When I go to a Safeway or Wegman's and see every tenth person over 300 pounds and pushing a shopping cart loaded with milk, cheeses, beef, etc. it makes me wince when I hear this "no bad foods" kind of thinking.
No. These folks are more likely OD'ing on simple carbs late in the day or at night. Plus, they probably have to break out mutliplication tables to figure out how many calories/serving sizes their shoveling down their craws.
Everybody else has a month but me. Until now.
I declare July to be "White American Man History" month.
We will commemorate the accomplishments of white American men:
Democracy, railroads, automobiles, airplanes,
television, highways, and the Internet.
And that's just infrastructure. Let's not forget:
Socket wrenches, Dirty Harry, the fast break,
pizza delivery, Harley-Davidsons, and scoreboards.
Contrary to popular belief and NBC Dateline stories,
not all white American males wear pinstriped suits
and neckties and brainstorm ways to ass fuck the
tired, poor, and huddled masses.
No, there are white American men among us making it
for themselves and others,
and they enjoy the ride to boot.
So July 1, crack open a cold beer,
put some burgers and dogs on the grill,
find a ball game on TV,
and revel in all that white American men
have achieved.
The party is getting started and I have sparklers to spare.
Just don't ask me to dance.
Odd. You support an organization that conscribes lawyers to conduct iconoclasm of religion, an institution or civil right expressly protected by the Constitution. What is your fax number?
It sounds like you do not value your undergraduate education. So I ask, what good is grad school to you? IMHO, you're better off staying in the trenches and when opportunities present themselves, show initiative by getting the job done.
Processes, concepts, best practices: these are the vices of ignorant PHBs. Practice makes the man including the software engineer. I've been doing my thing for about three and a half years now, and I'm a much more proficient programmer than I was when I landed my first job. School did nothing but forestall this progress for four and a half years. But by no means do I think I've reached coder valhalla. From where I'm typing, I see many areas for self-improvement, mostly my ability to persuade my co-workers why I am right.;)
In fact, I think you're better off taking communications classes, something in the realm of interpersonal skills. All hacks do. But to surrender to a cirriculum of consulting-babble is poppycock. I can only hope you are miserable with "the way things work" at your present employer and want to break the mold. That's good; engineers should be making engineering decisions.
If I lucky to be hiring, I'd rather have a coder with five plus years experience (with or without a degree) than a guy with three years experience coming of a year or two sabbatical for his masters. It takes years of practice to know what works and what doesn't. Not tens of thousands of dollars and countless hours in front of a whiteboard.
I work in state government and agree with you 100%. If it weren't next to impossible to secure employment elsewhere in the industry, I would have been gone two years ago. Why am I still here? I don't want to work 60 hour weeks on a regular basis with the persistent threat of getting sacked so a company officer can keep his vacation home.
I hypothesize that if you really want to be a star, especially in the software development biz, you should chuck your resume, pour your efforts into a project (open source anyone?), and become an authority for that niche. Stroustrop? C++. Torvalds? Linux. Wall? Perl. See where I'm going with this?
IT resumes are worth more as shit squares than they are for distinguishing talented individuals. Buzzwords have rendered them absolutely useless, because anybody and everybody splatters everything inside the margins with them. An IT staffer might as well sort IT resumes by weight or coloration than by reading them. If you reduce yourself to your resume, you're one of hundreds if not thousands of applicants for most jobs. Disco will be wildly popular again before you get an interview. If you get an interview, pangea will occur again before you get a callback. If you get a callback, species will evolve before someone will make a serious offer to you.
Another decent alternative I've come across to resumes, are well-written letters to companies stating what you believe they can accomplish and how you can help them achieve to that end if they give you gainful employment. You show initiative and interest in the company all in one shot.
I've been working in state government the last three years as a web programmer + whatever else needs to be done. Stability is a plus. We also have a sizeable budget for hardware, software, and support contracts.
Unfortuntately, we have a sizeable budget for hardware, software, and support contracts. What does that mean? The prevailing philosophy is to buy something off the shelf rather than developing it in house. Even for simple stuff like messaging systems, content management systems, etc. As a result, I have to look elsewhere during my spare time in order to learn new things (e.g. XML and Java to name a few). Like any other programmer, if I'm not learning new things, I'm not worth much.
This is great if your on the management side of the equation. CYA can't get any easier. Something doesn't work? Fall back on a fat support contract or buy software and hardware.
This sucks if you're a hack with a curious itch looking to take your game to the next level. Your proposals are going to be trumped by your department's need to "spend the budget or risk losing it come the fiscal new year."
