"Are pointers and recursion the Latin and Greek of Computer Science?" Joel Spolsky has an insightful article
on his "Joel on software" blog about computer science curriculums and
recent changes. He equates teaching of concepts like pointers and recursion
to the teaching of Latin and Greek in the early 1900's. These things aren't
taught because they have great practical purpose outside of school. They are
taught because they train the mind to think about hard things. They are also
taught because they help to weed out the students that aren't going to make it
later on. In Scouting, I've had an opportunity to counsel quite a few people
that were starting to look at colleges and wanted advice on a career in
programming. My advice has always been that the best schools are those that
care more about teaching theory than teaching languages. Languages change.
When I went to school, c++ was all the rage. Now, its Java. Who knows what it
will be in 10 years? If all you know is Java, you're useless when Java goes
away (just as programmers that only know Fortran are pretty much useless now).
On the other hand, if you know the theory behind programming languages, then
you are able to pick up new languages quickly and you are much more
valuable. Recently, I've been allowed to establish some of the criteria that is used
to evaluate potential recruits for the programming team at work. For me, my
priorities are on picking somebody that can be taught new things quickly, and
that already has a concept of working with and maintaining big code. Sadly,
that's just doesn't seem to be what schools are teaching. Applicants seem to
want to wow us with their familiarity with XML and Java skills. But when I
start asking about the projects they've been working on, things crumble. Most
of them don't have experience maintaining things beyond a single homework
assignment. Some of them have taken semester-long project courses, but even
those courses have been boiled down to the point where they've been robbed of
the process that goes along with the software life-cycle. Theory seems to be
an up and down thing. Some people get it, where others seem to have missed
it. I wonder if its one of those things that gets covered once and then
forgotten by most. My advice to people looking for a programming job: Knowing how to pick the
school is critical! If you get sucked up going after the big names just for
the name's sake, or if you go after the curriculum that seems the most
exciting, you can be sure that in the end, you'll have a resume that contains
lots of buzzwords but very little substance. You'll find yourself getting
picked for lots of first interviews (the HR folks will love you), but you'll
also find yourself getting called back (the non-HR folks will see right through
you). Eventually, you'll find yourself a job, but it will be something like
"systems analyst 1", which pretty much indicates that you know just a little
bit more than the secretary does and will not be moving up any time soon.
Instead, look for schools where the focus is on theory. These types of
schools usually make you wait a few semesters before letting you program in a
language you've actually heard of before. They give courses dedicated to
nothing but data structures and discrete mathematics. One final piece of advice: Don't look to your courses to give you all of
the education that you'll need. Just as important is what you do outside of
the curriculum. Join a CS club. Or, start writing your own software. Or,
pick an open-source project you like, and just start hacking away at it.
You'll be surprised just how much you can learn by trying to get somebody
else's software to compile on your platform.
posted at: 18:44 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
Ho Ho Ho This is just too cool.. if you have Google Earth installed, you can Track Santa
Claus as he makes his rounds. As I type this, he is presently delivering
toys to Miyazaki, Japan. In other news, Christmas shopping was completed last weekend. That's
probably a new record for me. Leanne and Natalie are up her parents right now,
but will be coming back this evening. We'll be having Christmas dinner with
family at our house tomorrow. Meanwhile, I'm taking this opportunity to get
caught up with some personal projects of mine. Also noteworthy, I just completed reading Harry Potter and the Order of the
Phoenix. This is probably the first novel that I've read cover to cover since
junior high.
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New fridge
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400 Patch Traders can't be wrong. Today, I just received the 400th submission for a listing on patchtrader.info. The simple little list
of patch traders that I started when I was chairman of the 75th anniversary
chairman for Wagion has really grown. I do have some ideas on expanding the site a great deal. The only thing
standing between me and those ideas right now is time.
posted at: 11:55 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
YAPC Conference Proceedings. The 2005
Yet Another Perl Conference Proceedings are out now. Now you can download
the bit-torrent and view my talk on DVD.
posted at: 13:25 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
What I've been doing. Family: Christmas shopping is going on in frantic fashion. Those
looking for Christmas presents for Natalie can just forget it. She already has
one of every toy in existence, and she's only 4! Scouting: I was just at the section NE-4B Council of Chiefs this
weekend. It was a good time. The new section
NE-4B web site is now up. I'm also working on the council web site, but it
sort of took a back-burner to the section site lately. My Vice-Chief advisee
for next year is already hard at work planning the lodge banquet. He is doing
a very good job. Perl: I've been devoting a good bit of time with the Pittsburgh Perl Mongers towards getting PPW up and
running next summer. There's been a few snags lately. I just discovered
today that Schedule::Ratelimiter, which I wrote, is a NetBSD port. That's
kind of neat. Makes me wonder if people are actually using it. Work: Stressing out big-time on a project that is taking much longer
than I wanted it to. Not going to enjoy my Christmas unless I get it done.
posted at: 00:47 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
A picture left for me by a little elf. I think that's suppose to be a picture of me holding some balloons. I'm not
really sure. Natalie left this for me on my whiteboard at work a while ago, I
just discovered it today when I flipped the board over to use the other
side.
