It seems like I buy a new computer at least once or twice a year because I have a problem with using outdated technology. Typically, I don’t throw money at a computer that “looks” good (unlike many of my friends). In matter of fact, I truly hate the typical question, “what computer should I buy?” The reason for this is because I first have to figure out what the computer will be tasked with, and then, I have to learn what the latest technology is and if it is worth the cost. It typically takes me a few weeks to a month to have a solid answer for this question.
Last summer, I was looking for a new computer to replace a 12” HP tablet PC that I owned. I wanted the new computer to be mobile, have suitable graphics; processing power and much better battery life (the hour I got out of the tablet was worthless). I settled on a netbook from Dell. It did exactly what I needed although it lacked a big enough screen for any real usability. I typically use my mobile laptop as a dummy terminal that connects to remote systems via Remote Desktop or SSH. I used the netbook for a few months and told myself that I need something that better fits my requirements. After a long search, typical PCs turned up nothing particularly interesting, although I typically require Windows 7 since a majority of my licensed software requires Windows.
I remember meeting up with some friends who are “mac boys” as I like to nickname them last October. They showed me how great the Mac OS is, and I have to admit that some of the features they showed were nice. This along with the fact that I wasn’t really knowledgeable about Apple convinced me to look into an Apple brand computer. I’d like to bring to mind that up until this point, I had very little experience with Macs so I felt that to help aid my extensive administration knowledge, a Mac wouldn’t be a bad investment. The final push that got me over the hill was the fact that the cheapest MacBook pro had really good specs for the price and I didn’t find any PCs that could compare to the specs of the MacBook pro with a similar size.
So around Thanksgiving of 2010, I got a MacBook pro 13” model. Honestly, my first words when it arrived were “this machine needs windows now!”, and I proceeded to configure bootcamp (a way to run Windows natively on the Mac hardware). Bootcamp was an interesting experience because it was so simple that I overthought the problem and ended up having to reinstall the Mac OS. I’m still not entirely sure how I managed that, but command line utilities definitely aided the problems. It is at this point when I realized why people really like Macs. Read the rest of this entry »
I bring a guest post to you from Brian Jenkins from braintrack.com!
What’s the Difference Between Computer Science and Information Technology Degree Programs?
To put it bluntly, the primary difference between a computer science and an information technology (IT) degree program is that IT students study management, information theory, and the use of computers for communication and business, while computer science students study the science of computers and how computers and computer programs work. Computer science has been described as the systematic study of algorithmic processes that create, describe, and transform information.
Included under the umbrella of computer science are the fields of computer technology, software development, programming, web design, and computer and Internet security.
Information Technology Bachelor’s Degree Programs
Information technology degree programs cover how to use computers to efficiently process, share, store, and manage data. These programs thoroughly review database management, systems analysis, software, networking, information assurance, and informatics.
Students are trained to improve the efficiency and capability of information systems so that networks can function properly. They also review telecommunications, electronic commerce, programming, and systems development. Computer systems and network administration are two very popular areas of specialization.
Information Technology Careers
The front-end jobs in this field focus on improving the interface and usability of networks and databases and back-end jobs focus on the support and maintenance of networks and databases.
Here are some of the most sought after information technology jobs:
Network administrators design, install, and support a company’s computer systems. They are responsible for wide area networks (WANs), local area networks (LANs), Internet and intranet systems, and network segments. They focus on the integrity of the network, security, and server development.
Systems administrators make sure the design of a company’s computer system allows all components of the network, including the computers and software, to work together properly. They also troubleshoot any problems that may arise.
Database administrators utilize database management software to determine the best ways to store, organize, present, and use data. They identify the needs of users and set up new computer databases.
Telecommunications specialists deal with the interactions between communications and computer equipment. They design and supervise the installation of video, voice, and data communication systems.
Network architects or network engineers set up, evaluate, and test WANs, LANs, Internet and intranet systems, and other data communications systems.
Computer Science Bachelor’s Degree Programs
These programs emphasize the mathematical and theoretical foundations of computing. Typically the core areas of study are software development and design, computational theory, object-oriented and systems programming, computer design, and discrete mathematics. Most degree programs include a number of intensive math courses.
