His book on Dependency Injection is one of the few recent computer books I had to go through carefully, and with notepad and highlighter in hand. His work on Google Guice is really notable. This ain't just some Microsoft-bound disgruntled guy.
But it's not necessarily surprising. I'm not very familiar with it, but Google's Wave was one of those allegedly killer technologies that just didn't get the corporate support it needed to reach its potential as a disruptive technology. Still, there's a possible tone of sour grapes here. Hard to know.
I'll just say this: I would love to have the privilege to work with someone of his caliber.
In my experience (which is as biased as everyone else here giving advice) your Fortran and COBOL are worthless, if not a little dangerous because the functional programming paradigm runs counter to object oriented programming, Model-View-Controller design patterns, etc. The assembly experience is, on the other hand, valuable because so few of these kids coming into the job market really understand the difference between a stack and a heap, understand what a pointer really is, etc.
In other words, the degree by which your lower-level language experience can give you an inherently deeper understanding of what's going on in higher-level languages may be your saving grace.
If I were to offer a programming language of choice for you, it would actually be Objective-C. (Thus, I would tell you to target iOS for learning your first platform.) It is the simplest superset of C you can find, and it has strong origins to the 1980's, and thus may seem the most familiar/comfortable to you. Given your description of your experience and background, you might be well suited to follow the (free) Stanford iPhone/iPod Touch development course that's available from the "iTunes U" section of the Apple iTunes Music Store. That's an undergrad level course aimed at developing Objective-C and getting started in that environment. And it's FREE.
One last piece of advice to get your head around: make it your mission to write GOOD, ELEGANT code and not prolific code. If I were interviewing you for a job, hearing about hundreds-of-thousands of lines of code would give me the most hesitation. Less is more, and I would want a person who spent 80% of his time thinking about how he was going to solve a problem and 20% of the time doing the implementation. My own experience working with Fortran programmers (in the 90's) was that they rarely understood this, and often wrote GIGO.
No, this wouldn't be the game of Monopoly, but it would be a familiar Wall Street game of corporate take-over... and a stupid one at that.
After the Time Warner / AOL fiasco has resolved into a case of "what were they thinking!?!" and BEA smartly tells Oracle to stuff it, let's look at the idea of Apple taking over Adobe.
First of all, Apple is a company that CEO Steve Jobs has somehow managed to steer into remarkable growth. Ten years ago they merged and integrated with NeXT. Probably not all that hard since both were Steve's babies and both were geographically located in the same place and both were relatively small in terms of staff size. I'm sure the corporate culture transformation had its bumps, but not too bad.
Just imagine merging Apple and Adobe, which I believe is housed in Seattle. Now we're talking about a two-campus company, rewriting the corporate management style-guide, firing sales staff and overlapping departments, yada yada yada. That would be mess #1.
Then think about the move of the Adobe code to Apple technology standards. Only an idiot would think Photoshop needs to be re-written as a Cocoa app. Do you really think we would get a better version of Creative Suite 4 next technology cycle? The new product development plans would evolve into mess #2.
Apple does what it does well: they REALLY innovate and focus on User Interface evolution. They see software market opportunities (Final Cut Pro, iLife, Aperture, etc.) and they expand their product line slowly and carefully. They are for the computer industry what Southwest Airlines has been for the Airline Industry for the past 30 years. If they bought Adobe (and other vulnerable software companies) "just because" without any strategy or focus they would become as irrelevant as Sony or Microsoft are becoming.
Now what would be nice would be seeing them slowly and steadily applying their cash into the hiring and development of the best & brightest of computer programming (and hardware engineering and design) talent. Don't buy Adobe and get stuck with some brilliant and some mediocre programmers; poach the top talent away from Adobe with top paychecks. That's my Good Idea #1.
I have one more Good Idea #2: create an incubation machine that finds programming talent and innovative spirit and spins off small software companies that can write incredible native-Apple killer apps. Apple has the corporate strategy, the design methodology, and the technology. They also exist in only one geographic location in the country. (And I, a developer in New York City, would kill for an opportunity to do Apple-platform development without moving to CA.) And I will agree that there are many apps and utilities that are needed--especially in the business/corporate IT niche--that exceed what the small Shareware developers can manage. If Apple could spin-off smaller Apple subsidiaries that had a stronger link to "the mothership", and if Apple invested some of its cash reserves into ongoing but cash-strapped projects (Gimp and OpenOffice are real, albeit imperfect, examples) we might get somewhere.
