My most painful college memory was trying to jam my own code in to a GUI I had an IDE generate.
Amen. I started coding in Java before there were any (usable) IDE's, so I learned the ins
and the outs of the AWT (and, later, Swing) "by hand". I found it pretty straightforward to develop
a usable GUI with no tools besides vi and the java compiler. In fact, it seems to me that
Java's AWT was designed to be used this way (much like Tk appears to have been), in
contrast to Microsoft's VB interface which was designed to require the IDE. Trying to do
Swing in an IDE is a very square peg in a very round hole.
Yet I know a guy who was fired from a contracting job because he also had learned to develop
GUI's without the IDE and couldn't make heads or tails of the "make it work just like
Visual Basic" GUI-generation tools in the IDE. He got "caught" one day hand-modifying the
unusable IDE-generated code. Not making full use of the "productivity enhancing tools",
you see.
society is progressing to the point where precise targetting is far preferred to generalization.
Here's the thing about that - I'm always reading something (it's getting harder
these days to cram in "reading time" now that I have a wife and a couple of kids,
but I manage to find some time to do it anyway). I read about topics I'm interested in,
such as programming (right now, I'm working my way through the behemoth "Programming Python");
not necessarily to discover a specific fact or solution, but to gain general knowledge.
The result? Because I know what's going on behind the scenes, and the theory behind it
all, I can usually figure out why something's gone wrong immediately, without having to
flail around doing random google searches as my, um, "contemporaries" tend to do (at least
as they do right before they beg me to figure it out for them).
This wouldn't bother me quite so much if it wasn't for the fact that the people who
expect me to do their jobs for them regard reading books as a "waste of time". The problem
with the "precise targeting", "gotta have it now, no time to research because we have to
hurry up and wait" attitude is that somebody has to write the answers to those
"precise target" searches. And how do you suppose they figured out how to do that?
Well, there is, actually - there are quite a few "under the internet" encrypted network ideas
floating around like anonet and freenet (and even Tor, although that's still a bit too open
for my paranoia level). Another possibility is an entirely user-run network - that is, a wireless mesh of open access points (encrypted point-to-point). MIT's RoofNet project is just such a network.
The problem is, nobody's really running them (or at least not a significant enough number of people for them to matter in the global war against censorship).
There seem to be two reasons why people don't participate. The first is the people who are
actually pro-censorship - the sort of people who say, "Well, I don't agree with censoring
political speech, but hooray for censoring obscenity". They'd rather leave themselves (and the
rest of us) open to arbitrary censorship than just shut it all down (and don't seem to understand that censorship is all-or-nothing).
The other reason is fear - fear that by participating in a movement that may well render
censorship obsolete, they'll be lumped in with the "worst" of the censorship offenders and
suffer the same punishment. To which I respond - if you're afraid to fight, you deserve what
you get.
Wow, I'm psychic... I *knew* somebody was going to post something along the lines of "this is the same American public who voted for GWB". Don't you think Bush-bashing is getting a little worn out? And honestly, do you really think either of the two alternatives would have been any better? Gore would have signed the patriot act and Kerry would have authorized warrantless wiretaps just like GWB did.
I'd vote for him in 2008 if he was running again... if he were running against Hillary (actually, I'd vote for Osama Bin Laden before I'd vote for Hillary - at least you know where he stands).
Yeah, that's the thing about that... I scored pretty high, too - but read the article again. Every "point" he makes is "I'm a great programmer because XXX - and XXX is how you recognize a great programmer!" I'd be curious to see a similar article written by somebody who wasn't biased towards pointing out why he, himself, is such a great programmer.
What he said was, "If I enabled wireless security on my network and someone hacked it, I would have a far harder time proving my innocence", and I often wonder if he's right. Like you, I'm pretty terrified of the accusation, so my network is locked down as tight as I can get it. I use WPA with a strong password, MAC address filtering, I renumbered the subnet from the default, I set a strong administrator password, and disabled DHCP... and if I can think of anything else I can do to lock it down, I'll probably do it, out of fear that somebody will do something nefarious with it.