Computer science students generally study subjects like:
Programming principles
Programming paradigms
Data structures
Algorithms
Computer architecture
Logic and computation
Mathematics
Beyond the basic classes, computer science students select courses from a number of different subfields, including:
Software engineering
Operating systems
Databases
Computer networking
Data communication
Artificial intelligence
Internet computing
Algorithm design and analysis
Compilers
Computer Science Careers
Positions for those with a computer science degree include computer systems designer, software developer, programmer analyst, computer programmer, systems analyst, and Web developer.
Although there is some overlap between computer science and information technology degree programs, each discipline requires a unique set of technical skills.
Brian Jenkins writes about computer technician careers, among other job and career topics, for BrainTrack.com.
Breaking through a restrictive firewall with OpenVPN
Let me start off with wishing you a happy thanksgiving holiday. I was hoping to get this blog done sooner but I have been facing a shortage of time with my regular responsibilities as a student. Anyways, enough about that, this blog post is going to explain how I can break through a restrictive firewall and have a fully usable IP address from the inside of that firewall. This task took me about a month to successfully complete with about 30 consecutive hours so I felt the urge to blog it for the future me, you, the reader can benefit too I suppose. This is a huge blog so it will take a while to read.
The motivation:
I’m a huge fan of landline communication because it has a more stable and clear signal. Unfortunately, my University removed the phone lines from all the rooms and wants $300 for a telephone jack activation and $28/month for local area calling (meaning the 716 area code only). Furthermore, my parents have a calling plan that allows for extreme local calling that doesn’t include the University phone prefix. Before, they didn’t mind paying extra to call me, but now my parents would have to pay for my University phone and the privilege to call me. This just doesn’t make sense.
With this in mind, I started searching for a VoIP provider (Voice over Internet Protocol) that uses SIP (Session Initiation Protocol). For those of you who have never heard of VoIP, it is a simple way to connect a special device to the internet and get a regular telephone jack. This jack can then be connected to an old fashioned telephone (or cordless phone in my case) that can act similarly to a landline. The quality for VoIP is very comparable to a landline when connected to a land based internet connection (meaning it sucks at home), but UB has a land based connection which means it will be fine.
I tested the device at UB over the summer on a network link in a room where I’m completing my master’s project and the device worked fine (I have some control over that firewall). Unfortunately, in my on campus apartment, that connection can’t be altered in my favor. I’ve found that the provider I selected requires unsolicited incoming connections to properly work, something that I know UB would never allow for. Instead of going through Bureaucratic Bulls**t where I would surely loose, I took the alternate route, unblock the connection myself (and use it for my own computers too).
In the end, I have public IP addresses that are totally un-firewalled within my apartment where I can do trace routes and other network diagnostic tasks. I also appear like I’m in Michigan (since that is where the datacenter is).
If you want to know more about how this is done, please continue by reading more. DISCLAIMER: I WILL NOT SUPPORT ANYTHING WITHIN THIS BLOG THAT IS OF YOUR OWN FAULT… The information is provided on an AS-IS basis. I’m sure there are minor mistakes here and there since this blog is almost 12 pages long in Microsoft Word!
One last note: DO NOT ATTEMPT DOING THIS if you are a novice user or someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing! Firewalls are put up for a reason, breaking through them without having a really good reason to do so could harm you and the network you’re on in the long run, especially if you’re at work! I take no responsibility for anything that happens to you.
I’ve spent the last year thinking of ways that I could effectively make a decent April Fools joke. Unfortunately, I am not a creative person in any aspect and I often end up using the ideas of others to make seemingly creative and innovative progress. I’ve never let this stand in my way of progress and I never intend to let it. So instead of doing a prank, I’m going to discuss some “fails” over the past year that I’ve found that I liked for one reason or another.
But first… A few pranks that I was tossing ideas around for but ultimately decided to let go of. Maybe some year
Modify famousphil.com to have a “make believe” virus that would appear to infect your browser / computer. I’m sure that you’ve seen those virus ads on malicious sites, I was considering making one of these, but not nearly as destructive. I decided against this because users would be required to click ok… and well most users tend to click ok without reading (in my experience). I didn’t really want to infect or compromise systems with something thrown together in a few hours for something like today.
