tries to do one thing right (play games).
The PC in my own personal experience is the paragon and birthplace of
bugs because:
a) it's too big in size and resources for the bottom-line end-funtionality.
c) It does a million things half-ass.
Over specialization results in a slow death.
Over flexibility results in unpredictability and possibly, sudden death.
The PC must go.
"..this ingredients that make the human body and mind. Like all the components that make up me as an individual with my own personality. Sure I have a face and voice to distinguish myself from others. But my thoughts and memories are unique only to me. And I carry a sense of my own destiny. Each of those things are just a small part of it. I collect information to use in my own way. All of that blends to create a mixture that forms me and gives rise to my conscience. I feel confined only free to expand myself within boundaries."
Major Motoko Kusanagi
GITS.
From Wikipedia:
"Truthiness is the quality by which a person purports to know something emotionally or instinctively, without regard to evidence or to what the person might conclude from intellectual examination. Stephen Colbert popularized the word during the first episode (October 17, 2005) of his satirical television program The Colbert Report, as the subject of a segment called "The Wørd.""
What our government and half of the voting population considers to have a lot of truthiness:
"Pollution can always be reversible and not only is under control but over-hyped"
"The USA Leading (aka ""protecting"") the free and the not-so-free world is God's plan"
If I start liking Taco Bell, watching American Idol blowing all my savings on video games and hanging at the Mall after hours, my particle velocity will increase allowing a potential collisions to occur without disturbing Eisenberg's Principle or my Bean Burrito for that matter. The forehead tribal tattoo and my mom picking me up in the mini-van left my particle in a stationary pattern.
It depends what's your goal.
If you want to endoctrinate the children provide 1 OS. And make them proficient in 1 OS.
If you want to teach (impart) education, install more than 2 OS's and integrate services among them.
Teach students to think OUTSIDE the BOX...Literally.
okay kde developers log this:
A great deal of kde users are heavy shell users (xterm,konsole,whatever)
I wish some kind of terminal apps could be held as a widget on the desktop showing
the actual text being displayed in the terminal (shrunk but visible and legible) and upon clicking or roll-over restores itself.
And here's the kick-ass feature.
a F-key expose that gives you all your terminals with the actual text displayed in real time and a history scroll bar that scrolls the history a typed commands not the displayed text. You roll over the terminals on expose and the take over the whole screen for 1 second and if you keep moving the mouse, returns to expose, if you stop moving the mouse the terminal remains in full-screen mode, if you right-click the terminal stays in full-screen mode. You press F-key and return to expose.
wait wait wait, when you select expose, the terminals are displayed and take over the whole screen from left to right top bottom in chronological last-selected time (like alt-tab) and you press anoter F-key and all terminals show the last 10 commands executed with the return text ALL IN SLOW MOTION!!
Now you picture this: You arrive at 9 AM with your coffee and your bagel all grogy, sit in front of your screen, log-in, press terminal expose, press history and voila! you get to see a little movie of all the crap you were doing the night before..kewl eh?
You got all that!! Now go tiger! go!
It's the process what makes a code rebust and
manageable, not the language. Here's some tid-bits.
Design...Code independent. (XML, UML)
Design...Modular . ( Natural/Logic decomposition of elements)
Design...By Contract. (Sign the dotted line, read the fine print)
Code...Follow the semantics design.
Code on tiers. Upper tier strictly follow design, same
naming convention same logic..lower tier
uses generic tools, api's for portability (ADT's, STL, POSIX).
Test...Traceable...Preconditions..Postcondtions.. al modules are accompanied
by a test suite and or third party test suite.
Test...black box, third party. Don't preach to the choir.
Test...Metrics metrics metrics. Test early, test often, catch the problems
before the catch you.
Happy Coding!