Children need consistency. They'll push the boundaries, but it's especially then they need to know that you aren't budging. They should know what is going to happen to them when they do something. Instead, many parents let something go on unchecked and then explode with anger.
Parents should have certain offenses that get a spanking. For my children, its lying in order to get out of trouble. I always want the punishment for just owning up to a fault to be less than trying to lie and get out of trouble. In my mind, this reinforces the concept of personal accountability. If you mess up, own up to it. If you don't own up to it, then that's when things go really badly. After each time I spank them, I hug them and reassure them of my love. That's what usually makes them cry and feel bad for what they've done, and that's exactly what you want: remorse.
Not being perfect, I have spanked my children out of anger and will probably continue to do so at times. But I *always* regret that later. But as bad as that is, people always complement me on my well behaved children. I'd rather err on the side of giving them a bad spanking every once in a while (read: the exception and not the rule) than having children run amok.
I think you never see the proper use of spankings because that doesn't tend to happen in public. A parent has to be pretty angry to spank a child in public, and that's exactly when NOT to use a spanking. What you don't see are the good spankings administered in private.
What a huge discovery! Violent entertainment desensitizes children to violence and encourages violent behavior.
On the other hand, inattentive parents do just as much harm. I just want to walk around my childrens' school and tell parents "No, little Joshua isn't just *really* smart and acting out of . He needs a good old fashioned butt whooping." This society we live in is designed to create the kinds of problems we are now experiencing. Some parents use corporal punishment incorrectly, therefore all corporal punishment is bad. It's the classic blame the "technology" for the bad implementation. Only when parents start disciplining children, and by discipline I mean the whole enchilada of not just corporal punishment when needed but also teching children right from wrong, spending time with them, and not being afraid to be a parent (as opposed to trying to be your children's best friend, which really just means that people are *afraid* to tell their children "no" to certain things), will we see violent behavior in children curbed.
Well, I'll tell you one thing: IBM is a primary sponsor of the Dojo foundation. Not so for jQuery and prototype. If IBM isn't a good enough reason to stay the heck away, I don't know what is.
Not contesting your arguments here. Why are you so angry? Did your parents not love when you were a child or something? Jeez, it's a discussion and you start barking at people. You obviously have some issues, buddy.
Is Interpol even relevant? I mean, the only thing I ever know that even mentions Interpol are those stoopid warnings on DVDs. If Interpol has essentially become a copyright enforcement organization, then who even cares?
Do anything for long enough and it becomes part of your nature. This is precisely why people who trot out the old "I don't write standard markup because it takes too long! I have *real* work to do." excuse are just lazy hacks. Once you know how to write good markup, you just do it right the first time. Sure you make mistakes sometimes, but more often than not you can get it right the first time. As for validating, if you use a good validator (like Firefox's tidy validator) the act of validating your page is painless.
As for the point about not being able to crank out a three column layout perfectly the first time, well, a good css layout actually consists of very little html. It's all in the CSS. Besides, you DO use templating, right? You should only have to write your page's layout code once and just reference it from then on. The real complexity shouldn't be written time and again, it should be in your template. If you have your web site properly designed, you should just be able to write content and the little bit or markup to make that content look right.
I don't think OP said QA was not important. QA is very important.
But QA is a horrid job. QA is at the end of the cycle, so if someone misses a deadline it is QA is who really pays. Where I work, the poor QA people have been working weekends and long days for the last few months to test the piss poor code that a dev team put out late. I feel bad for them. The trouble with doing QA work is that it singularly qualifies a person for doing yet more QA work.
To the person who first asked the question: get out of QA ASAP. Your ticket out of QA may be to stay where you are and show some iniative and document some standards, do code reviews (instead of testing the final product), and so on. Trouble is, will the dev team respect the QA guy who wants to be a developer? They should, but the reality is that you might be regarded as a wannabe. On the other hand, get a new job as a developer. You might take a pay cut, but at least you have relevant experience in an environment where people have an open mind toward working with you. What you should do really depends on your co-workers.
"Everything I do moonlighting-wise is anti-geek. Much of it is hands on, without programming or thinking about technology or electronics. It keeps me fulfilled."