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Riding the train.
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Eating at the mall.
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Wagion anniversary committee meeting.
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Shopping at the auction barn.
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Gotta love this. After watching the live episode of "The West Wing", I went to nbc.com to
cast my vote on who won the debate. Naturally, for the first half hour, the
site was totally un-reachable. Shows how on the ball NBC is about its site
when a television show can bring it down. Sort of makes it less impressive
that it was down during 9/11... Well, anyway.. I finally managed to get a chance to vote, but after casting
my vote, instead of seeing a confirmation screen, I saw this: My guess is somebody will be fired tomorrow.
Error on getting user info
Error is:DB Error: syntax error
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New Chuck-e-cheese in Greensburg
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Lodge officer training
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Pittsburgh Zoo Boo
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Petting Zoo at the Delmont Apple Festival
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Panera Bread
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Natalie at Mr. Rodger's Neighborhood in the Monroeville Mall.
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Playing air hockey at Chuck-E-Cheese
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My future desk.
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Another Scouting Year Almost Done. I just got back from the October OA Service weekend. Many pictures available. I
had a great time. Now comes the sad part of the year. There will be no more
OA service weekends until April of next year. My year of advising the Administrative Vice-Chief is nearing completion.
OJ has done a great job this year. He will be serving a third term as AVC next
year, but I will not be advising him. Next year, I will be advising the program division of the lodge. Allen will
be the Program Vice-Chief. He and I have already started working together.
Our very first task will be to plan the lodge Banquet for February. In other scouting news, I now have my hands in three different scouting web
sites. I'm still helping out with the Wagion
Lodge #6 web site, though I've handed most of that off to Mike. He and
Bill are doing a great job with that site. Just recently, I've been named the
adviser to the Order of the Arrow, Section
NE-4B web site. We don't have a chairman for that, so I'm just sort of
winging it and taking my queues from the Section Secretary. And finally, I
was just put in charge of the content for the Westmoreland-Fayette Council web site last
weekend. I'm really looking forward to making some good changes there.
posted at: 00:05 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
Natalie playing with Mac and Rowen
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Natalie at Panera Bread
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August OA Weekend. The August OA Weekend was a lot of fun, but it went by way too fast! I had just arrived, and before I knew it, I was leaving. The scouts worked really hard to put together a "Midnight Madness" carnival theme. They did really well, and managed to make a good bit of money on Friday night. However, on Saturday evening we had a really bad storm, so they didn't have any activities for Saturday. I did manage to take quite a few pictures with my new digital camera. You can see the pictures in my gallery.
posted at: 02:31 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
Come work at pair! I have an opening on my software development team at pair. If you have
experience coding in Perl and are interested in working in Pittsburgh, please
send in a resume. Here is some
information about the job description and where to send the resume.
posted at: 17:41 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
World pinball championship
posted at: 18:47 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
Blackjack! I wrote a simple Black Jack
game using Perl and HTML::Mason. Have fun playing it. The purpose of writing the game was really to prototype some techniques that
I've been working on for a project at work. It demonstrates how a complex
multi-page application can be written in a way that keeps code tidy and does
not allow users to bookmark the individual pages.
posted at: 16:55 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
Eagle Scout recognition dinner.
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Happy 4th of July!
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Toronto
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Cool looking ship.
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CN Tower
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Me on a Segway.