On the other hand, if I do get hacked (somehow), all that work will probably hang me. Couple that with the fact that I have an advanced degree in computer science (which to the average slashdot reader seems to mean I now *nothing* about computers, but would surely impress a jury of my "peers" that I'm impervious to being hacked), and if my network is used against me, I'm getting the death penalty.
Amen. I'm getting to the point these days where I'm slowly becoming wary of anything that appears, to me, to be a good idea. In the mid-90's or so, I came across this new paradigm called "Object Oriented Programming". At the time, I was maintaining monolithic Cobol systems, and the appeal of OO was intuitive. I saw right away how it could be used to simplify code reuse, or even make reusable code that had not previously been reusable.
These days, OO means every function is encapsulated in a class, and every class has an ISomething interface, a SomethingImpl implementation (which has no data members) and an AbstractSomething base class (that's not extended by anything else), and a SomethingFactory that creates instances of SomethingImpl's and hands back a pointer to an ISomething... and if you ever float the concept of implementing ISomething again (you know, taking advantage of all that framework?), you'll be scolded for violating the purity of the OO design.
XP was another thing that, when I first saw it, looked like a great idea. It seemed to me that XP was essentially a description of what productive programmers were already doing while they were pretending that Gantt charts were meaningful and that project managers were useful.
Now XP is called "Agile" and companies hire "Agile Mentors" to show us how to do precisely the meaningless project management exercises that XP was meant to replace... When I see how much paperwork I have to fill out to be "agile", I long for the days of Gantt charts and Microsoft project.
Refactoring, too. When I first saw Fowler's book, it was like a lightning bolt. The intro talks about how he spent a few days at a client site "cleaning up" a bit of code to simplify his next task. I had had that same experience too many times to count - I had been tasked with, say, implementing lot tracking in an inventory system. It was obvious (to me) that if I first made some modifications to the existing system, I could insert the desired feature without disturbing everything else - but I could never seem to explain that to a nonprogramming manager (in the end, I always ended up doing it and pretending I hadn't because I didn't want to be responsible for breaking the entire thing). And here was a book dedicated to the technique!
Yet, nowadays, refactoring seems to mean going through working code and wrapping every function in a SomethingImpl class, giving it an ISomething interface, letting it extend an AbstractSomething base, and creating a SomethingFactory to create SomethingImpls...
Well, that's the thing about Freenet - by design, the more people that use it, the faster it gets. So they're kind of stuck in a catch 22 where nobody will use it because it's too slow and it's too slow because nobody uses it. The best thing that we can do (those of us that oppose censorship) is to run it, update in the background every once in a while, and do other stuff while we're waiting for Freenet to catch up to us.
Another thing that always pops into my mind when I read about such a proposed bit of legislation... let's say that they did make nmap illegal, but not IDE's (or at least not compilers). I *can* write my own (admittedly inferior) version of nmap with a little bit of time, based on the knowledge I've gleaned from reading "TCP/IP Illustrated". As stupid as outlawing the distribution of nmap is in and of itself, I wonder (seriously wondering, not "what's next are they going to ban cars?" slashdot-style hyperbole-ing here) if they're going to move to have distribution of books like this limited as well? If *not*, then one could simply post the nmap source code, in book form if necessary...
One thing my 33 years in the 20th & 21st centuries have taught me is that politicians don't just stop at stupid, they constantly find new ways to redefine the concept.
Actually, most hubcaps have a special lock on them that needs a specific "key" (to prevent people from stealing hubcaps), and most people store the key in the trunk, so your analogy fails. Not that I disagree, BTW - I don't think they had any business rifling around on his hard drive.
You remind me of senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) comments in support of the FISA overhaul (including retroactive immunity for telecom companies who provided data without a warrant to the government): "The civil libertarians among us would rather defend the constitution than protect our nation's security."
Yes, that's what the law says, and that particular law is a crock of shit, which is why everybody feels justified in ignoring it. I don't think he missed any points at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Amen. I started coding in Java before there were any (usable) IDE's, so I learned the ins and the outs of the AWT (and, later, Swing) "by hand". I found it pretty straightforward to develop a usable GUI with no tools besides vi and the java compiler. In fact, it seems to me that Java's AWT was designed to be used this way (much like Tk appears to have been), in contrast to Microsoft's VB interface which was designed to require the IDE. Trying to do Swing in an IDE is a very square peg in a very round hole.
Yet I know a guy who was fired from a contracting job because he also had learned to develop GUI's without the IDE and couldn't make heads or tails of the "make it work just like Visual Basic" GUI-generation tools in the IDE. He got "caught" one day hand-modifying the unusable IDE-generated code. Not making full use of the "productivity enhancing tools", you see.
Here's the thing about that - I'm always reading something (it's getting harder these days to cram in "reading time" now that I have a wife and a couple of kids, but I manage to find some time to do it anyway). I read about topics I'm interested in, such as programming (right now, I'm working my way through the behemoth "Programming Python"); not necessarily to discover a specific fact or solution, but to gain general knowledge.
The result? Because I know what's going on behind the scenes, and the theory behind it all, I can usually figure out why something's gone wrong immediately, without having to flail around doing random google searches as my, um, "contemporaries" tend to do (at least as they do right before they beg me to figure it out for them).
This wouldn't bother me quite so much if it wasn't for the fact that the people who expect me to do their jobs for them regard reading books as a "waste of time". The problem with the "precise targeting", "gotta have it now, no time to research because we have to hurry up and wait" attitude is that somebody has to write the answers to those "precise target" searches. And how do you suppose they figured out how to do that?
Well, there is, actually - there are quite a few "under the internet" encrypted network ideas floating around like anonet and freenet (and even Tor, although that's still a bit too open for my paranoia level). Another possibility is an entirely user-run network - that is, a wireless mesh of open access points (encrypted point-to-point). MIT's RoofNet project is just such a network.
The problem is, nobody's really running them (or at least not a significant enough number of people for them to matter in the global war against censorship).
There seem to be two reasons why people don't participate. The first is the people who are actually pro-censorship - the sort of people who say, "Well, I don't agree with censoring political speech, but hooray for censoring obscenity". They'd rather leave themselves (and the rest of us) open to arbitrary censorship than just shut it all down (and don't seem to understand that censorship is all-or-nothing).
The other reason is fear - fear that by participating in a movement that may well render censorship obsolete, they'll be lumped in with the "worst" of the censorship offenders and suffer the same punishment. To which I respond - if you're afraid to fight, you deserve what you get.
Wow, I'm psychic... I *knew* somebody was going to post something along the lines of "this is the same American public who voted for GWB". Don't you think Bush-bashing is getting a little worn out? And honestly, do you really think either of the two alternatives would have been any better? Gore would have signed the patriot act and Kerry would have authorized warrantless wiretaps just like GWB did.
I'd vote for him in 2008 if he was running again... if he were running against Hillary (actually, I'd vote for Osama Bin Laden before I'd vote for Hillary - at least you know where he stands).
Remember, this is the same American public which allows (even cheers for) the FCC to decide what you can and can't see and hear.
Oh, you don't have to switch to AT&T. Just keep your current provider - as soon as AT&T gets this working, everybody else will follow suit.
Yeah, that's the thing about that... I scored pretty high, too - but read the article again. Every "point" he makes is "I'm a great programmer because XXX - and XXX is how you recognize a great programmer!" I'd be curious to see a similar article written by somebody who wasn't biased towards pointing out why he, himself, is such a great programmer.
What really sets you apart from others, though, is your humility.
What he said was, "If I enabled wireless security on my network and someone hacked it, I would have a far harder time proving my innocence", and I often wonder if he's right. Like you, I'm pretty terrified of the accusation, so my network is locked down as tight as I can get it. I use WPA with a strong password, MAC address filtering, I renumbered the subnet from the default, I set a strong administrator password, and disabled DHCP... and if I can think of anything else I can do to lock it down, I'll probably do it, out of fear that somebody will do something nefarious with it.
On the other hand, if I do get hacked (somehow), all that work will probably hang me. Couple that with the fact that I have an advanced degree in computer science (which to the average slashdot reader seems to mean I now *nothing* about computers, but would surely impress a jury of my "peers" that I'm impervious to being hacked), and if my network is used against me, I'm getting the death penalty.
Thanks, that's exactly what I was getting at.
Um - like?