There are plenty of things to do with electronics that have little to do with technology (I mean obviously, all electronics are technology, but...) You could repair appliances. Find old appliances in the alley and fix them and sell them. You'd learn about electronics, learn to solder, and learn how things work. And you could probably find info online to help you figure stuff out.
I tinker with electronics, old tech stuff. I build guitar amps (tube amps, no transistors). For extra cash I fix other peoples' guitars and amps. That extra cash funds my hobby and lets me guild more amps. I think that's a pretty geeky hobby. I learn a lot about electronics and actually get to make stuff. It's sufficiently different from my day job (designing apps, writing code, etc) to be interesting.
All this assuming you are somewhat mechanically inclined.
Wouldn't leaving ReiserFS because it will supposedly become unsupported at some point in the future become self-fulfilling?
After all, who is going to fix it if nobody uses it? And like everything else, it will need to be fixed at some point.
If you find it to be a good filesystem, I say keep using it. If it is a good filesystem, someone will maintain it. If not, then it dies because it deserves to and not because of FUD.
"I don't care to speculate on people who don't like CSS, unless you actually have some data to back up your preconceptions? I'll ignore the veiled insults and try to elucidate the areas I feel CSS is weak on."
Come on, please. It wasn't a veiled insult. Fat client development is a different mindset. If someone is accustomed to one way of thinking, moving to another paradigm is sometimes difficult. It's not an insult to say that someone might be used to working a certain way and finds difficulty in working a totally different way. Didn't you caution me about making assumptions a few posts ago?
I think the rest of your post makes good points. And I think you also kind of proved my point about being used to a different mindset on laying things out. You think in terms of grids (or tables, or anything else with rows and columns.) That's ok IMO, it's a perfectly logical way of thinking. The difficulty that people have with designing for the web is the preference for a grid type layout prevents them from seeing layout as being fluid.
To really grok CSS, you have to stop thinking in terms of grids and start thinking in terms of flowing layouts. Let the browser place things, you just tell it sort of which order to place things in and how to place them with relation to one another. Yes, this is a bit of an oversimplification, but is the basic idea to keep in mind.
The design pseudocode you wrote above wouldn't work in a browser, or at least wouldn't be practical. What size is the browser window? You don't know. And do you really want your menu to shrink down past a certain point?
Some designs are hard to implement in CSS. Most aren't. The whole "holy grail" multi column layout thing *is* lame. It's not that hard. Just use some negative margins, floats, and one IE min-width hack and you're done.
I think that many, not all, people who don't like CSS are more used to developing fat client apps. There's nothing wrong with that. Designing for the web is much different, you first have to grok the concept of fluid layouts. If you came from an environment of "put this widget at x and y" then, yes, this is harder.
You could justifiably say that you shouldn't have to work so hard to design a layout. Fair enough, laying out some designs requires some clever CSS footwork. But that's where experience comes in.
Maybe you've used CSS quite extensively. In my past experience (and I have been a professional web developer for many years now) when people complain about CSS being no good, it's only because they don't know how to do what they want to do. Maybe that's not you, I dunno.
Oh, and while I see your point about how CSS is too kludgy, don't misplace the blame on the CSS spec. There is really only one browser anymore that doesn't adhere reasonably well to the spec. And that company also doesn't adhere to HTML specs, or many others. It took them ten years just to understand alpha-blended pngs. It's not the specs, it's the software company that shall remain nameless.
Nobody who has used CSS professionally (which you obviously haven't) would call it "elegant"
Hahaha, I have watched CSS grow up since I started using it professionally about 8 years ago. Get serious. CSS is fine. Yes, there are hacks and inconsistencies, but anyone who *has* done professional web development for any length of time knows through experience what to use and what to stay away from. CSS could also be better, but you have to understand that it has been held back only by the browser makers, and by "browser makers" I mean MSFT.
"Elegant" is subjective. I think CSS has an elegance to it, and you clearly don't. My experience has been that people who don't truly understand a technology are the quickest to dismiss it. Look at all the javascript haters in this discussion. Case in point.
I have used it a bit, mostly just for experiments. It seems really nice. Unlike many attempts to use Javascript on the server (looking at you ASP) it actually works just like javascript works in the browser. It even uses the javascript engine from Mozilla. Oh, and this means you can use you favorite javascript libraries (like prototype!) on the server too. Very cool concept.