The really interesting challenge will be if Apple can grow in size while avoiding the bureaucratic morass that large corporations so often become. We shall see what the future holds...
It's strange. Once upon a time I had great respect for this journalist. That's back around the mid- to late-80's when PC's had new things going on with them, and when his books on low-level programming (DOS interrupts, etc.) were rarely informative and succinct that he'd earned some actual respect in my world.
Now days this guy seems to f---ing out of it; he's a pundit in the lowest sense of the term. Come on: what does "Web 2.0" mean these days? I'm actually using, on a daily basis, a number of web sites and technologies that are based on these new-and-coming technologies like social programming and AJAX and whatnot, and the sites that succeed are actually ground-breaking (not in the hyperbolic sense, but in the I'm-finding-myself-using-them-daily-and-changing-m y-own-web-usage-ways) but he doesn't seem to have any connection to that.
Dvorak has become a pundit in the most derogatory sense of the word. It almost makes me embarrassed to have bought (and coveted) whichever book I'd made dog-eared back around 1986. How far the mighty have fallen!
Your description of the Carbon API is partially accurate but in many ways wrong. Carbon WAS created as the migration path for old OS 9 apps (which it did brilliantly) but as the only C++ programming option, it is the de facto standard for anyone who is developing and maintaining ANY cross-platform app, whether it be a Windows/Mac app or Linux/Mac (as is OpenOffice). Adobe uses Carbon for its CS3 suite. Microsoft uses Carbon for Office. Game developers (EA) use Carbon.
And Carbon is updated on a regular basis to reflect new OS features. True, cool APIs like "Core Data" and (I think) Core Animation are Cocoa-only, but some of the newer libraries and technologies coming in Leopard have Carbon interfaces as well. Myself, I would use Cocoa when writing an app but I'd be writing Mac-only applications. If I did want to develop something that was cross-platform, I would probably use Carbon as well.
As you said, it's always slow before Macworld or WWDC, and this last MacWorld was totally lame for actual Mac owners since it was only about the damn phone and tv. No Leopard, no replacement for the long-absent iSights, no Blu-Ray DVD. The actual "Macintosh" is far more stagnant than I ever remember seeing it in the last five years.
Forgive my overall ignorance--I'm a Mac and Linux and Java person, although I've written a bit of VB in a job years ago--but does anyone know if moving to VB.Net allows a phased-in approach to introducing at least some C# programming down the road?
Do the.Net languages allow a decent functional "Mix 'n Match" capability? If so, I'd make sure the VB rewrite was in VB.Net (or are there VB.Net idiosyncrasies that would justify sticking with the old VB6?) and then I'd learn C# really well. At some point in the project some component might fall under the "this will really suck under VB, and we can tackle it much better by writing this piece in C#" which will let you get a toe-hold on the idea of using a better language.
That's the way I helped a Fortune 500 company start adopting Linux back in 1998... the friendly and subversive way!
As for the tasks VB are not suited for (again, I only know VB6, not VB.Net) the biggest glaring omission in my experience was the lack of decent Regular Expressions, or Hash Tables / "Dictionaries"--unless you link to the VBScript/IE6 library like everyone used to. On the other hand, there are IMOHO problems with languages like Perl that make them bad for a number of solutions, but that hasn't stopped nutty fanatics from treating them like "golden hammers".
While I'm writing disclaimers, there are a number of commercial applications out there written entirely in VB. In all cases I've observed, they "evolved" out of a simple and useful app and fell into being examples of the most counter-intuitive user interfaces and over all "kludginess".
I just finished a 2-year contract where I was located in Los Angeles, another guy was in Colorado, and the rest of the team was in London. I have two observations:
1: When in this geographical configuration (I know some L.A.-based bankers whose days start at 5am for the same reasons.) it's just a matter of fact that you are going to have to become more of a morning person. Starting the work day at 9am sounds unrealistic. (Now if truly there's a large contingent of co-workers in Asia, I'll buy that exception. But I also know a lot of programmers who "aren't morning people" where that is really the issue at stake.)
2: The communications problems I encountered were, in my opinion, more an issue of basic communications and team management than shifted time-zones. I've found that often certain developers just don't communicate well with certain other people. They fall into bad habits of avoidance that can be disguised as (or blamed on) a problem of the long distances. Whenever we got more committed to good team management practices--dedication to regular phone conferences and specific times every couple days, better use of Bugzilla to resolve all "issues" that needed to be coordinated, etc.--the communications problems went away.
