Entries from February 2006 ↓

Peter Norvig says:

Walk into any bookstore, and you’ll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 7 Days alongside endless variations offering to teach Visual Basic, Windows, the Internet, and so on in a few days or hours.

The conclusion is that either people are in a big rush to learn about computers, or that computers are somehow fabulously easier to learn than anything else. There are no books on how to learn Beethoven, or Quantum Physics, or even Dog Grooming in a few days.

Peter then compares programming with art and music. He argues that it takes ten years for somebody to be an expert programmer. (and not 24 hours or 3 days or whatever)

I believe he is close. My experience has been that it takes around 6 active programming years for somebody to develop the problem solving skills required for programming. Whatever is the programming language.

I agree with his comments on how to be a good programmer though. They are solid.

Thanks to Kartik for the link!

I have been getting a lot of spam comments on this blog recently. When I logged in today, I had 11 comments waiting to be moderated. And all of them were spam. Interesting!

This means either my blog is getting very popular, and the spammers think I am mentally challenged to approve their comments. Or that there are enough mentally challenged bloggers around who allow unmoderated comments or proudly display a free-ftp-hosting comment on their blog.

On the other hand, I am impressed by the software they use. Evidently they are keeping a close track of blogosphere and letting their bots hit all the new blogs they discover. May be it is not really about visible comments after all. When you post a spam comment, the blogger himself may come to your website to see who you are. Any publicity is good publicity after all!

Technology will never stop! Now we have cameras that can make you look better on the other side! CNet Asia’s review mentions that the cameras use a combination of lens and realtime picture enhancements to make you look brighter! They even work well in low light situations!

Wanna buy, dear video chatter?

You may have seen Cyrus Broacha getting confused about the taste of Britania 50-50 Pepper Chakkar and asking “What it is?”. Now if you have that question for a technology, ask it to O’Reilly. The O’Reilly WhatIs is a set of articles that explains technology terms in simple language. The articles are not too techy, but good enough for a beginner.

Don’t get disappointed by the $7.95 in the image. Most of the articles in WhatIs are free!

PS: Thanks to Kartik for the link!

Macromedia / Adobe has released the beta of Flex 2. Flex is a superb way to build Rich Internet Applications. The Beta includes Flex Builder, Action Script 3, Flex Charting Components, Flex Enterprises Services and the Flash Player 8.5. Our experience with Flex has been very good. Flex will impact the way web applications are designed in a big way!

Microsoft too, announced the Beta 2 Preview of Internet Explorer 7. IE7 now has tabbed browsing, RSS support and a cleaner user interface. They did spend a lot of development time tightening the security as well.

I still love Firefox!