Everything In Between

As I was reading my newsfeeds tonight, I came across several pieces of Python code supposedly written in one half of an hour. It took me half that much time just to read through the whole thing, and I still don’t really undertstand it all. In short, this left me feeling stupid.

(The code in question was Rui Carmo‘s Netgrowl.py. Rui Carmo is someone I consider a guru, and someone I look up to even though my only interaction with the man is from reading his web site.)

Then, when I was done and thoroughly convinced that I’m an idiot and will never be able to do quality coding because of various still-valid reasons (like not experimenting enough, which is the big one), I came across this pargraph in an article from About Perl/PHP regarding how to be a programming guru:

If you want to be a guru then you’ll have to accept that no matter how much you know, you’ll never feel like you know anything at all. So try not to get bogged down if you start to feel inadequate. That feeling will never go away if you’re worth your salt, so don’t let it bring you down. Just focus on trying to learn as much as you can, and sharing your knowledge when you have the chance. That’s really the best that any of us will ever be able to do.

Now I don’t feel so bad, so I’m glad I stumbled upon that when I did.

Life has been pretty difficult for me lately. Between erratic sleep cycles, Danica’s wild mood swings, lack of work (and thus, income), and the frustrating obstacles I face when trying to learn all the computer stuff I’m interested in, I spend most of my days feeling like I’m just trying to “make do” the best I can. I really hate that feeling.

O. M. G. I am amazing.

No, not just a random narcissistic comment, but rather a pat on the back for dealing with a wildly depressed partner while going on 29 hours without any sleep.

Yup, that’s right. I’ve surfed so much that I finally reached the end of the internet.

Now that I’ve blogged about this, I’m going to go see what’s on the other side. Hehe….

I am now officially phone-less. No landline, and now, no cell phone either. Which sucks, because having a phone is sort of important. I went out today, and after sitting at a diner I realized I didn’t have my phone with me. I always have my cell phone with me. I was a bit worried, but figured I had left it at home. I never leave it at home. But y’know, maybe just this once?

So I arrived home just a little while ago and, unfortuantely, there is no phone in sight. I tried calling my phone from my girlfriend’s cell phone to see if it was anywhere in the house. (My apartment is so small that if my phone rang in the middle of the night, the neighbors could hear it.) Unfortunately, no phone to be heard.

So I left a message, saying to please email me if the phone would be found. I’m hoping some good samaritan will have found it and picked it up (and checked the messages). Actually, I should probably send a text message too. Just a moment…. Ok, text message sent. Here’s hoping that does some good. I’ll have to contact T-Mobile and see what can be done about this. Phonep? :( No.

Oh, so in case it’s not obvious yet, if you call my cell phone I’ll probably not answer you.

Update: Good news! My mom called me today, when I didn’t have my phone. Thankfully, someone at EJ’s Luncheonette picked it up, and she was able to discern that I lost my phone and where it was. I picked it up today, and now I have my cell phone back. Phonep? T!

This is precisely why I uninstalled Norton AntiVirus the moment I discovered Avast! 4.5.

After a rash of coincidences revolving around Flickr, I’ve decided to go get my own Flickr account. Unfortunately, this has led to the realization that I have no photos I want to put up. I guess I like doing things backwards.

Randomness:

• College is a business, not an educational institution.
• Scientists love porn.

• According to one legend, Apple Computers is named Apple Computers because: It was the favorite fruit of founder Steve Jobs. He was three months late in filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call his company Apple Computers if the other colleagues didn’t suggest a better name by 5 o’clock.

  Update: Tom of AtomicBird.com has just informed me of another story about the origins of the Apple Computer name and logo:

  It comes from the legend about how Isaac Newton discovered gravity. The legend says that Newton was sitting under an apple tree, and an apple fell on his head. This caused Newton to think about why it fell, and why things should fall down and not some other way, and eventually led to his theory of gravity.

  When Apple computer was started, they hoped that it would be not just an electronics company but a force for inspiration that might change the world. They adopted “apple” as a reference to the apple that fell on Isaac Newton, suggestign that their computers could serve to inspire people in the same way that the apple inspired Newton. At first, the company logo was not the rainbow-colored Apple, but was instead a picture of someone sitting under a tree, with an apple in the tree looking like it was about to fall on their head. You can find this logo online, for example, right here.

  Very interesting.

• Noah Wyle confirms the legitimacy of RSS.

O. K.

I think I have DSPS, or Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome. I always thought it was insomnia, but now I’m not really sure anymore. With insomnia, you’re tired but you can’t really sleep for some reason. You want to sleep, but can’t. With DSPS, you’re just not tired and so the thought of sleep never really occurs to you until it’s daylight and you’re suddenly (and seemingly inexplicably) exhausted. Then you curl up in bed, wrap yourself in your blanket and vanish into unconsciousness without a second thought. So now I’m not sure if I’m really an insomniac, someone afflicted with DSPS, or somewhere in between.

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I was just heading to bed (well, kinda) but this was too blogworthy to pass up.

Browsing my newsfeeds, I happened upon this post from Andy Budd which points to this Mac OS X Hints post regarding a CSS-savvy web developer trying to do some online shopping. Unfortunately for the online store owners, their pages are unusable due to a serious rendering bug caused by their stylesheets. But rather than shop elsewhere, Lee Noble fixed the problem using a quick user stylesheet applied via Safari.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the Web puts the users in control, the way it always should be!

In Poker, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. When you’re an absolute beginner, no one can possibly predict what you are going to do. But sit down and play a few hands, get a feel for the game, and suddenly you’re just a fish in a sea full of sharks.

The same can be said for Web Design. Put a text document up on your web site and what can go wrong? Not that much, yet. But start marking that document up with some basic HTML and things can get ugly very fast if you don’t know what you’re doing.

New Web designers, and even experienced ones at times, constantly ask about screen resolution. They’ve realized that a design meant for a 1024 by 768 display isn’t going to look very good on a display sized at only 800 by 600 pixels. And since we’re working with the infinitely, personally malleable medium that is the Web, web page authors don’t know ahead of time what screen resolution we’ll be using to view their pages with. This can be a real tricky problem.

But like our Poker problem above, the solution is to keep learning new design techniques.

It is interesting to observe that newcomers to Web design only run into this problem when they begin to desire pixel-perfect control over their designs. They elect to wrap their content in a <div> or <table> of fixed-width, and that’s when the problem hits them. Before they made such a rigid design choice, however, the document flow took care of all their resolution-related worries and their pages would stretch with the browser viewport the way the tide is pulled by the moon.

So when I run across a web designer having trouble with this issue, I like to remind them that percentages are their friend. Flexible layouts can be far more elegant than a fixed design ever could. Rather than define a fixed measurement for any element’s dimensions, its dimensions can be sized in relation to its neighbors (or in the case of the root element, the browser viewport). This is known as liquid design.

But even this has some limitations, especially when said viewport becomes really tiny. That’s why a compromise using a resolution-dependant layout can often be the best of both worlds. The key is to realize that differences in hardware, software, and configuration settings will make a page look a bit different wherever you go—and to work with that instead of against it.