As much as people see the inefficiencies of being spread across multiple time zones, especially during crunch periods, it's worth noting that with well-coordinated efforts a certain programming problem can literally be worked-on 24-hours-a-day with one person sleeping while another is working. But it takes a real dedication to best communication (and project management) practices.
I haven't actually developed with WebObjects; my web-programming background has been either LAMP or JSP/J2EE, but I've noticed that many of the worst, most non-responsive web-pages are designed with WebObjects. (You can tell by the URLs.) I don't know if that means that people programming with WebObjects have on average less training and architectural design experience, or if it's ultimately a more broken architecture, but personally it would take a lot for me to ever consider it as an architectural choice.
This Slashdot posting is actually misleading. The intent of the legislation is to CREATE obstacles that don't currently exist to PREVENT communities from creating any sort of broadband services by creating a number of extra citizen-approval hoops to jump through. This showed up in Slashdot about a month ago as a news item of many states simultaneously proposing legislation to create these road blocks.
By wording this now in newspaper articles as "cities will now be able to offer Wifi if they first do X, Y, and Z" makes the bill sound as though it's going to help roll-out cool public services, when in fact the cities don't presently need to do the X, Y or Z.
And really, this has not as much to do with allowing some place like Boulder to get cool public WiFi but rather to prevent small rural areas from creating their own standard broadband offering (probably like broadband over power lines or WiMax) if the existing telcos and cable companies leave them behind.
I was actually trying to help a small mountain community in Colorado figure out how to get broadband because there were NO options. The telco said it would be too expensive (and the existing copper in the area sucked too much for DSL). This legislation is intended to make sure that little communities never get broadband service until the existing monopolistic communications corporations decide to do it themselves.
I can't say I get a lot of respect for being a Computer Ace. It certainly hasn't gotten me any dates recently. On the other hand family, friends, distant friends, ex-bosses, neighbors and friends of neighbors have no qualms about assuming I'm their free I.T. service. Respect? I don' t know. Co-dependence? Yeesh!
Looks like they'll be dropping Macintosh support completely. (Caveat: looks like there might be 3rd party support, but a friend of mine told me MarkSpace leaves something to be desired.)
Something I've waited for years and it never come--maybe someone can explain why: client-side SSL.
To my understanding, you would place a client-authenticating certificate in you web browser program, and during the SSL negotiation that certificate would be used for authentication.
The only two problems were (again, to my limited understanding) first that you had to go through the effort of installing the certificate on every browser you used, and second, the security could be broken if someone had access to your account. (Of course, account login security and browser "first-time-on-launch" passwords helped protect against that.)
1. We give source code for Office 2003 to more than 30 world governments. 2. They show their brightest computer programmers this code. 3. Trying to comprehend the source (written in typical Microsoft Quality) the programmers' heads implode, causing death within 2 hours. 4. With all the programming talent taken care of, we get all the world governments to outsource their internal I.T. operations to us. 5. We take over the world!
Speaking from someone who sunk thousands of dollars into equipment that still has yet to be used much, I'd suggest for your first foray that you consider renting or borrowing or finding the cheapest used DV camera you can find.
Don't freak about 3CCD elements and "all that jazz" because your first movie will be the exercise in which you make all your first mistakes. The degradation of substandard video equipment will be ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE less than all sorts of issues you will face.
If you're really serious and have some money to rub together, check out one of the programs of the New York Film Academy. They offer 4- or 8-week intensive courses that are really good, concentrated, and destined to give you the most bang for your buck. It'll do you a whole lot more good than spending several extra dollars on top-notch equipment.
Murray Todd Williams http://www.murraywilliams.com
P.S. My projects from the NYFA are on my website. They may seem rough around the edges, but I learned VOLUMES in making them!
Oh come on! There's an (overused) trick to prevent people from creating their music libraries from taping off the radio today: it's when the radio DJ "talks" into the first 10 seconds or so of the song, or fades one song into the other.
That makes every piece annoying enough that I doubt many people are going to want to record anything other than maybe entire programs.
I personally think Apple's hardware optimization (made easy since it only has two chipsets--Nvidia and ATI) aka "Quartz Extreme" is stellar. Whenever I move over to my Linux workstation I'm always a little jolted because even though it (Linux) is running on a much new, faster, more powerful computer AND graphics card, general GUI response from things like dragging & expanding windows is surprisingly sluggish. Same applies, to a lesser extent, with Windows.
But seriously, my old 500 Mhz PowerMac seems much more responsive than my new fancy Athlon 64 3200+ machine.
