academic programming

School has started over here in Wisconsin, and so far I have had a Web development class and a Visual Basic class. So far, I'm okay with each of them, but not particularly impressed. I guess my level of skill exceeds either of these classes, but they are prerequisites for the more interesting C# classes that I'll get in the second semester.

The web development class jumped right into coding HTML, which I regard as a good thing to do. Though I think more effort could have gone into explaining the nature of HTML code, like the differences between content and markup, I was happy to learn that old ways of doing styling were no longer used, and basic CSS was taught in the class.
The teacher explained to us how she had learned that it was okay not to close your p tags, but that this was regarded as wrong these days. So far so good. I did, however, regret that she did not always use strict XHTML, and sometimes lapsed into incorrect structures like these:

<.tag1><.tag2>some content<./tag1><./tag2>

To be clear, what I'm referring to here is the incorrect order in closing tags. (sorry about the dots and everything, I'm trying to get blogger not to eat HTML tags but I'm so far unsuccessful. Entities, on the other hand, are not recognised).

The visual Basic class was a bit more disappointing. First off, we did not get into any coding whatsoever the first class. Most of the class was spent looking at different types of flowcharts and UML stuff. Second, I was quite disappointed to learn that the software development lifecycle we were taught was basically the waterfall. Then the class went of trying to explain OO design, inheritance, polymorphism... these are things that cannot be taught without knowing some coding. The result was that the subjects were being dumbed down and incorrectly explained.

On another note, our VB teacher is female (which I find surprising, though I carry no judgement) and used to work as a COBOL programmer (well, nobody's perfect). She also teaches the C# and information security classes, though my info security class is not taught by her. I'm feeling lucky that I already have programming experience, because I think I would feel very confused coming out of the VB class had I had no previous experience.

Overall, I liked the HTML class better than the VB one. I think the teacher was a lot better (should I note my WebDev teacher is also female?), and it at least adheres to current development standards, or at least makes an effort in that direction. We'll see how things progress

I have arrived

Welcome, everyone, to my first message from the United States.

The trip to Wisconsin was mostly smooth, without any delays or other annoying stuff. It was, of course, tiring, but such things are unavoidable. My digestive system is still a bit upset, and I'm also still tired, but I'm sure I will eventually adapt. The weather here is a nice 25 degrees, mostly sunny (though today is a bit overcast). My host family is a married couple called Betty and Ron (I won't go into last names because of privacy). They have four children who are all out of the house already, and live mostly in Arizona. Ron is a long distance truck driver, so he'll be home mostly on weekends. Betty is part-time medical transcriptionist who I believe works for a dentist.

There is a nice mountain right across from the house, with a few skyslopes and everything. I'm looking forward to winter snowboarding and everything that goes along with that.

School hasn't started yet, it will begin next monday. I met a woman from NTC (my school) at the airport, who gave me a super thick booklet which I haven't read yet, but will. I've driven around town with my host mother, and seen the college already. She seems to think of everything as small, though it is all a lot bigger than what we have in the Netherlands.

This post was written from Betty's computer, but I'll be buying my own soon for the most work I have to do. So I'll see you all soon from my own pc. I'll also be buying a camera so you can all see what my new home looks like.

Pre-leave post

It's not that far away now anymore, the exchange. I may or may not have mentioned this, but I will leave for the states august 11, just under two weeks from now. I am strangely calm. Serene, I would almost say. In contrast, my mom is sort of freaking out all of a sudden. She has the impression that I need to do a lot of things before leaving. I wouldn't know what, really. Clean out my room, pack my bags, and we're all set.

Tania, my mexican alter-ego who will be replacing me during my time abroad, will arrive the ninth, two days before I leave. She'll have to bear with the guest room for a few days, but I don't think that's such a big deal. I'm floating between excited and nervous about meeting here. She speaks decent english, so it probably shouldn't be a problem, but I'm still nervous. More than about my own host family, which incidentally I don't know a thing about.

I should probably mention the dark knight. A friend of mine had tickets to the (Dutch) pre-run, the night before the official opening. We were seated basically exactly in the center of the IMAX theater, which was really awesome. As a bonus, free beer and nachos were served. And let's not forget the movie, which is awesome for a three reasons: the performance of Heath Ledger, the character that really drives this thing along. Second reason is not placing all attention on awesome special effects. They're there, but they don't take center stage for a change. And third reason is Morgan Freeman, one of my favorite actors of all time. In my eyes, a movie gets points just for him being in it.

I'll be seeing Wall-e tomorrow. I'm really expecting a lot from that movie. I'm hoping it'll be a pixar movie worth owning, which I haven't seen since Finding Nemo. Ratatouille is also good, I heard, but I never got the chance to see it. Maybe I'll rent the DVD once.

for the sake of content

So, after almost a month hiatus, I am now back to entertain you with another post. I'm not going to think up any more excuses for not posting. Frankly, with my day job progressing normally, there's just not much going on worth blogging about. I am of course kept busy, implementing the A* algorithm in python and other such niceties. This one jumps out at me since the use of a heuristic makes A* annoyingly unpredictable. Moving around the goal or start points of a graph might work just fine. Alternatively, it could blow up in your face for no apparent reason and take off finding a path to China.