My suggestion: If you're young and excited about learning new things and doing more with less, run don't walk from a gig with the government. If you've lost a step as a hack or are management material, get on board, ride it for twenty years, retire to Guadalajara, and sip tequila sunrises until your liver explodes.
I agree that you can distinguish a good Perl hack from a not so good Perl hack, but I don't think it's limited to newbies. I've seen folks who've used Perl for 3+ years continue to write unreadable page noise. They get by on experience, but the next guy who has to maintain their code would do best to sack the current code and start from scratch.
A combination of rote learning and learning by applications works best IMHO. I think the younger mind, I'm thinking sixth grade and below, is more supple and accepting to rote exercises. Kids should know reading, writing, and arithmetic by the sixth grade. Simple algebra. Construct well-formed sentences. Read a paragraph fluently aloud.
After the sixth grade, however, I think social interactivity simply takes over. Kids typically begin to show interest in the opposite sex around this time. They begin to struggle with deeper issues related to maturing physically, mentally, spiritually. They aren't going to receive theorems and rules for comma usage like they would have before. For me, everything between the seventh and twelveth grades was circumstantial education where some topical introductions to trade skills or apprenticeships could have been beneficial.
It is for this very reason that I thank Cliff Hillegas, creator of Cliff's Notes for helping me buy needed time away from the curriculum. I was asked to read Bronte's Wuthering Heights and James' The American at the same time I was discovering my penis. And English was my favorite subject! Seriously. I graduated from college with a degree in English. How was I supposed to maintain an interest in sappy literature and the Pythagorean theorem when girls were walking around with tits all of the sudden?!
No, there's simply a point when formulae and dipthongs fade into the background and an interest in people pegs our attention. Even if you hate people, people are the fascination, and that's where creative, enlightened interests should be focused. We're doing ourselves a disservice locking down kids in classrooms when they should be out engaging the public and discovering what it's going to take to make it in a field or fields of interest.
And FYI, I recently bought a copy of James' The American, gave it an earnest read, and I liked it. I have several "important" works of literature on my shelves now, and I've rekindled my interest in geometry at least since I've started drawing for fun. Time well spent.
Re:Quick n' Dirty Method
on
Perl & LWP
·
· Score: 2
That may be dirty, but it isn't quick. Fashioning regular expressions for this kind of work has to be one of the greater time pits for the average programmer.
By their claim, Microsoft would be able to file suit against Microtek, Micron, Micromedia, Microware,... I can see where there is an argument against the reptilian logo, but to parse letters in a non-profit project's title goes too far.
I'm twenty-nine and have been contributing to my 401(k) for about three years now. Same amount per paycheck, no wavering. I am absolutely *delighted* that the markets have receded the last two years, because it means there is that much more room for my investments to grow in the coming years. I just hope the markets don't take a bath just before I do the retirement thing.
It goes into that luxury box in the shiny new taxpayer-funded stadium.
It goes into twenty to fifty $250 rounds of golf at Hilton Head Golf Club under the guise of a "management retreat."
It goes into the corporate learjet that whisks some of these officers away to the above two destinations.
It goes into the CEO's million dollar annual pension whether he retires a hero or gets the pink slip for delivering his company to chapter 11.
It trickles...straight up.
The tragedy isn't that this stuff happens. It is part of the human condition. Admit it. Most of us would do the same if we were in these fuckers shoes. The real tragedy is that we won't challenge this behavior until it is too late to make meaningful amends. Think Charles Dickens.
Cruise control is obsolete. There isn't a five mile stretch of pavement east of the Mississippi or along the West coast that allows a driver to employ his c/c during any daylight hours or early night time.
A cruise control package on a car is like that range of channels on your cable dial that is dedicated to public access. Useless but there. You might as well drive with your hazard lights, rear window defogger, and seat warmers on full time where you otherwise would use c/c.
Now, if we could get the engineers in Detroit to install sharp gouging implements in hub caps, we could make good time!
Fuck off & stay fucked off. Without a proper introductions, your claim on my stupidity wins you a flamewar and raises doubts over your own intelligence.
I challenged the parent poster's concerns about speed. He said (and I'll restate it here for you): It must be easy and it must be fast. Needless trips to the server break that. With a mod_perl enabled web server, for example, a skilled developer can create robust, feature-rich applications that are happily served under intense loads.
You can verify forms via JS, or you can verify your form input at the server. Speed to process the request being inconsequential, why not do it closer to your application's code and therefore achieve a better separation of application code and layout HTML? Besides, you should be checking your form input for taint, formatting, etc.
Perhaps you misread my original post, and I should give you the benefit of the doubt. If you study cryptography, you should have some requisite intelligence to contribute to the human race. Perhaps just your social skills are lagging behind. As a thirty-year old with a job, here's a few things I have learned since I was twenty that may be of help to you:
1) You will not be of use to anyone until you are thirty. Until you learn humility, you won't earn shit and nobody, I mean nobody, will take you seriously.
2) Criticism is good. Criticism incites improvement. Criticism instills humility. However, labelling others without knowing them based on your misconceptions will inhibit the most important type of criticism: self-criticism. You're doing yourself a serious disfavor by sniping others.
3) Take nothing personally except a punch to your face. I know life can seem underwhelming at times, but it's the only one you have. If things aren't working out like you hope for, refresh yourself. Toss off in the shower. Drink a six-pack on a weeknight. Go to the driving range. Go for cheesecake. Hell you're Canadian; hit the ice and check somebody.
4) When searching for a job, especially one related to cryptography, don't call another cryptographer stupid. Think about this one, or don't. It's your job search.
I'm not talking pop-up windows, put help boxes that can show up in screen next to the item the user is on, dynamic tree menus that don't require Java, forms that hide fields you don't need to fill out, tabbed forms that don't require a trip to the server to change tabs.
Able programmers/designers can produce useful web apps without the need for DHTML via JavaScript. By eliminating JavaScript from your development, you will 1) take a giant step forward for browser compatibility with _all_ of your users, 2) significantly reduce your development time by eliminating browser-specific code, and 3) eliminate one more security vulnerability that can sabatoge your users' work on your site.
Don't underestimate or shy from server-side solutions. A mod_perl enabled Apache server, or a JSP/Servlet solution can deliver quite nicely. I hope you'll reconsider your position on JavaScript.
Forget KVM switches, VNC, RDP, or anything else that takes you away from a shell prompt. OpenSSH is your friend. Your keyboard. Your display. Your $ prompt. Available at web sites while source code lasts.
I agree. And I didn't mean to sing such high praises for Costner or The Postman movie really. The novel is better. No doubt about it. I just like the story's message.
As for Costner, his best movie was Fandango (see it if you haven't). Bull Durham was good. Dances With Wolves was good. Everything else drops off quickly.
Tax payer dollars would be paying for it in the end.
So that would come to what, $5000 per person per year?
Seriously, you make some good points though. I already handle my student loan online. Very nice. But it doesn't require e-mail. E-mail is at its best when 1) corresponding with family & close friends across large distances, 2) open source software mailing lists, & 3) requesting basic things from co-workers without having to crash their office/cubicle. Anything else is waste.
This is actually one of Costner's better movies. Yeah, I know, he's put forth some real stinkers, but The Postman was thought provoking despite being too long. The point that the post office and the postman help people communicate with each other & thus bring us together is not something that comes out of Hollywood often.
Slashdot Mirror
Add forty-five minutes to an hour of quality cardio exercise, and you will return to your proper weight. Of this there is no doubt.
No. These folks are more likely OD'ing on simple carbs late in the day or at night. Plus, they probably have to break out mutliplication tables to figure out how many calories/serving sizes their shoveling down their craws.
Everybody else has a month but me. Until now.
I declare July to be "White American Man History" month.
We will commemorate the accomplishments of white American men:
Democracy, railroads, automobiles, airplanes,
television, highways, and the Internet.
And that's just infrastructure. Let's not forget:
Socket wrenches, Dirty Harry, the fast break,
pizza delivery, Harley-Davidsons, and scoreboards.
Contrary to popular belief and NBC Dateline stories,
not all white American males wear pinstriped suits
and neckties and brainstorm ways to ass fuck the
tired, poor, and huddled masses.
No, there are white American men among us making it
for themselves and others,
and they enjoy the ride to boot.
So July 1, crack open a cold beer,
put some burgers and dogs on the grill,
find a ball game on TV,
and revel in all that white American men have achieved.
The party is getting started and I have sparklers to spare.
Just don't ask me to dance.
Odd. You support an organization that conscribes lawyers to conduct iconoclasm of religion, an institution or civil right expressly protected by the Constitution. What is your fax number?