Um... MovableType IS Perl based, not PHP/SQL as you suggest. It uses a method of generating static pages from the database content + formatting templates. The nice consequence is that your blog readers aren't running a zillion CGI scripts all the time, they're just getting served up nice clean static material.
It's also nice because one can conceivably add dynamic code content (JSP, PHP, SSI) to the generated code and mix 'n match any dynamic web technology with their MovableType system.
I only got a good job going through the "front door" approach once in my life. I was 14 years old.
20 years later, everything worth getting came from being aggressive with marketing myself and finding unexpected leads. I would recommend possibly getting a book about Cold Calling. There's one especially good called Cold Calling for Women that's really good for men or women. There's also a classic book called What Color is Your Parachte. It's geared toward people who maybe want to switch careers, but it's got good discussion of finding jobs as well.
It seems to me that going the "normal career route" in the I.T. field is inherently problematic simply because our field changes so rapidly, and few employers want to keep up with constant retraining. So we've got to think differently from other workers, even if we're slogging through the office right next to them.
The way you get the big payoff is you think outside the box. Become your own entrepreneur. If that's too much hassle, enjoy your $13/hr wage.
Just poked my head out the window and yup, frogs are falling from the sky.
Now if only Yahoo! would follow. I've sent them so many e-mails telling them that I would happily pay money for their upgraded email service if and only if they would offer IMAP. Being a geek who bounces between three or four computers (some with multiple OS's) IMAP is not just a luxury.
Go AOL! (Mmmm. I think the rain is getting lighter now.)
My first job out of school paid peanuts, but within three months they saw that I could work harder and smarter (with little supervision) than anyone else.
I'd say, don't worry about your first wage being low if gives you a quick chance to prove yourself and build a resume. I would suggest focusing on jobs that gave you exposure to the most technologies, opportunities, etc. Don't look for the "life career" straight away.
As much as I love my Macs, having shifted away from Linux the day the first OS X Public Beta was released, I have to admit I really get annoyed by Apple's draconian behavior when it comes to holding onto hardware monopolies.
It's very much like Microsoft, but with a twist. Some of my least favorite stunts:
1. Not allowing a person to upgrade a DVD/CD drive to a Superdrive. I bought my PowerMac two months before the superdrive was released. I get to use stupid DVD-RAM disks, but I can't burn DVD's unless I buy a whole new computer.
2. Apple keeps its iSync API locked up. There are millions of really cool things I could do to make Apple able to synchronize with things like LDAP servers, competing browsers, PC's, etc. But then Apple could use it as a leverage-point to keep people subscribing to the overpriced.Mac program.
3. USB video cameras, like the ubiquitous Logitech QuickCam, just don't work (well) and Apple seems to have put blocks into place to refuse iChat AV from working with anything but their iSight hardware product. (I exaggerate a little bit here, but not much.)
The iPod Quicktime-AAC is just another example. Where Microsoft fights to protect it's OS dominence, Apple refuses to make its customers' lives better if it suggests that they might loose the odd dollar in missed hardware sales opportunities.
If you dismiss and demean kids, they will live up (down) to your expectations. If kids believed they were being taken seriously, if they were approached intelligently and respectfully about their own curriculum, I'm willing to believe that they would prove you wrong about that. They would listen to your suggestions, dismiss some of them (adults HATE that), and then start to take their own education seriously. My teaching experience has suggested this is the case, but we're so myopic about our approach to education that we're not even going to give me the opportunity to be right or wrong.
Any maybe Gen-Ys' lack of enthusiasm (getting fat in front of X-box as you claim) is evidence that they've lost interest in their own education and in the outside world. What you describe as a cause I claim is instead a symptom.
Now I wouldn't offer Elvish at the expense of math (I've taught math myself) but if it showed signs of being an "in" that reached some kids and got them involved, I'd be all for letting them study Elvish instead of French, because it could lead to them developing a strong interest in Linguistics or Literature.
> I once heard a story of a woman that was eating a > dessert at a restaurant and thought it was so > incredible that she just HAD to have the recipe.
Dude, that was a famous old urban-myth email chain letter hoaxes. Go to any "Web Hoax" site and you'll find this. I got the email back in the late 90's, and it's made the rounds again every few years. The email suggested that since the customer was so angry and the store for over-charging her that you should help her seek revenge by forwarding the recipe (oatmeal chocolate chip cookies) to to "everyone in your address book".
