There was a Tea Party sticker left on one of the windows of my apartment. Next update I’ll be wearing a confederate flag t-shirt and have an “In God We Trust” license plate. You won’t get a picture of that because it would cause emotional distress and that’s illegal in this state.

(I actually do like it here.)

This week is going to suck.

Also, car seat warmers > you.

I came into the CS program having done little more than HTML and a chapter of a Java book. That first Java program (after “hello, world,” of course) was one where when my brother’s name was entered in a prompt it printed “you suck” and when anyone else’s name was entered it printed “you’re cool.” Good times.

Anyway, the first CS class I took went well, despite the realization that a lot of kids in the class already knew more than I did coming in. Actually, the entire four years went pretty well. I got good grades and I graduated. What more can you ask?

Then I tried to get a job. I ended up getting one shortly after graduating, but it was an eye-opening experience. I was clearly lacking as a candidate. I’m pretty thankful at this point that my first job was not a software development job, but a QA job. I pretty clearly wasn’t ready. The QA job helped with a lot of the problems I would have had. I got used to working in a Linux environment (something I had seriously overestimated my skills with). I got used to the basic software process: installing, testing, reading code when it was available, etc. Then I started doing scripting work for the department, which helped with developing software for other people to use. Eventually, I jumped to a development in the same company and was in a good position to fit what I learned in QA with what I had learned in college. Now having been a developer for a little while, most of my challenges are ones born of my lack of experience with various aspects of development; I have a sufficient understand of software engineering to be a productive employee, but I am by no means a great developer (over the next decade, hopefully I will become one).

Why is this so? My biggest mistake in college was not getting some kind of an internship. That would have helped immensely and is my own fault. So we’ll gloss over that for now. What about my education? The CS program at MSU suffers from a problem that lots of CS programs apparently suffer from: they want to be two things at once. They want to teach programming and software engineering. After all, that’s what attracts students: preparation for a career. They also want to teach computer science. So we get a hash. We learn basic programming, data structures, algorithms, theory, etc, both generally and for specific areas of computing (databases, AI, graphics, etc). The computer science side of it seems fine for the most part (though maybe someone who went through MSU’s program for that instead of programming might think differently), but there are definitely issues for anyone who wants to go on to a development job. Like Stroustrup says in his interview, writing code for other people is not taught well. When I thought about how to use exception handling, it was more “do I have to do this for this project?” and less “where is it good practice to do so”? When I took the software development course offered, they did try to make us write a program as in the real world. But my group failed pretty obviously at this and our project got an A. I have a feeling most groups didn’t do so well here, but it’s still a little disconcerting.

I mean, Java was one of the main languages I was taught and I was fuzzy on the idea of classpathes upon graduating. A class where we we looked at different approaches to programming languages and were able to compare and contrast them would have been incredibly useful. We had such a course, but it wasn’t well executed; we were shown so many different languages that we didn’t have time to really compare them. And a question on a test was literally “write down the comment symbol for each of these languages.” I think I would have gotten more out of a more limited comparison.

Now, I realize that a university CS program can’t focus too much on practicality. There are two-year programs where you could get a solid programming background and do very well with simpler development (like a lot of what I’ve done). That said, CS programs have advantages over those programs. You get a broader education which will make you a better developer in the long run. But that’s hampered by the deficiencies in short preparation. For MSU, maybe it’s just a programming practices course and a push for less constrained programming projects. It’s not like they’re far away from a pretty reasonable compromise. I don’t regret my educational path, but Stroustrup’s points definitely apply to my education. I could have been better prepared. If you push yourself as a student you can overcome these deficiencies. With some changes, though, maybe we can more students where they need to be.

I’ve been running Ubuntu for the past two years or so as my primary OS (dual booting XP, however). I don’t regret it; there’s a lot I like about Ubuntu and the Linux software ecosystem (there’s probably a better term for what I’m describing). A quick rundown:

1. Package management. Synaptic in particular. I can’t express how much I love repositories and package management. The ability to search for a piece of software and have the ability to install, uninstall, reinstall, etc with the click of a button is fantastic.

2. The shell environment. The Windows command line sucks. It’s almost completely useless to me. Linux’s shell environment is the opposite. That’s largely due to having used it daily for the last two and a half years (and often in the four years before that), but it allows me to do certain tasks quickly and efficiently and that’s what I want.

3. Amarok. There’s lots of Linux software I like and some that I like more than anything on Windows. Amarok is more than that. It’s far and away the best music application I’ve used on any platform. It does exactly what I want it to and it’s easy to use. There are good Windows music applications (like Foobar2k), but as far as I’m concerned Amarok beats them hands down.