The only concern I have is scalability, though. Seems nice for a small website, but I don't know about how well it'd hold up under a real load.
I see where you are coming from, but don't blame CSS on bad implementations. Once you learn proper CSS and enforce some standards (such as avoiding inline stuff and class bloat) then it is very elegant.
People who don't like CSS and decry it as ineffective haven't implemented CSS layouts. Oh sure, they use some CSS to lay out their pages. But they don't truly do CSS layout.
It's a bit impractical and...well, kinda touchy feely, but csszengarden.com is a good working example of a true CSS layout. And yes, this can be done in a way that's practical in a business environment.
Pretty much. In fact, all universes could have stars given that your parameters for what constitutes star is broad enough. In our universe, it's a ball of incandescant gas, in another universe it's a radioactive rock, in another universe it's a feces throwing monkey. Not much to see here. How clever.
Depends on who you are trying to make the app more usable for, which depends on what kind of app we are talking about.
If the app is a web site targeted to the general populace and has lots of new/casual users, then more important than mouse clicks is how easy it is to navigate to various tasks. Watch a few uninitiated users use your application. Give them tasks without telling them how to accomplish the task. See how they perform. I'll bet you'll find your problems that way.
If the app is for a set of users who use it all the time, then reducing mouse clicks and system response time (which has very little to do with the UI) will make the biggest impact.
Reduced mouse clicks, while a good indicator of usability, isn't the only thing to look at. For Office, it's a good indicator of usability (or maybe speed) because people who use office use the parts they use pretty regularly.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed.
Children need consistency. They'll push the boundaries, but it's especially then they need to know that you aren't budging. They should know what is going to happen to them when they do something. Instead, many parents let something go on unchecked and then explode with anger.
Parents should have certain offenses that get a spanking. For my children, its lying in order to get out of trouble. I always want the punishment for just owning up to a fault to be less than trying to lie and get out of trouble. In my mind, this reinforces the concept of personal accountability. If you mess up, own up to it. If you don't own up to it, then that's when things go really badly. After each time I spank them, I hug them and reassure them of my love. That's what usually makes them cry and feel bad for what they've done, and that's exactly what you want: remorse.
Not being perfect, I have spanked my children out of anger and will probably continue to do so at times. But I *always* regret that later. But as bad as that is, people always complement me on my well behaved children. I'd rather err on the side of giving them a bad spanking every once in a while (read: the exception and not the rule) than having children run amok.
I think you never see the proper use of spankings because that doesn't tend to happen in public. A parent has to be pretty angry to spank a child in public, and that's exactly when NOT to use a spanking. What you don't see are the good spankings administered in private.
What a huge discovery! Violent entertainment desensitizes children to violence and encourages violent behavior.
On the other hand, inattentive parents do just as much harm. I just want to walk around my childrens' school and tell parents "No, little Joshua isn't just *really* smart and acting out of . He needs a good old fashioned butt whooping." This society we live in is designed to create the kinds of problems we are now experiencing. Some parents use corporal punishment incorrectly, therefore all corporal punishment is bad. It's the classic blame the "technology" for the bad implementation. Only when parents start disciplining children, and by discipline I mean the whole enchilada of not just corporal punishment when needed but also teching children right from wrong, spending time with them, and not being afraid to be a parent (as opposed to trying to be your children's best friend, which really just means that people are *afraid* to tell their children "no" to certain things), will we see violent behavior in children curbed.
or squittering?
Well, I'll tell you one thing: IBM is a primary sponsor of the Dojo foundation. Not so for jQuery and prototype. If IBM isn't a good enough reason to stay the heck away, I don't know what is.
Not contesting your arguments here. Why are you so angry? Did your parents not love when you were a child or something? Jeez, it's a discussion and you start barking at people. You obviously have some issues, buddy.
Is Interpol even relevant? I mean, the only thing I ever know that even mentions Interpol are those stoopid warnings on DVDs. If Interpol has essentially become a copyright enforcement organization, then who even cares?
If you lay out a web page the way you construct an argument, I don't think it matters HOW you code it.