Cause intentional intermittent downtime to famousphil. Of course, with this, readers may become discouraged and never come back and that isn’t good.
Post an article on a major subject related to server administration that is actually a huge lie with fake commands that actually cause more confusion / damage than it is worth. Obviously, april fools shouldn’t cause harmful damage so this was out the door immediately.
Finally: edit all of the servers I manage to make common commands / operations looks like major errors occurred (when they really didn’t). I considered this, but I’m not in touch with my other staff members as often as I would like, so they might consider it a real emergency and wake me up early on my sleep in day!
So now onto some of the fails of the year that I really didn’t like when they occurred:
Last June: LXAdmins owner commits suicide after a major web hosting company is hacked and over 100,000 websites are deleted instantly. It is rumored that this is caused by the owner of this web hosting company stored his root passwords in his GMail account which had a weak password. A Matthouse Virtual Server was one of the 100,000 that was affected (although sufficient backups are in place) More Info
Exchange 2003 and 2007 Server: I began implementing an Exchange Email system for myself around June. I remember that when I first implemented 2003, I really hated everything about it. I then upgraded to 2007 and didn’t really like that, so now I am at 2010 and I really like 2010. The failure is that I spent well over 100 hours of my valuable time figuring out what I was going to do about email. I’m still learning a lot about the backend of Exchange.
My backup system, in December, I looked at my backup routine with a critical lens. This was obviously outdated and I also was not even backing up half of the data. I have since found much better methods to backups and they are implemented in the production systems.
My inability to mount a drive as read / write in single user mode causes a 4 hour server outage. About a month ago, I rebooted the main web server that hosts 80% of the Matthouse client sites to test my work on modifying the underlying disk partition structure. It turns out that I was missing a single flag that I blogged about.
My inability to read the server ID before requesting a complete wipe by the datacenter. This caused a 24 hour outage around late December, early January. This fact still sort of embarrasses me to this day, but I doubt I will ever do this again! Good thing I fixed my backups just a week before this. Good news is that the backups work perfectly!
Last December, I was grading exams for my job as a Teaching Assistant with a few other TAs. I was asked to generate a key for the other graders since I wrote a section of problems. I should know the answers to my own problems… but for some reason I made a slight mistake and that propagated onto a little over 60 exams before it was caught. It took another hour to fix.
Last Failure: Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.5.1 Daylight Savings Time option missing: I use a custom built version of this Windows version that omitted the daylight savings time. Because time shifted ahead a few weeks ago, I actually missed an appointment to figure out what I need to do in terms of classes. My phone shifted correctly, but the times in my calendar never adjusted themselves, so I ended up doing it manually after discovering I was exactly 1 hour late for my appointment.
Obviously, I’m not perfect, but I do find that I learn from my mistakes quickly. Hope you enjoyed reading a few of my biggest failures over the past year. My next blog is going to deal with sound wave analysis and the “Loudness Wars”, but I need a bit more research before I jump into the topic.
At the time of beginning this post… it is 12:01am Eastern Time, January 1, 2010. My first words are: Happy New Year! and Happy new decade! Hopefully this decade will bring a lot more fortune than the last one I just want to quickly look back on the last 10 years of my life and the funniest videos of the year that I’ve found.
Ten years ago from today, I did not know much about a computer. I can assure you that I did not know how to turn one on, and I only had a slight clue about what the internet was. At the time, I had high hopes of becoming an electrical engineer and I loved playing around with circuits. I was also much younger and had a lot to learn (obviously). I also wasn’t entirely sure about what all the Y2K stuff was all about, so it didn’t really affect me. Finally, a last tiny tidbit… I have spent *every* new year of my life in my own bedroom here at home. I might be a few feet off from the same position each year, but I’ve basically in the same spot. This is only the third year of my life that I’ve been up to witness the new year come in.
So, how does it feel? I doesn’t feel any different… its just another day. For some people, its an iconic day I suppose, being a new year and all, but for me, nothing has really changed. I will continue to live and will continue to do what I do every day. The only difference is, I will have to get over the annoyance of not remembering to write 2010 on any documents I create for at least the next few weeks (probably about a month or two in reality).