4. Open source culture. Who doesn’t like free shit? More seriously, while there’s lots of open source software for Windows, it’s still a closed OS and doesn’t encourage as much open source development.

There are other little things, but that’s the gist of why I like using Ubuntu. I was tempted to put Gnome on there, but it’s honestly not a huge improvement over XP (and I wasn’t particularly impressed with KDE, when it was stable on my machine). So why am I switching?

Most of the problems Ben lists here, really. Multimedia is a huge to me. X is annoying and slow. Audio is a mess. Pulse-audio is supposed to fix that, but right now it’s caused several of the apps I use occasionally to not work and the stuttering audio problem in some programs has mysteriously returned after I messed with some configuration settings (ok, maybe that’s not so mysterious). I just don’t want to deal with it anymore. That said, the biggest reason for me is probably games. I’ve started gaming more in the past two and a half years and rebooting is annoying. It makes me less likely to play. I can’t be on Steam and jump into a game when one of my friends comes online. Wine is simply never going to be a good solution (it’s often passable, however) and if you want to play the latest and greatest and have them look like the latest and greatest you’re out of luck.

This is, of course, from the point of view of a home user. For software development, I prefer Linux without question. I just don’t do all that much development outside of work to justify it.

I will probably make the jump to Vista instead of going back to XP. Maybe it’ll suck, but it doesn’t seem too bad from what I’ve used of it. Plus, I want a 64 bit, DX 10 OS for gaming and I was thinking I’d take the plunge next year when I do a Core i7 build anyway. Maybe there’ll be a post here in a month or so ranting about Vista. You never know.

So there it is. I’m guessing this post will become search engine bait in the near future. Though it’ll be hard to touch my rolfing post in that department.

People are claiming Palin is finally becoming less popular with the electorate. I gotta say, according to the chart in that link, it looks the McCain-Palin ticket has dropped. Her drop started earlier, but for the most part it mirrors McCain’s. So I hesitate to say it’s really about her. Not that I’d feel bad if I’m wrong.

Schweitzer spoke on the MSU campus the other day. A pretty nice turnout, too. There were some anti-Schweitzer protesters there, too. Five to ten, maybe. Signs included “Election fraud isn’t funny” and “Bully” (a couple with that). Sounds like hand-wringing pussy talk, but what do I know. There were also people handing out some kind of literature on the Federal Reserve. Ron Paul-types, presumably. Nice timing, if nothing else.

Working for a university gives me certain benefits, one of which is discounted tuition and fees. So I’m taking suggestions for further education. A CS master’s? History or philosophy? Underwater basket-weaving? My future is in your hands.

1. Good ISPs in town? Currently, my DSL is controlled and administered by a company hired by the owners of my apartment complex. This means I have less control that I want to have (and it’s slower than I want), so I’m thinking I’m going to go off an get my own. Suggestions? I don’t really want Bresnan and I’ve been looking at Bridgeband.

2. Roy Zimmerman is playing at the Labor Temple this Wednesday. If you don’t know who he is, well, watch this:

See, clearly you need to go see him. I believe it’s $15 and benefits the Montana Women’s Lobby.

On the other hand, I managed to watch four movies and significant number of Arrested Development episodes. Eventually I assume I’ll get tired of that show, but I’m nowhere near that point yet.

Clearly, I have too much spare time.

So, I almost have a collectible piece of gadgetry. In high school I got an Eiger Labs F20V, which is the second generation of the MPMan F10. As far as I know, the thing still works, though it’s probably lost somewhere in my parents’ house. Still, second gen of the original isn’t bad, right?

It brings back fond memories, too. Like after a basketball game when a teammate of mine was talking to someone about how he heard about these cool things that you could put songs on from your computer. I got to interrupt the conversation and go “oh, that thing you’re talking about? You mean this.”

Then there was the time I discovered that because our computer speakers sucked and the sound quality on the player was so poor I could encode mp3s at 64 kbps and it sounded fine. That made my early mp3 collection largely useless after a few years, but luckily my tastes had evolved enough that it wasn’t a big deal. I still had some of those 64 kbps mp3s when I started college.

All right, I’m done now. I assume this is what my generation’s nostalgia looks like. I’m sure you old people were drooling over your 8-track and record players in the same manner.

We’re so much cooler than you were.

In any case, this is what I’ve been reduced to. Substantive thought outside of work is apparently the first thing to go for me.