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Me in Toronto
posted at: 17:43 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
Day 1 Wrap-Up The opening talks went very well. Larry Wall gave an interesting talk
about building open-source communities. There was also a good talk about the
"State of the Carrot". Though, I was disappointed to find that pair was not
mentioned at all this year. This comes after last year, where we received two
different thunderous applause during the Carrot speech. I attended a few talks today but my concentration was mostly on giving my
talk at the end of the day. There was a talk in the morning about tools for
writing tests for your code. It was good, but also mostly review. There was
also a talk about mod_perl 2.0, which seemed interesting, but dealt with a lot
of things that I didn't have much experience with. My talk went very well. The place wasn't exactly packed. But the people
that did attend seemed to enjoy the talk. I was generally pleased with the
way things went. Immediately after my talk, Meng Wong of pobox.com got a group of people
together for a tour of the city on Segways. I have some pictures stored on my
phone, which I will post when I get home. We found a place that rented out
Segways and took people on tours. Afterwards, we had a really nice dinner in
an old building that was used 130 years ago to store Whiskey at a refinery. I
enjoyed this day a lot. Now with the fretting about my talk out of the way, I can enjoy the rest of
the conference.
posted at: 23:23 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
Slides for my talk. Slides for my talk today are now available here both in PDF and
HTML versions.
posted at: 08:45 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
Arrival Day Managed to get checked out of the Hilton and into the dorm rooms pretty
easily. Cab fare for a 15 minute car ride was about $45. The dorm room is
just about everything I expected. The AC is barely working in my room. The
layout of the room isn't that nice either. I'd say this was obviously designed
with college kids in mind, but it doesn't seem laid out well for that purpose
either. The registration happened a little bit late. Now, I'm waiting a little bit
before its time to head to the arrival dinner. Looks like it will be about a
20 minute walk for that. Itinerary for the rest of the night is to come back and get my slides
polished up for tomorrow. Then, hopefully practice it a few times. Also, looks like the cell phone network up here doesn't support sending
pictures. So, it will be text journal entries for me only until I return to
the United States.
posted at: 17:51 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
Arrival at Toronto I made it to Toronto a little after 3:00 today. My very first commercial
air plane flight went well. The hotel accommodations are very nice, but they
are only for one night, then I will be staying in the conference facility for
the rest of the week. It has dorm-room like conditions, which I do not expect
to be as nice.
Unfortunately, from my hotel, the only thing in walking distance is more
hotels, so I don't think I'll be doing any sight seeing tonight. The taxi
ride, which was less than 5 minutes long cost $18 (Canadian), so I don't think
I'll be taking a cab anywhere either.
posted at: 19:58 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
My flight: Air Canada 7947
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At Pittsburgh airport
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Leanne caught a bass at twin lakes park.
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Another day at Idlewild
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Picnic at the park.
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Rainbow over the south side for my birthday
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Congratulations to OJ and Kenny for getting elected to section office!
posted at: 10:32 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
Wagion volleyball team
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Say goodbye to that beard, Jack!
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Vote for this guy for section chief.
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I wish Leanne would stop throwing garbage on the back porch. The picture did not come out so well. But if you look dead-center in the
picture, you will see a possum. It was standing about two feet away from
Natalie and I on the other side of the sliding door in our kitchen. It was in
to some garbage that Leanne decided to just throw on the back porch rather than
put in a garbage can.
I'm a little concerned that I was standing there banging on the glass, and
it just looked at me and kept on going. It wasn't afraid of me at all.
Natalie had just been outside playing about 15 minutes earlier. Who knows what
might have happened if she saw it and ran up to it.
posted at: 00:54 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
Parking time expired.
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Natalie in the boat at Idlewild
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Playing in the park.
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Natalie and Evalina
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Pittsburgh Perl Mongers talk I gave a talk last night at the Pittsburgh Perl
Mongers meeting about a DBIx::SearchProfiles.
Slides from my talk are available here.
posted at: 09:26 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
Pittsburgh Perl Mongers
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Natalie and Kayla
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Pittsburgh sunset.
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I've had it with Watson Chevy! I took my blazer to Meineke about two weeks ago to get the brakes looked
about because they were squealing a little bit. They told me my brakes were
fine. They said I had about 40% life left in them. So today, I took my blazer to Watson Chevrolet-Olds in Murrysville to get
inspected. They told me that my brakes were completely worn out. They also
told me that my had broken belts in them and that the ball joints were bad in
my front wheels. They wanted $700 to fix everything. So, I took the blazer over to Export Tire to have them look at the tires
since that's where I got the tires. They told me that the belts were not
broken in the tires. They also checked the ball joints and told me that they
were a little loose, but would certainly pass inspection. This is the last time I go to Watson to get my blazer inspected. The
Cavalier is still under warranty, so I'll probably take that there until the
warranty is up. I certainly will not be buying any more vehicles from
them!
posted at: 18:58 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
Opening day for Panera Bread in Murrysville.
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Tomatoes ready to plant.
posted at: 12:04 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
YAPC::NA 2005. I will be speaking at YAPC::NA 2005 (A
programming conference) in Toronto on June 27. The title of my talk is AnyData - A
Case Study. I'm going to be talking about the AnyData Perl module and how
I've used in some of the programs that I've written for pair.
