08.03.13

What Most Schools Don’t Teach…

Posted in Blogroll, Random Thoughts, Tech at 9:44 pm by Liv

If you work in IT, you have probably by now have seen the famous video on YouTube labelled “What most schools don’t teach” — where Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and a few other prominent figures are talking about how easy it is to program, and how only 10% of the USA schools teach programming. It goes on more to bombard the viewer with some scary figures about how 1,000,000 jobs or more will go unfilled because there are not enough coders — I’m guessing as a motivational message to inspire people (kids?) to start programming.

The thing is, watching the video, I cannot but cringe at the hypocrisy employed in making this video! If the purpose of this message is to increase education efforts (at school level or individually) in the programming sector, then I’d say it probably does it job — in a very lame way, but it sort of does. If however this is intended to be a call to arms for “everyone” to start programming and either change their jobs to a programming job or if they are at the beginning of their career, to set their career path to be in programming, then I’d say the message is a hypocritical one. Even worse, it is setting up the targeted audience for a harsh comedown!

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24.12.12

Use MS Powerpoint to Draw Diagrams

Posted in Blogroll, News, Random Thoughts, Tech at 5:37 pm by Liv

OK, so this post probably looks odd in the context of my blog — since most of the content so far is made up of (rather silly) pictures of me mixed up with technical content targeted at developers out there. However, if you are more than a coder and you actually get involved in designing and architecturing the app you are working on (and let’s face it, the days of the dumb coder sitting there producing code based on specs are code and most of us are actually doing a mix of everything!), you will probably find yourself rather often having to produce some diagrams to present to the rest of the team or the upper layers. When doing this, quite likely you will find yourself having to produce not just diagrams but some explanatory text around it, since a image is worth 1,000 words (it would better be, come to think of it, it’s taking just as much space on disk!), however, you need on average 2,000 words to describe your design

In such cases, I found quite a few developers to get stuck in terms of what to use — since there are huge numbers of applications for this, each boasting all sorts of features, and unfortunately, each one of them coming with all sorts of cumbersome UI’s which make them quite unfriendly and/or difficult to use. (I wish the writers of such applications would understand that as a developer you don’t want to spend days, not even hours, on reading manuals, you simply want to put a few boxes or cliparts on a canvas, connect them with some arrows and some text.) While I’m not claiming I hold the universal solution to this issue — one has to factor in personal preferences into this! — I found my “solution” to actually work in a lot of cases, and most of the friends I recommended this have seem to take onto this right away; with that in mind, this post is meant to propose a (what I perceive to be) simple way of achieving the above with simple tools.

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20.12.12

Of Java and Assembler

Posted in Blogroll, Random Thoughts, Tech at 6:04 pm by Liv

The title would no doubt puzzle quite a few of you — after all I’m putting in the same sentence a low-level, processor-specific language (for no better term for “assembler” — I know, I know, I know, “it’s not really a language”, right?) with a rather high-level, even platform-independent language like Java. So, right away you’d all be asking yourself “well, what can they have in common?” — or probably thinking that this is an article looking at how far apart these 2 languages are. The thing is, they’re not actually that far apart! Yup, I’m going to say that again and re-phrase is so the purpose of this post becomes more clear: they are quite similar in fact!

Now, I bet this got your attention, didn’t it ? Rest assured, I didn’t just say it for the sake of it — I will try to explain throughout this post how that is possible. And if you decide to read it all, and happen to work within the JVM space, I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on this — either via a comment here or simply drop me a line.

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07.04.11

Write C++ Code in Microsoft Paint!

Posted in Blogroll, Fun Time, Photos, Tech at 10:41 am by Liv

This is an absolute gem (thanks Tord!) — but you can write C++ code using just MS Paint!!!

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11.03.11

Bandwidth – reloaded

Posted in Random Thoughts, Tech at 1:59 pm by Liv

I’ve posted before about bandwidth in my posts and I knew from the beginning that it’s one of those issues that you can never exhaust. As it happens recently I came across another interesting thing which is probably worth sharing: cross browser delivery. In brief, it means delivering to each browser the content it can “understand” and more to the point display.

Sure it is easy to deliver the same content to each and every browser – it means you don’t have to do any browser “targeting”, and as such your code is easier to maintain and write. It does mean however you are pumping out quite often a lot of content that browsers will have to ignore as they cannot display it. For instance, some of you might not know this but there are a few text-only browsers in the unix world (mainly lynx or elinks) that have been designed to work for instance in a text console — they have no capabilities of displaying images, flash movies, quicktime etc as typically the container they get launched in doesn’t offer anything but text (think old-style green terminals!). You’d think that there is no point for someone to use these browsers and in most cases you’re correct, but imagine this: you’ve ssh’d into a server and figured out you need to download a patch to some component. You got 2 options:

1. browse the net on your desktop using a “proper” browser, download the patch locally and then upload it onto the server to apply it
2. use the likes of lynx on the server directly, google and find the patch, download it right onto your server and apply it

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