crmacd

What is the world? That which you make it. What you make it, is it beautiful?
Christopher MacDougald

So, I’m the usual (crazy) professional programmer who finds reading about programming interesting to say the least. Today I ran across an interesting article about Using Bugs To Bring Developers and Testers Closer Together which lead me to this article Makers and Breakers. There was this great quote:

Suppose there is a village in which every man must be clean shaven. There is a male barber living in the village who shaves those men, and only those men, who do not shave themselves. Who shaves the barber? –Bertrand Russell

What was so remarkable was the flawed (or what I saw was flawed) logic in the whole discussion on the articles page. Lets take a look one sentence at a time.

• Suppose … clean shaven.

First off it says nothing about anyone else in the village. We can only know that there are men there. We don’t know anything else about who else is there. That and they must be clean shaven. OK. Next sentence.

• There … shave themselves.

There is a barber who shaves men who do not shave themselves. So there are men in town who shave themselves. Therefore the last sentence (question).

• Who shaves the barber?

It’s obvious he shaves himself. Now, if you look at the discussion it was obvious that people were thinking a little too hard about this one. This logic (or complete over site by me) makes both of these articles lose key points the authors attempt to make. I just found it interesting the no one picked up on how easy the logic seemed. Feel free to comment on this as well as my grammar/spelling mistakes.

I agree w/ your rant.

It is a sad day for technology when BBS had more usability than present
day GUI applications.

When I learned HTML in 1992/1993 I remember finding this treasure:

http://werbach.com/barebones/ - The Bare Bones Guide to HTML.

If you want someone to use your methods, products, etc. make it easy to
understand and write for a general audience. Why do you think a
majority of newspapers are written at a 6th grade level? Why do you
think 5 year olds can use Windows? Better yet why can a 5-year-old
program in VB? The GUI, intuitive layouts, and documentation are
created so they can read and actually understood. It would be great if
5 year olds and people with no formal training could write or add
modifications to open source projects. Imagine a newbie being able to
patch a kernel problem.

Both standards organizations and the open source community have lessons
to learn (myself included - my grammar and spelling are horrible).
Remember DOS? What happened? What did MS learn that we (the open source
community) did not? Intuitive GUIs is what I feel they learned (or
copied depending on your opinion) and documentation for the common
user. We have lessons to learn from our mistakes. I personally think we
have brilliant people writing excellent software, however, I feel they
are so intelligent they forget about those who are not as well educated
as them. Please keep the 5 year olds and people who are using a
computer for the first time in mind when you write documentation and
software. After all you learned some time ago and started somewhere,
just as they are now. I know we all complained about the documentation
then, so why repeat that cycle. Can we not learn from our past
mistakes? Why do you think they have the dummies series? We forgot in
all our feature rich excitement about the average user who does not
have a technical background.

Remember we all had to learn technology. DonǃÙt forget the past or you
are likely to repeat itǃÙs mistakes. Above all KISS - keep it simple
stupid (or keep it simple or you will appear stupid).

I find this blogging to be rather interesting. I would like to take this post to express a quick look at what it has done to the online community.

First off I have noticed a lot of people or reading and actually creating communities of religious (almost) followers to sites. I have to admit that Eric Meyer does an excellent job of explaining CSS and other online technologies. I find myself at least spending 5 - 10 minutes on the site everyday looking up CSS, or reading some his latest observations. This strange occurrence of followers is a kind of new/old devotion. I can remember when people would devote themselves to certain BBS and in the attempt to access to ‘hidden’ areas of the system.

Second, I can not help but talk about freedoms of expression and speech. Personally, I find it fascinating to see the level of self editing that goes on. I was quite surprised to see lots of personal information on certain sites which tend to for the most part be reserved in their writing. I’m still trying to figure out why this is.

Third, topics of discussion are just random! I can’t believe peoples postings sometimes. I realize that this last sentence could come back to haunt me but, oh well. I’ve learned more about the dynamics of people and what their hobbies and interests are by reading various blogs. I consider this random topic occurrence to be all part of the chaos theory but, only time will tell.
Conclusions to be drawn at a later time…

Well the following was just something I was thinking about off the top of my head. I figured I would use this blog as a sort of journal and collection of random thoughts so we see what it grows into.

Programming: Today I’m attempting to get a PHP/XHTML form to post to itself until the users entities are completely validated. Once, validated I want the application to POST the (validated POST values) to another URL. We shall see where it goes from here. JS or Sockets that is the question. I’ve been trying to use the PHP.net comments to build something but nothing seems to work. Back to the drawing board. We shall have to see what I come up with to solve this problem. In the mean time if anyone has a working online example please contact me.

In an attempt to create something of a online journal of my thoughts I have decided to open a blog. I’m a very large fan of some other online bloggers and figured it was about time to try one of my own. So we shall see where this project takes me.

Until next time…