2009 brought me 8 hard drive failures in various machines that I’ve worked on, 2 being my own. It also brought some bad fortune with the passing of my grandmother. On the brighter side, it brought Windows 7, Microsoft Exchange, XM Radio, 2 new Laptop computers, a new server, and the magic of Verizon wireless high speed internet here at home. It also brought me a wonderful job at my college and lots of new knowledge about computers. Overall, 2009 for me was a decent year, especially considering the killing I made on Ebay selling Michael Jackson dolls (I sold quite a few within the first day after his death). Of all the stuff that 2009 brought, perhaps the biggest was a new and improved FamousPhil.com. Within the next few weeks, FamousPhil.com will change slightly again to become more smooth in color transitions
In 2009, I watched a lot of amazing video. I think its time to share some of the more memorable youtube links of the best videos I saw in 2010! I’m also going to leave this blog post here. I hope that your 2009 was as enjoyable as mine and that your 2010 brings good tidings Enjoy!
Ancient Modem that still works (seen on Yahoo for several weeks back in June, 2009)
World’s Fastest Speed Reader reading the original Health Care Bill – Cavuto (Fox News)
Glen Beck – Turtles on TV (You may have to get half way through this partially edited clip)
Next up is from a movie that was hilarious (Monsters vs. Aliens). I also liked High School Musical 3.
I discovered something about geiko!
And finally, the video that combines it all together perfectly!
First, I would like to wish you a Merry Christmas! This has been a long year for me!
6 score and days ago (clever huh? ) I was preparing for a new semester at the University at Buffalo. Little did I know what I would be getting myself into. I was enrolled in 17 credit hours (8 undergrad, 9 grad) with a really split schedule. This and an unexpected Teaching Assistant position pretty much took all of my energy away for most of the semester. Included I’d like to provide some tips after looking back that might help others facing similar schedules.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t make my schedule in such a way that I could have classes in a long solid chunk like I have had in past semesters. I wasn’t expecting this to be hard to handle, but I was expecting a bit of lost time throughout the semester. This is because most of my work is project based and I’m not very efficient with doing work when I have an hour here and there to do the work.
The reason why is because it takes me a good half hour to an hour to get into an efficient working rhythm. I prefer having a large chunk of contiguous time to handle any chunk of work that I need to get done because I enter a mood and I work very quickly and efficiently. Programming is one of the huge tasks that I do that requires large chunks of contiguous time.
During the semester I couldn’t find large chunks of time to get work done and this probably hurt me a little bit, but I did get through it. I managed to get by through losing the concept of a “life”. Most of my weekends were spent working on projects that were due, and I was limiting my sleep to 6 hours a night. During the last 2 weeks, I had so much work left to do and so little time that I finally gave up on the concept of getting it all done in time. I switched over to a “best effort” approach and started getting my 8 hours of sleep every night again. This probably saved me the most because I quit worrying as much and I started being more productive.
After adjusting, I did start a paper todo list. I found this to be very helpful compared to my computer based todo list because I could cross stuff off and it would still appear on the paper. My computerized todo list removes my items from the list so I can’t see what I’ve accomplished. This was a huge set back for me until I realized it was happening. I will hopefully have a solution to this problem in the next few weeks to prepare for next semester.
Here are my tips: If you are in a situation where you don’t have enough time to do all the work, I recommend taking the stress out of the picture and start sleeping again. I found that losing sleep wasn’t helping the problem at all. I just couldn’t focus. I also admit that I didn’t get everything done, but the tiny details were the things that I left out. In my best effort approach, I quit doing the stuff that wasn’t worth a lot of points for my time and that was a huge help. Another huge thing that helped was a todo list on paper. This managed to keep me organized until I could finish and proved to me that I was moving forward.
All in all, I did enjoy the last semester. I learned a lot from it in many aspects that I can hopefully take away into future tasks that I need to handle. I would like to thank everyone who had to put up with me last semester, I probably wasn’t in the best of moods most of the time
This topic came up in a CSE 505 (programming languages) lecturer last night and I decided that I’d share the truth with my readers (you). If you didn’t know, I am a teaching assistant for the 2nd part of the introduction to Java course at UB. When I took CSE116 originally (the course I now TA for), I didn’t really grasp the material well and I admittedly was quite lost. Now that I teach the material (and assist students with the material), I know the material quite well. What happened?
Last night in CSE505, Dr. Jayaraman was giving a lecture and came to a power point slide that had a typo on it. Naturally during the lecture, a student corrected him, and he admitted that he does make mistakes. He then went into an aside how many professors want to learn new subjects and the other staff members suggest they teach a course on that subject. He said that it is very true that professors end up teaching courses on material that they’ve never learned before. Furthermore, many of the professors will admit (especially to their TAs that they are only a week or two ahead of the students who are learning the material). Off the top of my head, I can name off two professors at UB that can fit this description to a tee! I’m sure that if I thought, I could name off a few more.
So now onto my case. Being a TA has really re-enforced this concept of learning the material thoroughly. I often have to review concepts a week or two before they come up in the lab that I formally teach the concepts to. I firmly believe that if I cannot do the material thoroughly myself, I have no business in teaching it or expecting someone to do it for me. This is why I often do the work before the students and figure out exactly where I fail so that I can warn my students of what they will run into.
In addition to being a TA, I also offer a lecture series on website development. My original reason for wanting to offer a web development series was to improve my speaking skills which aren’t up to par (see my blog from last April…). I must say that since becoming a TA and Lecturer, I have become much better at speaking to audiences and my shaking has definitely dropped to non existent.
With my website development series offering, I expected to get over the anxiety of presenting, what I didn’t expect to learn was that I really sucked on terminology in website development. Sure, I made a great famousphil.com over the course of 6 months, and sure, I got everything working flawlessly and securely; but could I teach how I did it formally. i quickly found out that there were so many pieces that I take for granted.
If you would like an example, here is one. In XHTML Strict development, there is always the same header that should be placed on every page. This is:
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">. Other than knowing how to copy paste this line of code specifying the document type, I never actually knew what any of it meant (other than it required that I program in Strict XHTML). Giving a lecture on this line really made me spend a half hour researching what everything meant and why it was necessary.
It isn’t that I don’t know web design, but formally, I needed to learn a lot to give lectures that made some sense. Normally I’d just assume that the HTML specifications I’m writing are correct. This lecture series has really taught me a lot about how to formally develop websites. I’m also finding that I’m a whole 2 days ahead of the students who are attending the lectures! Fortunately, it has met my original goal of improving my public speaking skills to groups of students. Hopefully I can get some feedback from the students and perhaps offer the same series again next semester, but a bit more organized and a bit easier to understand.
That is all I have to say. Feel free to leave your two cents. Oh, and that blog on Exchange gateways is coming, I just need to update it. Ubuntu 9.10 was released and I’d like to have it current for this new update to Ubuntu!
After Thoughts:
After discussing this further with a professor, I completely overlooked one point. That is, normally professors have many years of experience in related topics. For example, prior to teaching website development, I have been in the field for about 7 years and I understand what most HTML tags do. I can use the knowledge that I have to research information that might not be that clear to me. I know for a fact that I couldn’t teach an art history course because I just don’t have the background in that field to know where to begin. So teaching the material does require some background in the subject matter, it just doesn’t necessarily mean that you know that subject explicitly.
From the title, I’m sure that you can infer that I recently experienced someone burning out or I burned out. To remove the inference, I’m fairly sure that I hit my breaking point this past Monday around midnight. I didn’t realize it until a few minutes after I hit the point, but I’m going to put some tips in this post that will help you identify when burn out occurs and why it can be spectacular to watch.
Normally, burnout occurs from having the answer the same question, or repeat yourself many times over and over. It eventually gets to the point where you can’t stand it anymore and you bust. Another instance that causes burn out (and in my case is true) is pushing yourself to the limit for long periods of time with little self time. Not setting time aside for yourself can make the burn out happen quickly and be the prime reason for fireworks. Now to define burnout. As wikipedia puts it, burnout is the experience of long-term exhaustion and diminished interest.
In my case, I am normally a very calm, patient person that is willing to put up with a lot of nonsense for a long period of time without loosing my temper or cool. Having experienced burnout only on Monday, I wasn’t really sure what was happening.
