Daniel Pietzsch

Is programming our era’s equivalent of literacy?

Look at the FAQs on H.R. Giger’s website. They are totally honest and straight forward; definitely not your usual ‘fake’ FAQs.
I particularly like this section (it is long, but totally worth it):

WHEN SHOULD FANS CONTACT GIGER’S AGENT?

Hardly ever. But fans being fans and not always prone to listening to reason, they will do whatever they want, regardless of the advice given here. That’s the nature of the Internet. So, if you believe you need an answer to a specific question not touched upon in this FAQ section, you can try to Email Les Barany and he will try to respond to you if he can.
If you have already written to him and did not receive a reply, it’s most likely because he has not gotten around to opening your mail, or because your question has already been dealt with here, or was too obvious, too ridiculous, or too vague. As you can imagine, he gets a lot of Email and has an only a limited amount of time for replies, which restricts his ability to reply to everyone. If you will write about something that is not directly related to Giger’s artwork, don’t be surprised if you do not receive an answer. If your letter catches Les’ interest, you may hear from him, eventually, sometimes many months later. Be prepared, it may not be the answer you expected.

Here is an example, for the enlightenment of everyone:

I’m an aspiring artist and a big fan of Mr. Giger’s work, and was wondering if you could possibly give me some advice? Any help you could give me would be greatly appreciated, particularly if you could guide me as to what courses you feel would be of most benefit to me.

Dear Aspiring Artist:

Here is my advice. Think of it as a five-year plan:

Take whatever courses you find the most interesting.

Study closely the work of the Old Masters.

Stop making art that originates only from your own imagination.

Stay with one technique until you perfect it.

On any given day, always be in the middle of reading a book. When you finish one, start the next. Fiction, nonfiction, biographies, autobiographies, history, science, psychology, or how to build a kite. Anything but go easy on the comic books.

Buy and read the first 6 pages of newspaper every day and also the editorial commentaries. Skip the entertainment section. Su Doku is fine. Do the crossword puzzle.

Fill up a sketchbook every month with pen or pencil drawings of the world around you, not from your imagination.

Buy a book on figure drawing. It’s the only art book you will ever need.

Until you can draw an accurate portrait of someone, you don’t know how to draw.

Stay away from the airbrush. You’ll never master it, hardly anyone ever has.

Visit every museum in your city. Often, until you have seen everything in it. Every kind of museum. Not only the art museums but, of course, those as well.

Forget about contemporary art by living artists, at least for the next few years.

Stay away from most art galleries. Go to art auctions. That’s where the real action is.

Learn to play chess.

Take a business course.

Talk to you mother or father at least once a week.

Stop going to the movies until you have rented and seen every film on this list. http://www.time.com/time/2005/100movies/the_complete_list.html

Do not watch television unless it’s the news or documentaries.

Do not use an Ipod.

No video games, either.

Learn a foreign language.

Learn to cook.

Spend 8 hours in a hospital emergency room.

Save up money so you can travel to a foreign country within the next five years.

Do not litter.

Avoid politically correct people.

Vote in every election or never dare to utter a political opinion. You are not entitled to one.

Buy a digital camera and take photos every day. If you see nothing interesting to photograph, you will never be a good artist. Keep only one photo of every ten you take. Delete the rest. It will force you to learn how to edit the garbage from your life, to make choices, to recognize what has real value and what is superficial.

Visit an old age home.

Listen to classical music and jazz. If you are unable to appreciate it at least as much as contemporary music, you lack the sensitivity to develop into an artist of any real depth.

Go to the ballet. Classical or Modern, it doesn’t matter. It will teach you to appreciate physical grace and the relationship between sound and movement.

Wake up every morning no later than 8 AM, regardless of what time you went to sleep.

Learn to play a musical instrument.

Learn to swim.

Keep your word.

Never explain your art. People who ask you to do so are idiots.

Never explain yourself. Better yet, never do anything that will, later, require you to explain yourself or to say you’re sorry.

Always use spell check.

Stop aspiring and start doing.

This will keep you very busy but it can’t be helped. In my opinion, this is how you might, possibly, have a shot at becoming a good artist.

Hope this helps,

Les Barany

This describes a problem I experience quite often:

You’ve been using alt-tab to bounce back-and-forth between your text editor and your web browser—you’ve formed a habit. You now click over to your Twitter client to see your friend’s latest updates, click back to your text editor, type a few sentences and hit alt-tab. What happens? Because of your habit, you expect it to go to your web browser, but because the last used application was your Twitter client, that’s where it switches. That’s most likely not what you wanted. What happens next? You generally pause to think, and then use double alt-tab to switch where you wanted to go, which is your web browser. Then you hit alt-tab to switch back to your editor (habit!) and instead it goes back to Twitter. The troubled cycle repeats until MRU’s [MRU - Most Recently Used] ordered once again aligns with your habit.

It’s an interesting article, which asks more questions than giving solutions, although it provides one solution candidate.

I didn’t know that some people put that much thought into this, especially because I don’t know if this problem is solvable at all. I hold it with commenter Ralf G, who says:

The problem with your proposed solutions is the “almost always”. I don’t particularly like the current alt+tab situation (see below) but it at least behaves predictably. I think it might be possible to do what you describe IF you had deep insight into the state of apps. As an example, after you get an IM, the user switches to the Adium window 95% of the time. The problem is when behaviors aren’t well defined.

There’s also the problem that this is not a very commonly used keyboard command, as Rob points out:

Cool article but I think there is a bigger elephant in the room.
How does a user discover the alt-tab mechanism?
Alt-tab has to be the single least discoverable keystroke in personal computing.
Christ-come-to-Earth would need his mate with a BSc. in Computer Science to tell him about it.

I thought this was a very interesting read anyway.

The Peter Principle is the principle that “In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence.”
It holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Sooner or later they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their “level of incompetence”), and there they remain, being unable to earn further promotions.
Peter’s Corollary states that “in time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out his duties” and adds that “work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence”.

(via Marco)

mwunsch:

What I’m looking at on Wikipedia, right now.

In the context of computing, a polyglot is a computer program or script written in a valid form of multiple programming languages, which performs the same operations or output independently of the programming language used to compile or interpret it.

Here’s more from this article:

The two most commonly used techniques for constructing a polyglot program are to make liberal use of languages which use different characters for comments and to redefine various tokens as others in different languages.

Weird stuff. Check out the example of the article to see such a “thing”.