About 6 months ago I read a Lifehacker article that advocated standing at your office desk to stay healthier. I thought it was a neat idea at the time but didn’t try very hard to make it happen. Then Lifehacker again linked to an article in the NY Times about standing at work, and this time I decided to do something about it.
Introducing my standing desk
Michael J. Braude wrote a post on why he’ll never be a “web guy”. The gist being, the annoyances of writing for the web are not the sort of challenges he wants to tackle as a programmer.
Then Jeff Atwood gave his two cents on why programming for the web is where it’s at — it’s fast, it gets seen by more people, and more and more great apps are being made on the web.
I’m sure Michael has a point. I think the way he said it got up Jeff’s nose a little (it certainly got up mine), but it’s valid. For some, the web just seems simple and trite. My lecturer thinks like this I suspect. I also agree with Jeff that it’s somewhat myopic — if you dismiss web apps, you dismiss a lot of clever, well written programs right out of the gate.
I managed to code me up some of the exercises from chapter 4, and I’m all over classes. The final exercise was to create a Robot class that took a name, weight, bad habit(?), artificial intelligence level, and whether it could see. As an extension exercise, it could also have a “memory module” that allowed 5 mutations (changes) to either the bad habit, or the AI.
Last night was a wash Java wise. I’ll be writing another post soon, once I’ve gone through my text book, and dissecting what we covered last night. Until I do that, I’m completely lost. And not because I can’t understand it so much as the delivery was all over the place.
My lecturer complained a couple of times that the text and notes go into complicated areas that if he were to teach it, would not be covered yet — which is fair enough. But then time and again he himself would veer off into areas that I’m sure will be covered in a few weeks (ie. not now) and just makes things more confusing now.
And what is with using “Dog” as an example of a program? Every introduction to programming I’ve read uses dogs, cats, cars and pizza to explain classes. That’s useful for about as long as it takes for you to “get” that a class can have attributes and functions, but beyond that is completely meaningless in a practical sense. Using dogs for coding examples just makes my brain hurt, because I can’t see how you can perform arithmetic on a dog, or use a dog to perform a function for another dog. I get that it’s using simple things to explain new concepts, but to me it just clouds the issue. Give me a real example (a simple one) of how making a function and calling it generates a result, and I’ll be happy. Unless your example is int x = a+b; — that’s almost as meaningless as Dog().
I apologise if I’ve used the incorrect terms for things in the previous paragraph. I also stress that I can’t do better or think of more useful examples because I still can’t program yet. But I’m working on it. And I’m gonna’ read a chapter ahead this time, as I suspect my classmates are only ahead of me by a hair as I’m pretty sure all the questions they were asking would have been straight forward and obvious if they were reading the text (judging by the questions they asked about stuff even I knew).
Please correct me or share your thoughts about how Dog() is actually a useful thing to learn!
So I’m looking to start storing short bits of code online. With my Java course starting tonight, it might be nice to have a place to share and exchange code with my classmates, and store for later use. I’ve been checking out some online code snippet repositories, and narrowed it down to two of the best.
Snipt.net is very pretty. It has a lovely ajaxy interface that swooshes and swashes around when you add and edit code, and just exudes polish. It has an embed function that allows you to post to a website and have the code remain up-to-date no matter how many revisions you make. Someone has also made a Wordpress plugin that makes the embedding even easier (which is nice for my purposes). What it lacks right now is an API (they’ve asked for help from the community, but there doesn’t seem to be much there right now).
Snipplr.com on the other hand is all about the API. They have plugins for all sorts of IDEs, and like Snipt, a Wordpress plugin (which on the other hand won’t let me input my API key…). They offer a bookmarklet to quickly add code from your browser, and a Textmate bundle for those of you who like that sort of thing. Like Snipt, embedding snippets is a breeze but unlike Snipt, Snipplr keeps previous versions, so revising code never overwrites previous work completely.
google_logo, originally uploaded by keso.OK, I haven’t Googled it so this game might already exist.
Two or more players — one player does a bit of research (if they need to) and declares some piece of information that the other players must find. Ideally it should be something that will only be found on one page on the net — not common info like you might find on Wikipedia, but rather some small factoid on some obscure website in the outer reaches of the internet.
Then the other players have to craft the perfect search phrase that will produce that page in the top result of a Google search — without using any of the actual words you’re searching for, or any prior knowledge of the page to your advantage. The player’s score decreases with every failed attempt to make it into the top spot.
I can’t think of anyone geeky enough to actually play this with me, so it’s purely hypothetical. And it’d probably need honing and crafting to make it playable. If you’re geeky enough you might also like Googlewhacking or you could check out this online archive of Google games.
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