I was working as normal on coding for a school project due in a few weeks (I’m normally a week or two ahead of the due dates). For some reason around midnight, the lack of sleep coupled with I couldn’t get a piece of code to work properly caused me to hit the breaking point. For a few minutes, my laptop was likely worried (if it has feelings) that it might go out the window and 5 stories below the airborne way. Thankfully, I had a lot of other (non expensive) cups and papers and remotes that I could throw and erupt at.
I normally don’t throw stuff or really get upset like that but for some reason, it was simply an uncontrollable reaction. Because of this happening, I decided to take it easy this week and only slightly push to get the rest of my tasks for the week done. This weekend is going to be entirely taken off and I plan on watching several movies. Hopefully I can get this stress gone so that I can focus on school work again next week without the kind of stress that I’ve noticed lately.
Burnout can be quite spectacular. with me, I found it was totally uncontrollable. I also found that I was quickly able to fix the problems and lighten the load to make the stress go away quickly (basically that is why I keep a 1-2 week buffer on work due). I’ve also noticed that I’m slowly regaining my productivity that I lost a month ago when I started overworking myself. I’m assuming that I’m going to have to push starting next week again, but I will not push nearly as hard as I have been pushing.
In conclusion, always take time for yourself, you need it! Burnout does happen, and when it does, it is usually uncontrollable. You certainly don’t want that, do you? I don’t think so!
Just by looking at the title, I’d hope that you can at least partially relate to what I’m going to blog about today. As you may or may not know, I am a computer science major at the University at Buffalo going on my 4th year of studies. In computer science classes, it is well known that you will be expected to complete programming assignments, it makes common sense doesn’t it. A big chunk of the computer science program at UB deals with programming assignments, and most of these projects are not trivial.
: Normally when completing a math assignment, there is only one way to come out to the correct answer (eg. 2+2=_; _=4). In programming, this is not the case. Usually there are at least 5 to 10 different methods to solve the same problem in a given language (C, C++, .NET, Java, Erlang, Prolog, Lisp, etc). For example, to add up all the numbers from 1 to 10 in Java, a programmer may choose to implement any kind of loop that increments a variable each time and save the answer or they may choose to just flat out add 1+2+3… on one single line and print out the answer.
To get back to the topic in hand, thr0ugh my entire time here at UB (up to but not including this semester), I would always begin my programming assignments the day they were handed out. I would then spend countless hours with all of my free time finishing them well ahead of schedule. This was partially because I am an early person and I hate being late with any type of commitment I have. The other half of this was because I normally had no clue what had to be done so I would spend countless hours researching the topic to figure out where to begin (this process included visiting professor and TA office hours). Almost always between this research and working on a project, I could expect to spend anywhere from 10 hours to 150 hours per project from start to finish.
An example of a 10 hour project when I first started learning Java in a freshman course was to make this fish tank program that had swimming fish. Naturally, most of the support code and advanced code was already written for me, but it would be my job to figure out what that code did and tie it together into what the assignment was asking. Unfortunately, not knowing what I was doing (I might have had a clue but not much more), it would take me on average 10 hours to learn what the assignment was asking me to do and figure out the 10 lines of code that made the project work. The projects that fall in this category tend to have a week to complete the assignment and I barely had enough time to learn what I was supposed to learn.
Later in the program, I got into projects that would easily take 100 to 200 hours to complete. A good example of such a project would be a program that works with storing data in the computer. In computer science, there are methods that allow the programmer to store data and these are called data structures. One such data structure that I had to work with in this project was a binary search tree. I doubt you know what this is, but the important part is to picture a tree outside. Think that all the leafs on the tree are the data stored in the tree and the branches are a way to get to those leafs, this is a very vague picture of what a binary search tree does. Anyways, the project example would use a tree of some sort to store a dictionary and implement a spell check functionality using a tree, which tends to be much faster in dictionary lookups than other data structures.
If you don’t understand whats above, don’t worry, I don’t expect that anyone outside of computer science would have the slightest clue to what I said above is actually trying to get across. The fact is, through all of my past 3 years, I discovered that I’m really good at estimating how long a project will take and I decided that I’d plan ahead for a project that was due a couple weeks ago. I gave myself *just* enough time to complete that project based on what I felt it would take in terms of time, etc.