Processes, concepts, best practices: these are the vices of ignorant PHBs. Practice makes the man including the software engineer. I've been doing my thing for about three and a half years now, and I'm a much more proficient programmer than I was when I landed my first job. School did nothing but forestall this progress for four and a half years. But by no means do I think I've reached coder valhalla. From where I'm typing, I see many areas for self-improvement, mostly my ability to persuade my co-workers why I am right. ;)
In fact, I think you're better off taking communications classes, something in the realm of interpersonal skills. All hacks do. But to surrender to a cirriculum of consulting-babble is poppycock. I can only hope you are miserable with "the way things work" at your present employer and want to break the mold. That's good; engineers should be making engineering decisions.
If I lucky to be hiring, I'd rather have a coder with five plus years experience (with or without a degree) than a guy with three years experience coming of a year or two sabbatical for his masters. It takes years of practice to know what works and what doesn't. Not tens of thousands of dollars and countless hours in front of a whiteboard.
Precisely. Like tossing some puppies into your raucous audience and refusing to start the show until the puppies are dismembered.
I work in state government and agree with you 100%. If it weren't next to impossible to secure employment elsewhere in the industry, I would have been gone two years ago. Why am I still here? I don't want to work 60 hour weeks on a regular basis with the persistent threat of getting sacked so a company officer can keep his vacation home.
IT resumes are worth more as shit squares than they are for distinguishing talented individuals. Buzzwords have rendered them absolutely useless, because anybody and everybody splatters everything inside the margins with them. An IT staffer might as well sort IT resumes by weight or coloration than by reading them. If you reduce yourself to your resume, you're one of hundreds if not thousands of applicants for most jobs. Disco will be wildly popular again before you get an interview. If you get an interview, pangea will occur again before you get a callback. If you get a callback, species will evolve before someone will make a serious offer to you.
Another decent alternative I've come across to resumes, are well-written letters to companies stating what you believe they can accomplish and how you can help them achieve to that end if they give you gainful employment. You show initiative and interest in the company all in one shot.
Unfortuntately, we have a sizeable budget for hardware, software, and support contracts. What does that mean? The prevailing philosophy is to buy something off the shelf rather than developing it in house. Even for simple stuff like messaging systems, content management systems, etc. As a result, I have to look elsewhere during my spare time in order to learn new things (e.g. XML and Java to name a few). Like any other programmer, if I'm not learning new things, I'm not worth much.
This is great if your on the management side of the equation. CYA can't get any easier. Something doesn't work? Fall back on a fat support contract or buy software and hardware.
This sucks if you're a hack with a curious itch looking to take your game to the next level. Your proposals are going to be trumped by your department's need to "spend the budget or risk losing it come the fiscal new year."
My suggestion: If you're young and excited about learning new things and doing more with less, run don't walk from a gig with the government. If you've lost a step as a hack or are management material, get on board, ride it for twenty years, retire to Guadalajara, and sip tequila sunrises until your liver explodes.
Ain't no lie, bye, bye bye...
I agree that you can distinguish a good Perl hack from a not so good Perl hack, but I don't think it's limited to newbies. I've seen folks who've used Perl for 3+ years continue to write unreadable page noise. They get by on experience, but the next guy who has to maintain their code would do best to sack the current code and start from scratch.
After the sixth grade, however, I think social interactivity simply takes over. Kids typically begin to show interest in the opposite sex around this time. They begin to struggle with deeper issues related to maturing physically, mentally, spiritually. They aren't going to receive theorems and rules for comma usage like they would have before. For me, everything between the seventh and twelveth grades was circumstantial education where some topical introductions to trade skills or apprenticeships could have been beneficial.
It is for this very reason that I thank Cliff Hillegas, creator of Cliff's Notes for helping me buy needed time away from the curriculum. I was asked to read Bronte's Wuthering Heights and James' The American at the same time I was discovering my penis. And English was my favorite subject! Seriously. I graduated from college with a degree in English. How was I supposed to maintain an interest in sappy literature and the Pythagorean theorem when girls were walking around with tits all of the sudden?!
No, there's simply a point when formulae and dipthongs fade into the background and an interest in people pegs our attention. Even if you hate people, people are the fascination, and that's where creative, enlightened interests should be focused. We're doing ourselves a disservice locking down kids in classrooms when they should be out engaging the public and discovering what it's going to take to make it in a field or fields of interest.
And FYI, I recently bought a copy of James' The American, gave it an earnest read, and I liked it. I have several "important" works of literature on my shelves now, and I've rekindled my interest in geometry at least since I've started drawing for fun. Time well spent.
That may be dirty, but it isn't quick. Fashioning regular expressions for this kind of work has to be one of the greater time pits for the average programmer.
