Written September 7, 2008 in Uncategorized
This is going around like a bad cold, but here goes.
How old were you when you started programming?
I first tried at 12, but couldn’t get started in a way that was meaningful to me. I ran into a problem at 18 in college that I solved with an Access database.
How did you get started in programming?
That access database needed to be glued together with a lot of VBA to make it work the way we needed it to. I read a book and just jumped from topic to topic reading the bare minimum I needed to make it work. Unlike most programmers, I wasn
What was your first language?
VBA, then VB6, then Bash shell scripting, then PHP, and from then it was on.
What was the first real program you wrote?
Probably a VB6 program for a class. The first one that stuck around for a while was in PHP3.
What languages have you used since you started programming?
VBA, VB6, PHP, Shell scripting, Java, Python, Perl, C#, and VB.net
What was your first professional programming gig?
Writing shell scripts and regular expressions to update OregonLive automatically with a minimum of cleanup. All the text for the site at the time was sent over in the Oregonian’s custom typesetting language.
If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?
Yeah, probably. I still say that programmers who want to work with the toys because they’re shiny and they enjoy making them do things should not go into programming at all — they belong in computer science research. The programmers I enjoy working with are the ones who use the programming tools to solve problems. They also recognize that maintainability and future-proofing ARE problems and code in ways that solve them.
If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?
Do read other people’s code. Don’t read their comments. If you can’t understand what it’s doing from the code, then throw the code out because the comments aren’t worth reading. Code in a way that keeps things simple and makes things easy. Easy, simple systems are easy to maintain and reliable. Don’t over engineer it or try to be clever because you’ll only end up creating something that will get thrown out shortly because it’s hard to keep working.
What’s the most fun you’ve ever had?
Um, with my clothes on? Seriously, get out and live a little. It’s not all about programming. Programmers work to solve problems that people run into, and unless you’ve got life skills and social skills, you won’t be able to understand the problems sometimes.
- GraphicsMagick vs. ImageMagick - GraphicsMagick is a new suite that touts itself as a faster, cleaner, leaner replacement for ImageMagick.
- Credit Repair: MyFico’s most requested/interesting threads… I need to do some of this in preparation to buy a house in the next two years.
- Linux-HA / Heartbeat: Getting Started
Brandon and I photographed the Northgate Music Festival this past weekend. Brandon and I created a group pool on Flickr, and Dana will eventually get his pictures up there too.
If your band played in it, or you’d like a high-res copy or print, please click the contact tab at the top of the page and drop me an email. Sorry we didn’t cover everyone — there were up to 8 bands playing at the same time, and only three of us photographers.
This summer’s sucked around here. We’ve had a drought for most of the summer, and if you look at the current US drought maps, we’re in an area that’s experiencing the most severe level of droughts. Water use has gone through the roof and the utility companies are putting drought billing structures in place that will penalize excessive water use, although they haven’t yet implemented drought use restrictions since we’ve still got adequate water in the aquifer that feeds our drinking water wells.
College Station sucks as an area to grow things unless you’ve spent some time enriching your soil. …
Download Squad has posted a list of free alternatives to Photoshop.
Out of them, only GIMP runs on OS X. Anyone got alternatives that are focused on Mac?
This is all it takes to knock down a site running IIS. And you have to have a complex URL filtering tool in place to keep it from happening. It’s not secure out of the box, it’s not secure without some work, and even when your site isn’t running a database backend an automated SQL injection attack can still hose your entire website.
Christ.
And this is supposed to be “enterprise-ready” software?
I’ve been doing a lot more writing than reading over the past few weeks, and none of that writing has been in this blog. Sorry about that. Money coming in takes precedence over just about everything else, including cleaning and having a life.
Here’s what actually did manage to rise above the surface over the past few weeks…
- Frosting shots are new hipster trend — I think hipsters are looking too hard for new ways to be weird. (Thanks, Becca!)
- Why Frameworks Suck
- Infoworld’s Best of Open Source Software
- Installing both Gnome and KDE on OpenSuSE 11.
This has worked on OpenSuse 10.3, Fedora 9, and all recent versions of Ubuntu…
Problem: Audio doesn’t work when the machine is docked in a Dell dock.
Solution: You need to enable the IEC958 Switch in your Volume Control application.
HowTo:
- Click Computer, More Applications, and Voume Control
- Click Edit, Preferences, and check IEC958. Then click Close.
- Switch from the Playback tab to the Switches tab, and check the IEC958 checkbox.
I also clicked the IEC958 Default PCM box on my OpenSuSE 11 machine; this gave me control over the dock’s specific output port as opposed to the headphone port on the laptop.
With some recent equipment upgrades (thanks, eBay!) and a few loaners from friends, I’m getting stared the shooting again.
The basic gist: If you need pictures taken for an event (please, though, no weddings) or to commemorate an engagement, birthday, or other event in the College Station area, drop me an email via the contact page. I’m all digital now thanks to the sale of all my film gear, which reduces my expenses significantly. I can provide portfolio work and references upon request.
Since I’m still building (well, rebuilding!) my portfolio and the equipment I have at my disposal, at least …
Kottke’s feed linked today to Smashing Telly’s post of a youtube video in which an architect experiments with allowing a computer to generate solutions to a hotel design. The conclusion is that the computer’s designs, even though they’re using a genetic algorithm to ‘breed’ better designs as time goes on, that the “best” solutions posed by the computer don’t make any sense in a human world. Therefore, the computer is useless as a tool without the design inspiration that’s brought to the drafting table by the simple addition of human experience.
I take issue with the conclusion that …
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