I'm pretty excited. It will be my first time speaking at a conference like
this. Its also going to be my first time ever on a commercial airplane. I've
been to Canada twice before, but never to Toronto, so I guess that's a first
also.
posted at: 00:51 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
April OA Weekend This weekend was the April OA Service Weekend. I had a good time. I helped
to get some work done for the lodge. Mostly, I was just glad to be able to sit
back and watch the officer that I'm advising do his job without much
involvement from me.
The weather was interesting this weekend. I arrived on Friday wearing a
T-Shirt and shorts. When I went home on Sunday, there was snow on the ground.
In between, we had a mix of really cold winds and freezing rain.
posted at: 00:53 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
Our wise lodge adviser.
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Rich's umbrella.
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Saturday vigil meeting.
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Friday night executive committee meeting.
posted at: 20:22 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
Cool.. I'm ranked by Alexa now.
Check it
out. My site gets enough traffic that Alexa actually decided to rank it.
posted at: 15:05 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
Eating ice cream at DQ
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Fun with Google Maps
The hallway is changing color again.
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Riding the horse.
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Enjoying a nice day at the park.
posted at: 00:00 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
One of the reasons I hate shopping at Wal-mart: they always have junk blocking the aisles.
posted at: 23:11 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
Wagion banquet
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Banquet is just a week away. The lodge banquet is just a week away now. My Vice-Chief has been doing a
great job. In some ways, I think advising an officer is a lot easier than
advising a chairman. If the Scout has gotten far enough in the OA that he is
an officer, a lot of the skills are already present. So the adviser has to
take on less of a teacher role and more of a just being there in case something
goes wrong role.
I'm happy to say that my role in the lodge web site is diminishing. I was
really happy to help get that committee up off the ground. But I'm even more
happy to see it being self-sufficient.
I'm also taking up other roles in scouting now. In addition to my
membership on the Council Marketing Committee, I'm now a member of the Council
Camping Committee as well. My present job is to analyze the past performance
of the camp trading post and make suggestions for the present year. The
committee seems to be eager to make some big changes in the trading post in
order to improve revenue and help keep camping fees down.
In other news, we took Natalie to see the new Pooh's Heffalump Movie tonight
along with Evalina and her mom and dad. They had a good time. Afterwards,
we stopped at Dave and Busters for a bite to eat and to play some games. I
think that was probably a bit too much for Natalie.
posted at: 00:10 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
Throwing pennies in the fountain at the mall.
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Natalie at Evalina's birthday party.
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Wagion 6 lodge leadership development course.
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Leanne's birthday dinner at Red Lobster
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My office assistant.
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Merry-go-round
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Natalie and Abigail
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Natalie at a school mate's birthday party at Chuck-e-cheese.
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Natalie and daddy working on the computer.
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Annoying twerp.
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Flowers from Rob and Kim.
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Pittsburgh Perl Mongers meeting.
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Our first camping trip. I set up a dome tent in the living room last night and we all had our first
family camping trip. For Leanne, it lasted about 20 minutes before she
decided she'd rather go upstairs and sleep in a bed. Natalie went upstairs
with Leanne for a bit, but then decided she'd rather sleep in the tent. So she
came downstairs and slept in the tent with me until about 6:00 in the morning.
Then she decided she'd rather have her mom and went upstairs with her. This morning, we had smores and Natalie helped me take the tent down.
Natalie told me she really liked camping. A few more times of doing this and
maybe we'll be ready to graduate to the back yard.
posted at: 15:55 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
Stopping the child from striping in the middle of Wal-Mart.
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It's a hard life.
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Happy New Year Natalie spent last night with her grandparents, and Leanne and I had the
house to ourselves. We decided to go out to Dave and Busters. We stayed there
until closing time around 1:00. It was nice to get out and do something with
just the two of us. After we went up to get Natalie, we came home and watched television. We
all watched the ball drop for New years, then I opened up the front door to see
if I could see any fireworks. I didn't see any fireworks, but I did see
plenty of pretty lights. Apparently a bunch of teenagers were pulled over by
the police right in front of our house. I'm refreshed from having a week off of work, and I'm very anxious to get
back and start working on some new projects at pair. Scouting is going very well. My Vice-Chief is doing an excellent job, and
the Camping Promotions committee has started working on their own. The next
things to look at will be Unit Elections and the Banquet.
posted at: 01:40 | permanent link to this entry | Comments: