M362

being consistent
when things aren’t

2014-01-24

time flies…

The course web-site is up. There’s the usual, “hail fellows well met” introductions, they come first. Next on the agenda are the software install woes and hells. Normally I’m a wee bit bemused by the these hells and woes—we’re third-level computer students, why do we have so many problems doing a basic thing like installing software?

I see the problems right enough, installing software is often a complete pain but we’re surely beyond being hand-held on this? After all, at some point on this course, we are going to have to debug some mess that we’ve created with threads. Whatever we want to do with computers, and I hate computers, we should be pretty-expert at using them? We should be able to deal with our own dependencies. If you can’t set-up a computer to do what you want it to do, should you really be diddling with the guts of it?

Once-upon-a-time my answer would have been a definite affirmative. I’m still there when it comes to software but I’m beginning to doubt everything. Doing a degree, for me, has been an exercise in injecting doubt into my head. What I once saw as easy I now see as a grey area.

I haven’t installed the course software yet. In a large part because I have NetBeans 7.2.1 and a shared project that involves maven and a neoj4 graph database. I sense problems getting the course software loaded in a way that doesn’t mess that up. Not problems that I see as insurmountable but problems where I don’t have my usual back-ups available.

Normally [before] I can use multiple computers with different configurations. Now my admin rights at work have been swiped from me I’m a wee bit stymied. I could get them back, by asking, or just plain steal them; that seems a wee bit like a cop-out. I won’t get away with that in real life. So I’m down with the we’re-all-in-this-together, so give me the answer. Let’s share.

However you want to interact with computers, if you are a serious diddler you may not have to how they work at a micro level but you’d better be able to mess with them at the macro. You’d better be able to install software, configure a firewall and know about how your IDE works.

Otherwise you will be left asking daft questions in forums, getting stupid answers and writing no code. These ain’t no telescopes folks, you can’t just look.

Why do you code?

2014-01-11

a real tale

A while ago my business manager came to me with a problem, not one that I was supposed to fix but one that he felt I might have an insight into; ie geek stuff.

Background: oor Council, like the NSA, seems to need up-to-the-minute info. about schoolkids and has a database to do so. There was a wee problem…

Multiple users could open the database but if one of then wrote to it then the others couldn’t. [Well they could try but they’d get a sinister-looking dialog that warned of death if they continued.] I’m parsing our conversation; what impressed me was that he had realized that concurrent access was the problem. The conversation that followed was a bit of an eye-opener to me.

Aside from me having a better jargon he and I both knew what the essentials of the problem were. The only difference was that he thought that there was a fix, I knew that there wasn’t. Or rather I knew that we might do better but I saw the trade-off—you can only cope with edge-cases better by degrading performance for the general-cases.

I might as well have not have been for all the insight that I supplied; my fix was all about people. Does it have to be so?

Time to get behind the jargon and see—you aren’t a proper geek if all you have is better words.