Slashdot Mirror
His book on Dependency Injection is one of the few recent computer books I had to go through carefully, and with notepad and highlighter in hand. His work on Google Guice is really notable. This ain't just some Microsoft-bound disgruntled guy.
But it's not necessarily surprising. I'm not very familiar with it, but Google's Wave was one of those allegedly killer technologies that just didn't get the corporate support it needed to reach its potential as a disruptive technology. Still, there's a possible tone of sour grapes here. Hard to know.
I'll just say this: I would love to have the privilege to work with someone of his caliber.
In my experience (which is as biased as everyone else here giving advice) your Fortran and COBOL are worthless, if not a little dangerous because the functional programming paradigm runs counter to object oriented programming, Model-View-Controller design patterns, etc. The assembly experience is, on the other hand, valuable because so few of these kids coming into the job market really understand the difference between a stack and a heap, understand what a pointer really is, etc.
In other words, the degree by which your lower-level language experience can give you an inherently deeper understanding of what's going on in higher-level languages may be your saving grace.
If I were to offer a programming language of choice for you, it would actually be Objective-C. (Thus, I would tell you to target iOS for learning your first platform.) It is the simplest superset of C you can find, and it has strong origins to the 1980's, and thus may seem the most familiar/comfortable to you. Given your description of your experience and background, you might be well suited to follow the (free) Stanford iPhone/iPod Touch development course that's available from the "iTunes U" section of the Apple iTunes Music Store. That's an undergrad level course aimed at developing Objective-C and getting started in that environment. And it's FREE.
One last piece of advice to get your head around: make it your mission to write GOOD, ELEGANT code and not prolific code. If I were interviewing you for a job, hearing about hundreds-of-thousands of lines of code would give me the most hesitation. Less is more, and I would want a person who spent 80% of his time thinking about how he was going to solve a problem and 20% of the time doing the implementation. My own experience working with Fortran programmers (in the 90's) was that they rarely understood this, and often wrote GIGO.
No, this wouldn't be the game of Monopoly, but it would be a familiar Wall Street game of corporate take-over... and a stupid one at that.
After the Time Warner / AOL fiasco has resolved into a case of "what were they thinking!?!" and BEA smartly tells Oracle to stuff it, let's look at the idea of Apple taking over Adobe.
First of all, Apple is a company that CEO Steve Jobs has somehow managed to steer into remarkable growth. Ten years ago they merged and integrated with NeXT. Probably not all that hard since both were Steve's babies and both were geographically located in the same place and both were relatively small in terms of staff size. I'm sure the corporate culture transformation had its bumps, but not too bad.
Just imagine merging Apple and Adobe, which I believe is housed in Seattle. Now we're talking about a two-campus company, rewriting the corporate management style-guide, firing sales staff and overlapping departments, yada yada yada. That would be mess #1.
Then think about the move of the Adobe code to Apple technology standards. Only an idiot would think Photoshop needs to be re-written as a Cocoa app. Do you really think we would get a better version of Creative Suite 4 next technology cycle? The new product development plans would evolve into mess #2.
Apple does what it does well: they REALLY innovate and focus on User Interface evolution. They see software market opportunities (Final Cut Pro, iLife, Aperture, etc.) and they expand their product line slowly and carefully. They are for the computer industry what Southwest Airlines has been for the Airline Industry for the past 30 years. If they bought Adobe (and other vulnerable software companies) "just because" without any strategy or focus they would become as irrelevant as Sony or Microsoft are becoming.
Now what would be nice would be seeing them slowly and steadily applying their cash into the hiring and development of the best & brightest of computer programming (and hardware engineering and design) talent. Don't buy Adobe and get stuck with some brilliant and some mediocre programmers; poach the top talent away from Adobe with top paychecks. That's my Good Idea #1.
I have one more Good Idea #2: create an incubation machine that finds programming talent and innovative spirit and spins off small software companies that can write incredible native-Apple killer apps. Apple has the corporate strategy, the design methodology, and the technology. They also exist in only one geographic location in the country. (And I, a developer in New York City, would kill for an opportunity to do Apple-platform development without moving to CA.) And I will agree that there are many apps and utilities that are needed--especially in the business/corporate IT niche--that exceed what the small Shareware developers can manage. If Apple could spin-off smaller Apple subsidiaries that had a stronger link to "the mothership", and if Apple invested some of its cash reserves into ongoing but cash-strapped projects (Gimp and OpenOffice are real, albeit imperfect, examples) we might get somewhere.
The really interesting challenge will be if Apple can grow in size while avoiding the bureaucratic morass that large corporations so often become. We shall see what the future holds...
It's strange. Once upon a time I had great respect for this journalist. That's back around the mid- to late-80's when PC's had new things going on with them, and when his books on low-level programming (DOS interrupts, etc.) were rarely informative and succinct that he'd earned some actual respect in my world.
m y-own-web-usage-ways) but he doesn't seem to have any connection to that.
Now days this guy seems to f---ing out of it; he's a pundit in the lowest sense of the term. Come on: what does "Web 2.0" mean these days? I'm actually using, on a daily basis, a number of web sites and technologies that are based on these new-and-coming technologies like social programming and AJAX and whatnot, and the sites that succeed are actually ground-breaking (not in the hyperbolic sense, but in the I'm-finding-myself-using-them-daily-and-changing-
Dvorak has become a pundit in the most derogatory sense of the word. It almost makes me embarrassed to have bought (and coveted) whichever book I'd made dog-eared back around 1986. How far the mighty have fallen!
Your description of the Carbon API is partially accurate but in many ways wrong. Carbon WAS created as the migration path for old OS 9 apps (which it did brilliantly) but as the only C++ programming option, it is the de facto standard for anyone who is developing and maintaining ANY cross-platform app, whether it be a Windows/Mac app or Linux/Mac (as is OpenOffice). Adobe uses Carbon for its CS3 suite. Microsoft uses Carbon for Office. Game developers (EA) use Carbon.
And Carbon is updated on a regular basis to reflect new OS features. True, cool APIs like "Core Data" and (I think) Core Animation are Cocoa-only, but some of the newer libraries and technologies coming in Leopard have Carbon interfaces as well. Myself, I would use Cocoa when writing an app but I'd be writing Mac-only applications. If I did want to develop something that was cross-platform, I would probably use Carbon as well.
As you said, it's always slow before Macworld or WWDC, and this last MacWorld was totally lame for actual Mac owners since it was only about the damn phone and tv. No Leopard, no replacement for the long-absent iSights, no Blu-Ray DVD. The actual "Macintosh" is far more stagnant than I ever remember seeing it in the last five years.
Forgive my overall ignorance--I'm a Mac and Linux and Java person, although I've written a bit of VB in a job years ago--but does anyone know if moving to VB.Net allows a phased-in approach to introducing at least some C# programming down the road?
.Net languages allow a decent functional "Mix 'n Match" capability? If so, I'd make sure the VB rewrite was in VB.Net (or are there VB.Net idiosyncrasies that would justify sticking with the old VB6?) and then I'd learn C# really well. At some point in the project some component might fall under the "this will really suck under VB, and we can tackle it much better by writing this piece in C#" which will let you get a toe-hold on the idea of using a better language.
Do the
That's the way I helped a Fortune 500 company start adopting Linux back in 1998... the friendly and subversive way!
As for the tasks VB are not suited for (again, I only know VB6, not VB.Net) the biggest glaring omission in my experience was the lack of decent Regular Expressions, or Hash Tables / "Dictionaries"--unless you link to the VBScript/IE6 library like everyone used to. On the other hand, there are IMOHO problems with languages like Perl that make them bad for a number of solutions, but that hasn't stopped nutty fanatics from treating them like "golden hammers".
While I'm writing disclaimers, there are a number of commercial applications out there written entirely in VB. In all cases I've observed, they "evolved" out of a simple and useful app and fell into being examples of the most counter-intuitive user interfaces and over all "kludginess".
I just finished a 2-year contract where I was located in Los Angeles, another guy was in Colorado, and the rest of the team was in London. I have two observations:
1: When in this geographical configuration (I know some L.A.-based bankers whose days start at 5am for the same reasons.) it's just a matter of fact that you are going to have to become more of a morning person. Starting the work day at 9am sounds unrealistic. (Now if truly there's a large contingent of co-workers in Asia, I'll buy that exception. But I also know a lot of programmers who "aren't morning people" where that is really the issue at stake.)
2: The communications problems I encountered were, in my opinion, more an issue of basic communications and team management than shifted time-zones. I've found that often certain developers just don't communicate well with certain other people. They fall into bad habits of avoidance that can be disguised as (or blamed on) a problem of the long distances. Whenever we got more committed to good team management practices--dedication to regular phone conferences and specific times every couple days, better use of Bugzilla to resolve all "issues" that needed to be coordinated, etc.--the communications problems went away.