Sheesh! Mr. http://www.havenworks.com/ is this you?
well, if said browser adheres to standards and the site doesn't work, then you need better web developers.
I agree with Bogtha.
Do anything for long enough and it becomes part of your nature. This is precisely why people who trot out the old "I don't write standard markup because it takes too long! I have *real* work to do." excuse are just lazy hacks. Once you know how to write good markup, you just do it right the first time. Sure you make mistakes sometimes, but more often than not you can get it right the first time. As for validating, if you use a good validator (like Firefox's tidy validator) the act of validating your page is painless.
As for the point about not being able to crank out a three column layout perfectly the first time, well, a good css layout actually consists of very little html. It's all in the CSS. Besides, you DO use templating, right? You should only have to write your page's layout code once and just reference it from then on. The real complexity shouldn't be written time and again, it should be in your template. If you have your web site properly designed, you should just be able to write content and the little bit or markup to make that content look right.
I don't think OP said QA was not important. QA is very important.
But QA is a horrid job. QA is at the end of the cycle, so if someone misses a deadline it is QA is who really pays. Where I work, the poor QA people have been working weekends and long days for the last few months to test the piss poor code that a dev team put out late. I feel bad for them. The trouble with doing QA work is that it singularly qualifies a person for doing yet more QA work.
To the person who first asked the question: get out of QA ASAP. Your ticket out of QA may be to stay where you are and show some iniative and document some standards, do code reviews (instead of testing the final product), and so on. Trouble is, will the dev team respect the QA guy who wants to be a developer? They should, but the reality is that you might be regarded as a wannabe. On the other hand, get a new job as a developer. You might take a pay cut, but at least you have relevant experience in an environment where people have an open mind toward working with you. What you should do really depends on your co-workers.
"Everything I do moonlighting-wise is anti-geek. Much of it is hands on, without programming or thinking about technology or electronics. It keeps me fulfilled."
There are plenty of things to do with electronics that have little to do with technology (I mean obviously, all electronics are technology, but...) You could repair appliances. Find old appliances in the alley and fix them and sell them. You'd learn about electronics, learn to solder, and learn how things work. And you could probably find info online to help you figure stuff out.
I tinker with electronics, old tech stuff. I build guitar amps (tube amps, no transistors). For extra cash I fix other peoples' guitars and amps. That extra cash funds my hobby and lets me guild more amps. I think that's a pretty geeky hobby. I learn a lot about electronics and actually get to make stuff. It's sufficiently different from my day job (designing apps, writing code, etc) to be interesting.
All this assuming you are somewhat mechanically inclined.
Wouldn't leaving ReiserFS because it will supposedly become unsupported at some point in the future become self-fulfilling?
After all, who is going to fix it if nobody uses it? And like everything else, it will need to be fixed at some point.
If you find it to be a good filesystem, I say keep using it. If it is a good filesystem, someone will maintain it. If not, then it dies because it deserves to and not because of FUD.
"I don't care to speculate on people who don't like CSS, unless you actually have some data to back up your preconceptions? I'll ignore the veiled insults and try to elucidate the areas I feel CSS is weak on."
Come on, please. It wasn't a veiled insult. Fat client development is a different mindset. If someone is accustomed to one way of thinking, moving to another paradigm is sometimes difficult. It's not an insult to say that someone might be used to working a certain way and finds difficulty in working a totally different way. Didn't you caution me about making assumptions a few posts ago?
I think the rest of your post makes good points. And I think you also kind of proved my point about being used to a different mindset on laying things out. You think in terms of grids (or tables, or anything else with rows and columns.) That's ok IMO, it's a perfectly logical way of thinking. The difficulty that people have with designing for the web is the preference for a grid type layout prevents them from seeing layout as being fluid.
To really grok CSS, you have to stop thinking in terms of grids and start thinking in terms of flowing layouts. Let the browser place things, you just tell it sort of which order to place things in and how to place them with relation to one another. Yes, this is a bit of an oversimplification, but is the basic idea to keep in mind.
The design pseudocode you wrote above wouldn't work in a browser, or at least wouldn't be practical. What size is the browser window? You don't know. And do you really want your menu to shrink down past a certain point?