I'm writing this at work right now, to keep myself from falling asleep. Yesterday was my friend's birthday party. The main dish was the movie The Happening, a horror/disaster movie not unlike The Day After Tomorrow. This time around, the plants are angry at us and dispense a neurotoxin that makes people want to literally kill themselves. I am not joking. The movie started with construction workers jumping off their buildings en masse, in an enactment of the infamous lemmings. Though we noted and appreciated the ties between this movie and the suicide bunnies, we feel safe in recommending that you do not go see this movie.

Despite resolutions to the contrary I was (mis)led by temptation to party on far too long, finally hitting the sack at about 3:30 AM. Of course our little kittens no longer have any qualms about going into my bedroom, jumping on my bed, and start hunting one of my body parts that happens to be moving at the time. This was not appreciated, and I conveyed this message to them in clear and concise manner. No excessive violence was used, of course.

I will make a feeble attempt at dragging myself through the day. I am afraid that with my limited concentration, the bugs/lines of code ratio would exceed one, which makes programming an extremely bad idea at the moment. I've decided to focus on the simple things, letting the hard ones for after the weekend, when my mental state has returned to normal levels.

School's over for me!

I've been back for a few days now, but there has been so much going on I didn't have the time to get around to posting something. Well then, where to start, where to start...

Probably most important is that I passed my exams with flying colors. Here are my marks:

Dutch:	7
Latin:	6
Philosophy:	6
English:	8
Chemistry:	8
Physics:	8
Math:	8

There will also be german and french marks appearing on my diploma, but I passed those classes 3 years ago with similar marks. Festivities have already commenced to celebrate my diploma.

And when I say festivities I actually mean my job as a python programmer has just started. I'm sitting in an office right now, making a wxPython application that I won't bore you with. It's actually quite fun, though I have spent most of my time reading documentation and experimenting with the GraphicsContext API.

In my previous post I said I would be going on a vacation with some friends. I mentioned Ameland as a likely destination, but actually the goal was Terschelling, the island next to it, throwing all my rabid fans and paperazzi off my track. Actually, I just forgot what island we had decided upon and picked one at random, but he former story sounds more exciting.
Anyway, we had a lot of fun there, the weather was great, and we played midget golf. That's all you need to know really. I will give you one more nugget of information: our vacation at some point involved beer and a soccer match, which we won.

Now onto more important news: exchange. In the middle of my vacation, I took a leave of my friends and traveled to the city of Arnhem, where the exchange information and preparation weekend was held. About a hundred of my fellow exchange students showed up. Strangely, about eighty percent of those also went to the USA, with rather a lot of them going to states in the lake michigan area. About the weekend I could also bore you with endless details, but it should suffice to pass judgement in a single word: exhausting. There was beer here also, and the amount of hours spent sleeping were surprisingly little. Though we were talked to a lot, I would not call the weekend informative. Most of this talking carried the same single message: judge not, for thy culture is different. A not altogether surprising variant to the well known biblical saying.

Last but not least: two little kittens can now be seen walking in our house, chasing each other or sleeping lazily in the sun. The chasing must be quite tiring, I believe. I love them already. Pics will be coming up ASAP. They do not dare enter my bedroom yet, granting me my sleep at night. The stairs are a very intimidating obstacle, I concur. But this will not likely last long. They already wake up my sister wrestling in her room at night. Sometimes even on her bed.

I am a free man!

Hurray! The exams are finally over, and until august, I am basically a free man! No more school, no more boring stuff, no more nothing. Just me and the things I want to do. And THAT means programming.

But first, next week I'm going on a vacation with two friends of me. A camping trip of sorts. Our destination will most likely be Ameland. Or another of the Wadden Islands. We'll be leaving saturday, and I expect to be back sometime the week after that.

Linux: threats are enough to fix it

Firefox was locking up on me again. Mind you, this is not usually a problem with firefox, but Fedora 9 comes with the BETA of firefox 3, and since this is a still unfinished version, I have found it to be somewhat slow on me sometimes, even crashing a few times.

So as soon as I thought it had locked up again, I quickly opened a prompt and threateningly wrote out the following command:

ps aux | grep firefox | awk '{print $2;}' | xargs kill -9

Then, before the final press of the enter button, I switched back to firefox again, just to check. And what do you know? Without intervention, the scared little fox had decided to start running again. Good boy you! I was only midly sorry I never got to use that triple-pipe thing right there.

So there you go. In Linux, even the Beta's work. If you... coerce them, a little.