As much as people see the inefficiencies of being spread across multiple time zones, especially during crunch periods, it's worth noting that with well-coordinated efforts a certain programming problem can literally be worked-on 24-hours-a-day with one person sleeping while another is working. But it takes a real dedication to best communication (and project management) practices.
I haven't actually developed with WebObjects; my web-programming background has been either LAMP or JSP/J2EE, but I've noticed that many of the worst, most non-responsive web-pages are designed with WebObjects. (You can tell by the URLs.) I don't know if that means that people programming with WebObjects have on average less training and architectural design experience, or if it's ultimately a more broken architecture, but personally it would take a lot for me to ever consider it as an architectural choice.
This Slashdot posting is actually misleading. The intent of the legislation is to CREATE obstacles that don't currently exist to PREVENT communities from creating any sort of broadband services by creating a number of extra citizen-approval hoops to jump through. This showed up in Slashdot about a month ago as a news item of many states simultaneously proposing legislation to create these road blocks.
By wording this now in newspaper articles as "cities will now be able to offer Wifi if they first do X, Y, and Z" makes the bill sound as though it's going to help roll-out cool public services, when in fact the cities don't presently need to do the X, Y or Z.
And really, this has not as much to do with allowing some place like Boulder to get cool public WiFi but rather to prevent small rural areas from creating their own standard broadband offering (probably like broadband over power lines or WiMax) if the existing telcos and cable companies leave them behind.
I was actually trying to help a small mountain community in Colorado figure out how to get broadband because there were NO options. The telco said it would be too expensive (and the existing copper in the area sucked too much for DSL). This legislation is intended to make sure that little communities never get broadband service until the existing monopolistic communications corporations decide to do it themselves.
I can't say I get a lot of respect for being a Computer Ace. It certainly hasn't gotten me any dates recently. On the other hand family, friends, distant friends, ex-bosses, neighbors and friends of neighbors have no qualms about assuming I'm their free I.T. service. Respect? I don' t know. Co-dependence? Yeesh!
Looks like they'll be dropping Macintosh support completely. (Caveat: looks like there might be 3rd party support, but a friend of mine told me MarkSpace leaves something to be desired.)
Something I've waited for years and it never come--maybe someone can explain why: client-side SSL.
To my understanding, you would place a client-authenticating certificate in you web browser program, and during the SSL negotiation that certificate would be used for authentication.
The only two problems were (again, to my limited understanding) first that you had to go through the effort of installing the certificate on every browser you used, and second, the security could be broken if someone had access to your account. (Of course, account login security and browser "first-time-on-launch" passwords helped protect against that.)
Why the bloody SecureID system that's so klunky?
1. We give source code for Office 2003 to more than 30 world governments.
2. They show their brightest computer programmers this code.
3. Trying to comprehend the source (written in typical Microsoft Quality) the programmers' heads implode, causing death within 2 hours.
4. With all the programming talent taken care of, we get all the world governments to outsource their internal I.T. operations to us.
5. We take over the world!
Speaking from someone who sunk thousands of dollars into equipment that still has yet to be used much, I'd suggest for your first foray that you consider renting or borrowing or finding the cheapest used DV camera you can find.
Don't freak about 3CCD elements and "all that jazz" because your first movie will be the exercise in which you make all your first mistakes. The degradation of substandard video equipment will be ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE less than all sorts of issues you will face.
If you're really serious and have some money to rub together, check out one of the programs of the New York Film Academy. They offer 4- or 8-week intensive courses that are really good, concentrated, and destined to give you the most bang for your buck. It'll do you a whole lot more good than spending several extra dollars on top-notch equipment.
Murray Todd Williams
http://www.murraywilliams.com
P.S. My projects from the NYFA are on my website. They may seem rough around the edges, but I learned VOLUMES in making them!
Oh come on! There's an (overused) trick to prevent people from creating their music libraries from taping off the radio today: it's when the radio DJ "talks" into the first 10 seconds or so of the song, or fades one song into the other.
That makes every piece annoying enough that I doubt many people are going to want to record anything other than maybe entire programs.
I personally think Apple's hardware optimization (made easy since it only has two chipsets--Nvidia and ATI) aka "Quartz Extreme" is stellar. Whenever I move over to my Linux workstation I'm always a little jolted because even though it (Linux) is running on a much new, faster, more powerful computer AND graphics card, general GUI response from things like dragging & expanding windows is surprisingly sluggish. Same applies, to a lesser extent, with Windows.
But seriously, my old 500 Mhz PowerMac seems much more responsive than my new fancy Athlon 64 3200+ machine.