Some designs are hard to implement in CSS. Most aren't. The whole "holy grail" multi column layout thing *is* lame. It's not that hard. Just use some negative margins, floats, and one IE min-width hack and you're done.
I think that many, not all, people who don't like CSS are more used to developing fat client apps. There's nothing wrong with that. Designing for the web is much different, you first have to grok the concept of fluid layouts. If you came from an environment of "put this widget at x and y" then, yes, this is harder.
You could justifiably say that you shouldn't have to work so hard to design a layout. Fair enough, laying out some designs requires some clever CSS footwork. But that's where experience comes in.
Maybe you've used CSS quite extensively. In my past experience (and I have been a professional web developer for many years now) when people complain about CSS being no good, it's only because they don't know how to do what they want to do. Maybe that's not you, I dunno.
Oh, and while I see your point about how CSS is too kludgy, don't misplace the blame on the CSS spec. There is really only one browser anymore that doesn't adhere reasonably well to the spec. And that company also doesn't adhere to HTML specs, or many others. It took them ten years just to understand alpha-blended pngs. It's not the specs, it's the software company that shall remain nameless.
Hahaha, I have watched CSS grow up since I started using it professionally about 8 years ago. Get serious. CSS is fine. Yes, there are hacks and inconsistencies, but anyone who *has* done professional web development for any length of time knows through experience what to use and what to stay away from. CSS could also be better, but you have to understand that it has been held back only by the browser makers, and by "browser makers" I mean MSFT.
"Elegant" is subjective. I think CSS has an elegance to it, and you clearly don't. My experience has been that people who don't truly understand a technology are the quickest to dismiss it. Look at all the javascript haters in this discussion. Case in point.
Ok, so what do *you* prefer?
Java? Don't even get me started on Java...
Have you used Jaxer?
I have used it a bit, mostly just for experiments. It seems really nice. Unlike many attempts to use Javascript on the server (looking at you ASP) it actually works just like javascript works in the browser. It even uses the javascript engine from Mozilla. Oh, and this means you can use you favorite javascript libraries (like prototype!) on the server too. Very cool concept.
The only concern I have is scalability, though. Seems nice for a small website, but I don't know about how well it'd hold up under a real load.
I see where you are coming from, but don't blame CSS on bad implementations. Once you learn proper CSS and enforce some standards (such as avoiding inline stuff and class bloat) then it is very elegant.
People who don't like CSS and decry it as ineffective haven't implemented CSS layouts. Oh sure, they use some CSS to lay out their pages. But they don't truly do CSS layout.
It's a bit impractical and...well, kinda touchy feely, but csszengarden.com is a good working example of a true CSS layout. And yes, this can be done in a way that's practical in a business environment.
"As I understand it, accasablity on the web is achieved through both the page and the browser." [sic]
Then you obviously don't understand it.
"Also, I can read this all just fine"
Typical unlearned wannabe web designer response. 'Well, I can can use it! That means everyone else can too!'
On second thought, are you even serious?
Yes, exactly.
Um, invite people you know? And if they steal from you, get better friends.
Pretty much. In fact, all universes could have stars given that your parameters for what constitutes star is broad enough. In our universe, it's a ball of incandescant gas, in another universe it's a radioactive rock, in another universe it's a feces throwing monkey. Not much to see here. How clever.
This isn't science, it's philosophy.
haha, if that is true, that is SO sad!
I am starting a pet store, and I call it the Java pet store!
Yes, these were chemists. Chemists aren't exactly dogmatic. They are real scientists. It's not like they're biologists...ick
Depends on who you are trying to make the app more usable for, which depends on what kind of app we are talking about.
If the app is a web site targeted to the general populace and has lots of new/casual users, then more important than mouse clicks is how easy it is to navigate to various tasks. Watch a few uninitiated users use your application. Give them tasks without telling them how to accomplish the task. See how they perform. I'll bet you'll find your problems that way.
If the app is for a set of users who use it all the time, then reducing mouse clicks and system response time (which has very little to do with the UI) will make the biggest impact.
Reduced mouse clicks, while a good indicator of usability, isn't the only thing to look at. For Office, it's a good indicator of usability (or maybe speed) because people who use office use the parts they use pretty regularly.
So Portugal is the new Poland?