Ok so my daily podcast listening has gotten me excited about Newsvine. If you don’t already know what it is, I’m not really going to tell you. All I need is an invite. Email me!
Edit: I’ve now recieved an invite and I can give out 20. I’ve already dished out 3, but I’d be happy to give away the other 17.
After Joel Spolsky’s famous rant about how Java isn’t hard enough to teach computer science, here’s a fresh idea about the best teaching language.
I was immediately attracted to these two articles because, you guessed it, I’m a dork. Not only that, but they hit close to home. I was brought up in the Computer Science world using primarily Java. If for some reason you didn’t read both articles, that’s OK. The gist was that Java isn’t a hard enough language to weed out average programmers from great ones. The original Spolsky article says that unless students are able to wrap their head around poiners and recursion, they’re maybe not fit for the CS field.
As I said, this hit close to home and also threw in an insult. Sort of. I say that because I didn’t really feel insulted after reading the article. I found myself agreeing more with it than anything.
At St. John’s, the first few courses do teach machine code and assembler. This is a good thing, according to Doug Ross’ article. Therefore, I don’t feel totally insulted. Thinking back to my college programming days, I can remember struggling through machine code and assembler and also pointers and recursion, but being a CS TA, I got to revisit the material often enough. In the end, I felt more confident with the concepts. The same goes for Java. As I was taking higher level programming courses, I was TA’ing the intro to Java classes. The review I got from that job was priceless.
I’ve said this before. I went to school and now work with or know many CS or computer people who can only tolerate so much. They say they spend hours upon hours on a computer at work and don’t feel like using one at home. Bah! That’s not a real computer dork. Now granted, I’m not programming all day at work (though I do sneak some in), so I can’t speak for those who do. But I know that someone who can and enjoys spending much of their time on the computer can only benefit from the time.
Now was I lazy in college? Yep, probably about as much as possible! Do I feel lazy for learning Java? Somewhat. I always saw C/C++ as a more useful and widely used language whereas Java made me feel like I was wearing some sort of training wheels. The big question is, do I feel like I’m one of the mediocre programmers or one of the above average ones? On one hand, I feel the dedication I have to computing says a lot. Then again, I haven’t done a whole lot of real world programming on what I’d call “mission critical” code. Yet I find many of my peers turning to me for help, so maybe I shouldn’t short change myself so much.
This is the step by step account of what led to the Chappelle show being canceled… this is the truth man!!!
What is it about conspiracy theories that I like so much? I’ve never really analyzed why. Part of it might be something to do with my general dislike of authority. Maybe it’s just part of my inner girl showing how much it likes gossip. I don’t know. For whatever reason, I like them.
Back somtime around October or November I had blogged about getting a digital camera. For my continued work on DecoyMusic, Aaron agreed to hook me up with a digital camera. Well shortly afterward Aaron hoped on a tour for about 6-7 weeks and right before he left he ordered it. But for whatever reason, it never showed up. His credit card was never charged.
Time for Round 2. Aaron made another attempt to order said camera and again something goofed. So finally on his third try he got things down and finally got the order placed. Well on Thursday the package showed up on my doorstep.
As for camera itself? It’s better than I expected. Back in October when I first started looking for potential cameras, I settled on the Canon SD500. I really like Canon’s digital cameras in general and my buddy Rick had a similar model, but I digress. When I was doing my research, I was looking for a 4-5 Megapixel camera and like I said settled on the SD500. I swear I remember seeing it as a 5.0MP camera, but looking at review on Steve’s Digicams dated 3/30/05, they say it’s a 7.1. Either way, I win. It’s a great little point and shoot camera. It’s small and fits in my pocket. I was quite surprised with the video it shoots as well. My few tests looked nice even at full screen on my 19″ LCD.
Along with the camera, I also got a 1GB memory card for it. At the max quality settings, that’s over 300 pictures. If I change it from SuperFine to Fine, I get something like 580+ pictures. Makes the 32MB card they include with the camera look pretty small in comparison.
Now that I have a digital camera, I expect I will be uploading a lot more photos to my gallery. Maybe I’ll have to get a Flickr account too.
I finally got around to updating to Wordpress 2.0. I have to say the new interface is pretty damn slick. Lots of improvements. I’m glad there were no headaches from upgrading. Now to install the Tiger Admin Interface!
Update: I spoke too soon. My artwork and about me page is throwing errors (Grrrr!). I’m working on it now so it should be fixed soon.
Second update: Fixed and running smoothly now.
I’ve got a problem. This is a problem I’ve gotten myself into and the problem is I don’t have someone I can really talk tech with. Not to sound elitest or anything, but the stuff that interests me (computers, programming, technology) just doesn’t strike the same chord with most of my friends. The ones who are into tech don’t seem to have quite the same interests as me.
Maybe it’s not my problem at all. I hear this from my collegues in the industry a lot, “I spend my entire work day at the computer, why would I want to spend more hours at home working on the computer.” or something along those lines. I can, and often do, spend almost all my waking hours at a computer. Who else does that?
Last week was MacWorld Expo. The week before was CES. This is big stuff if you’re a tech geek. Unfortunately, my friends are not and I had to be content with following coverage and discussion online. My best friends when it comes to tech are Digg.com, TWIT, Security Now, Inside the Net, Diggnation, Command-N, and Digital Life TV. I guess for now that’s my only hope until I find someone who is as much of a dork as I am.
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