Amen. I'm getting to the point these days where I'm slowly becoming wary of anything that appears, to me, to be a good idea. In the mid-90's or so, I came across this new paradigm called "Object Oriented Programming". At the time, I was maintaining monolithic Cobol systems, and the appeal of OO was intuitive. I saw right away how it could be used to simplify code reuse, or even make reusable code that had not previously been reusable.
These days, OO means every function is encapsulated in a class, and every class has an ISomething interface, a SomethingImpl implementation (which has no data members) and an AbstractSomething base class (that's not extended by anything else), and a SomethingFactory that creates instances of SomethingImpl's and hands back a pointer to an ISomething... and if you ever float the concept of implementing ISomething again (you know, taking advantage of all that framework?), you'll be scolded for violating the purity of the OO design.
XP was another thing that, when I first saw it, looked like a great idea. It seemed to me that XP was essentially a description of what productive programmers were already doing while they were pretending that Gantt charts were meaningful and that project managers were useful.
Now XP is called "Agile" and companies hire "Agile Mentors" to show us how to do precisely the meaningless project management exercises that XP was meant to replace... When I see how much paperwork I have to fill out to be "agile", I long for the days of Gantt charts and Microsoft project.
Refactoring, too. When I first saw Fowler's book, it was like a lightning bolt. The intro talks about how he spent a few days at a client site "cleaning up" a bit of code to simplify his next task. I had had that same experience too many times to count - I had been tasked with, say, implementing lot tracking in an inventory system. It was obvious (to me) that if I first made some modifications to the existing system, I could insert the desired feature without disturbing everything else - but I could never seem to explain that to a nonprogramming manager (in the end, I always ended up doing it and pretending I hadn't because I didn't want to be responsible for breaking the entire thing). And here was a book dedicated to the technique!
Yet, nowadays, refactoring seems to mean going through working code and wrapping every function in a SomethingImpl class, giving it an ISomething interface, letting it extend an AbstractSomething base, and creating a SomethingFactory to create SomethingImpls...
Then it would seem that the censors have already won.
Well, that's the thing about Freenet - by design, the more people that use it, the faster it gets. So they're kind of stuck in a catch 22 where nobody will use it because it's too slow and it's too slow because nobody uses it. The best thing that we can do (those of us that oppose censorship) is to run it, update in the background every once in a while, and do other stuff while we're waiting for Freenet to catch up to us.
Check out Freenet - total anonymity and total encryption is the goal. All that's needed for it to work is for more people to download and run nodes.
Hell? Maybe you meant Perl?
I take that as a challenge, peraDUMB! Let's see you resist a flame war with ME!
Another thing that always pops into my mind when I read about such a proposed bit of legislation... let's say that they did make nmap illegal, but not IDE's (or at least not compilers). I *can* write my own (admittedly inferior) version of nmap with a little bit of time, based on the knowledge I've gleaned from reading "TCP/IP Illustrated". As stupid as outlawing the distribution of nmap is in and of itself, I wonder (seriously wondering, not "what's next are they going to ban cars?" slashdot-style hyperbole-ing here) if they're going to move to have distribution of books like this limited as well? If *not*, then one could simply post the nmap source code, in book form if necessary...
One thing my 33 years in the 20th & 21st centuries have taught me is that politicians don't just stop at stupid, they constantly find new ways to redefine the concept.
Actually, most hubcaps have a special lock on them that needs a specific "key" (to prevent people from stealing hubcaps), and most people store the key in the trunk, so your analogy fails. Not that I disagree, BTW - I don't think they had any business rifling around on his hard drive.
Of course, you could always mind your own business and leave the law enforcement to the law enforcement people, Batman.
You remind me of senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) comments in support of the FISA overhaul (including retroactive immunity for telecom companies who provided data without a warrant to the government): "The civil libertarians among us would rather defend the constitution than protect our nation's security."
Feel free to download and run FreeNet, too, which (if it ever gets some momentum) will make it exponentially less likely that anybody will be caught.
Yes, that's what the law says, and that particular law is a crock of shit, which is why everybody feels justified in ignoring it. I don't think he missed any points at all.
What do you mean? GUIs are awesome. With GUIs, you can open up dozens of command-line terminals side-by-side.
Seriously, though, can you find even one single example of this in the actual database?