The best quote related to this is: "If you can afford to advertise, you don't need to." I forgot who wrote this or where I saw it.
By their claim, Microsoft would be able to file suit against Microtek, Micron, Micromedia, Microware, ... I can see where there is an argument against the reptilian logo, but to parse letters in a non-profit project's title goes too far.
I'm twenty-nine and have been contributing to my 401(k) for about three years now. Same amount per paycheck, no wavering. I am absolutely *delighted* that the markets have receded the last two years, because it means there is that much more room for my investments to grow in the coming years. I just hope the markets don't take a bath just before I do the retirement thing.
It goes into twenty to fifty $250 rounds of golf at Hilton Head Golf Club under the guise of a "management retreat."
It goes into the corporate learjet that whisks some of these officers away to the above two destinations.
It goes into the CEO's million dollar annual pension whether he retires a hero or gets the pink slip for delivering his company to chapter 11.
It trickles...straight up.
The tragedy isn't that this stuff happens. It is part of the human condition. Admit it. Most of us would do the same if we were in these fuckers shoes. The real tragedy is that we won't challenge this behavior until it is too late to make meaningful amends. Think Charles Dickens.
A cruise control package on a car is like that range of channels on your cable dial that is dedicated to public access. Useless but there. You might as well drive with your hazard lights, rear window defogger, and seat warmers on full time where you otherwise would use c/c.
Now, if we could get the engineers in Detroit to install sharp gouging implements in hub caps, we could make good time!
I challenged the parent poster's concerns about speed. He said (and I'll restate it here for you): It must be easy and it must be fast. Needless trips to the server break that. With a mod_perl enabled web server, for example, a skilled developer can create robust, feature-rich applications that are happily served under intense loads.
You can verify forms via JS, or you can verify your form input at the server. Speed to process the request being inconsequential, why not do it closer to your application's code and therefore achieve a better separation of application code and layout HTML? Besides, you should be checking your form input for taint, formatting, etc.
Perhaps you misread my original post, and I should give you the benefit of the doubt. If you study cryptography, you should have some requisite intelligence to contribute to the human race. Perhaps just your social skills are lagging behind. As a thirty-year old with a job, here's a few things I have learned since I was twenty that may be of help to you:
1) You will not be of use to anyone until you are thirty. Until you learn humility, you won't earn shit and nobody, I mean nobody, will take you seriously.
2) Criticism is good. Criticism incites improvement. Criticism instills humility. However, labelling others without knowing them based on your misconceptions will inhibit the most important type of criticism: self-criticism. You're doing yourself a serious disfavor by sniping others.
3) Take nothing personally except a punch to your face. I know life can seem underwhelming at times, but it's the only one you have. If things aren't working out like you hope for, refresh yourself. Toss off in the shower. Drink a six-pack on a weeknight. Go to the driving range. Go for cheesecake. Hell you're Canadian; hit the ice and check somebody.
4) When searching for a job, especially one related to cryptography, don't call another cryptographer stupid. Think about this one, or don't. It's your job search.
Best of luck.
Able programmers/designers can produce useful web apps without the need for DHTML via JavaScript. By eliminating JavaScript from your development, you will 1) take a giant step forward for browser compatibility with _all_ of your users, 2) significantly reduce your development time by eliminating browser-specific code, and 3) eliminate one more security vulnerability that can sabatoge your users' work on your site.
Don't underestimate or shy from server-side solutions. A mod_perl enabled Apache server, or a JSP/Servlet solution can deliver quite nicely. I hope you'll reconsider your position on JavaScript.
Forget KVM switches, VNC, RDP, or anything else that takes you away from a shell prompt. OpenSSH is your friend. Your keyboard. Your display. Your $ prompt. Available at web sites while source code lasts.
As for Costner, his best movie was Fandango (see it if you haven't). Bull Durham was good. Dances With Wolves was good. Everything else drops off quickly.
The Anonymous Coward responsible for sacking this poster has been sacked.
So that would come to what, $5000 per person per year?
Seriously, you make some good points though. I already handle my student loan online. Very nice. But it doesn't require e-mail. E-mail is at its best when 1) corresponding with family & close friends across large distances, 2) open source software mailing lists, & 3) requesting basic things from co-workers without having to crash their office/cubicle. Anything else is waste.
This is actually one of Costner's better movies. Yeah, I know, he's put forth some real stinkers, but The Postman was thought provoking despite being too long. The point that the post office and the postman help people communicate with each other & thus bring us together is not something that comes out of Hollywood often.