Um... MovableType IS Perl based, not PHP/SQL as you suggest. It uses a method of generating static pages from the database content + formatting templates. The nice consequence is that your blog readers aren't running a zillion CGI scripts all the time, they're just getting served up nice clean static material.
It's also nice because one can conceivably add dynamic code content (JSP, PHP, SSI) to the generated code and mix 'n match any dynamic web technology with their MovableType system.
I only got a good job going through the "front door" approach once in my life. I was 14 years old.
20 years later, everything worth getting came from being aggressive with marketing myself and finding unexpected leads. I would recommend possibly getting a book about Cold Calling. There's one especially good called Cold Calling for Women that's really good for men or women. There's also a classic book called What Color is Your Parachte. It's geared toward people who maybe want to switch careers, but it's got good discussion of finding jobs as well.
It seems to me that going the "normal career route" in the I.T. field is inherently problematic simply because our field changes so rapidly, and few employers want to keep up with constant retraining. So we've got to think differently from other workers, even if we're slogging through the office right next to them.
The way you get the big payoff is you think outside the box. Become your own entrepreneur. If that's too much hassle, enjoy your $13/hr wage.
Just poked my head out the window and yup, frogs are falling from the sky.
Now if only Yahoo! would follow. I've sent them so many e-mails telling them that I would happily pay money for their upgraded email service if and only if they would offer IMAP. Being a geek who bounces between three or four computers (some with multiple OS's) IMAP is not just a luxury.
Go AOL! (Mmmm. I think the rain is getting lighter now.)
My first job out of school paid peanuts, but within three months they saw that I could work harder and smarter (with little supervision) than anyone else.
I'd say, don't worry about your first wage being low if gives you a quick chance to prove yourself and build a resume. I would suggest focusing on jobs that gave you exposure to the most technologies, opportunities, etc. Don't look for the "life career" straight away.
As much as I love my Macs, having shifted away from Linux the day the first OS X Public Beta was released, I have to admit I really get annoyed by Apple's draconian behavior when it comes to holding onto hardware monopolies.
.Mac program.
It's very much like Microsoft, but with a twist. Some of my least favorite stunts:
1. Not allowing a person to upgrade a DVD/CD drive to a Superdrive. I bought my PowerMac two months before the superdrive was released. I get to use stupid DVD-RAM disks, but I can't burn DVD's unless I buy a whole new computer.
2. Apple keeps its iSync API locked up. There are millions of really cool things I could do to make Apple able to synchronize with things like LDAP servers, competing browsers, PC's, etc. But then Apple could use it as a leverage-point to keep people subscribing to the overpriced
3. USB video cameras, like the ubiquitous Logitech QuickCam, just don't work (well) and Apple seems to have put blocks into place to refuse iChat AV from working with anything but their iSight hardware product. (I exaggerate a little bit here, but not much.)
The iPod Quicktime-AAC is just another example. Where Microsoft fights to protect it's OS dominence, Apple refuses to make its customers' lives better if it suggests that they might loose the odd dollar in missed hardware sales opportunities.
I should think you could opt NOT to send any e-mail to a person with a GMail address if it concerned you so much.
Gah!
If you dismiss and demean kids, they will live up (down) to your expectations. If kids believed they were being taken seriously, if they were approached intelligently and respectfully about their own curriculum, I'm willing to believe that they would prove you wrong about that. They would listen to your suggestions, dismiss some of them (adults HATE that), and then start to take their own education seriously. My teaching experience has suggested this is the case, but we're so myopic about our approach to education that we're not even going to give me the opportunity to be right or wrong.
Any maybe Gen-Ys' lack of enthusiasm (getting fat in front of X-box as you claim) is evidence that they've lost interest in their own education and in the outside world. What you describe as a cause I claim is instead a symptom.
Now I wouldn't offer Elvish at the expense of math (I've taught math myself) but if it showed signs of being an "in" that reached some kids and got them involved, I'd be all for letting them study Elvish instead of French, because it could lead to them developing a strong interest in Linguistics or Literature.
> I once heard a story of a woman that was eating a
> dessert at a restaurant and thought it was so
> incredible that she just HAD to have the recipe.
Dude, that was a famous old urban-myth email chain letter hoaxes. Go to any "Web Hoax" site and you'll find this. I got the email back in the late 90's, and it's made the rounds again every few years. The email suggested that since the customer was so angry and the store for over-charging her that you should help her seek revenge by forwarding the recipe (oatmeal chocolate chip cookies) to to "everyone in your address book".