You might say that I kind of started it at the last minute (although I started days ahead of time because I estimated it would take 100 hours or so). Anyways, I choose to start precisely 1 week prior to the due date for a project that had a full month to complete. Normally, this is acceptable in most disciplines. Since I thought I knew enough to do this project in 100 hours, that is why I decided to start later.
Up until this project, I have never risked starting a project so late, especially a programming project that I really care about. You might say that I was experimenting with seeing how late I could start and still finish on time. Unfortunately, starting late because I thought I knew what I was doing burned me. I ended up doing a programming marathon with little sleep from that Thursday to that Sunday when the project was due.
From this experience, I have learned never to start late. I consider it my one trial for lateness to see what happens when I start something late, and for me, I write horrible code and my work is crappy. I also learned that when I work under pressure, I tend to give up a lot easier on tiny bugs, and I also found that I didn’t even do common sense error checking that I normally would do. The result, I submitted a half working project that might get a 75/100.
Perhaps you can use this example to convince yourself that you should never plan time without adding a buffer to it. Starting at the last minute is bad news, especially if you need to ask questions that may not come up until you actually attempt to submit your project.
I am taking an unusual course this semester that is titled “software engineering” but covers a much wider scope of not only software engineering, but common life problems. The instructor, Michael “Fantastic” Buckley, took a few days outside of the curriculum to discuss bad vs good design in everyday life. This really has made me think a lot about designs and how horrible they tend to be.
The ultimate bad design that has always slowed me down is here at the University at Buffalo. If you have any classes in the Natural Sciences Complex (NSC), you know exactly what I am going to be ranting about. Have you ever got caught in the after class rush hour traffic? (sorry, I had no better words). Whoever engineered the exit door for NSC into the surrounding buildings really designed it badly. There are two doors and a single file stair case (basically 1 lane coming up and 1 lane going down). Trying to push about 1000 people through that staircase at the same time results in HUGE backups and it usually takes me 5 minutes to get through that passage when leaving class late. Here is a picture of this design:
Another bad design at the University at Buffalo is the front lawn between Bell Hall and Bonner Hall. In this case, there is a sidewalk that runs about 150 feet in a square around this huge patch of grass. Diagonally, there is a really beaten path that is now showing only dirt. Unfortunately, whoever designed that path didn’t realize that putting a sidewalk through the center might be a good idea since the door to a building is about 20 feet from that diagonal path and most people going to it come from the exact opposite corner of that patch of grass. Note that a^2 + b^2 = c^2 and the hypotenuse (c) is obviously the shortest path and most people take the shortest path.
Now lets talk a little about door handles. Have you ever sprained your wrist because a door handle looked like a handle you pull, yet at that door, you push it? Or even yet, a door bar that you push but the door was actually meant to be pulled? I can give you many instances of this that occur on the University at Buffalo campus and I’m sure you could give me many examples also. Mike pointed out a really surprising but believable story. Between the math building and NSC, there is a tunnel that connects both buildings together. The doors open out of this tunnel and both sides of the doors have a pull handle. Someone entered this tunnel through one door and got trapped because he couldn’t pull and didn’t try to push the door open. This is truly a bad design and it could potentially scar people who got seemingly trapped. This is very similar to people who get trapped in an elevator once and never ride them again.
Naturally, I could go on and on about bad design so I’m going to stop ranting here. I am going to leave this little tidbit for you though: as you go through the day, how often do you hit a bad design such as the door handle and blame yourself for being stupid? I know I do it quite often. Mike pointed out that it really isn’t the case that I’m stupid, but rather, the person who designed what I’m doing wasn’t really thinking critically for real life application. So the next time you hit a bad design, blame the designer, not yourself!
) I was preparing for a new semester at the University at Buffalo. Little did I know what I would be getting myself into. I was enrolled in 17 credit hours (8 undergrad, 9 grad) with a really split schedule. This and an unexpected Teaching Assistant position pretty much took all of my energy away for most of the semester. Included I’d like to provide some tips after looking back that might help others facing similar schedules.
