[Bendug] Bored

[Tim Howe]

On Tue, 1 Nov 2005 08:45:55 -0800
"Tami Kinney" <tami at one-horse.com> wrote:

> Ah, boredom.  No better inspiration for starting new projects.  I've never
> been too impressed with php myself, though it might grow into a truly robust
> programming language in a few years.

	It is useful and easy, but, like Perl, it is very easy to be dirty and
ugly.  If you like PHP and are good at it, then power to you.  I have seen
awesome stuff done with PHP.  I love some stuff that has been done in Perl.
Still, I have no love for it.  We're just on friendly terms.

> Me, I'm still working on learning Java.  I finally have my brain more or
> less wrapped around the OOP thing, but I'm still doing more reading than
> programming.  I'm into the fun stuff now, getting a good view of all the
> neat stuff you can do and how, then I can sit down and plan out a baby
> program (bouncing balls or something), then write it and spend a week or two
> figuring out where I went wrong...  I'm a big believer in learning from my
> mistakes, so I have to make a lot of them... I'm also studying Braille for
> real now (5 lines an hour.  Yay, me.), so I have to alternate my study time.
> I know there are blind programmers out there, but I haven't made contact
> with them yet to find out how they do it or even how blind they are.  I'm
> getting an unhappy feeling that it just takes them three or four times as
> long to do everything.  Ah, well.  Might as well give it a shot, eh?

	I see fine, and it takes me 4 or 5 times as long to do everything, but
I don't let it stop me.  I was originally introduced to OOP with Visual Basic
in college, but programming in Ruby has actually helped me understand it.  A
guy I know in Eugene is visually impared and is part of the Debian project (I
think).  He has an Apple iBook that he holds up to his face really close to
read email using mutt. I would be interested to hear how you configure your
machine and what programs you use in order to work on your computer.  When I
worked at Purdue, I would make various changes to the size and color of an
interface to allow some of our students to work.  Sometimes black or blue
backgrounds with White text was much better.  We also had some programs that
would read text out load.  That experience has made me very aware of the need
to follow ADA standards when building web pages.  I got very angry when a
coworker suggested it was unimportant.

> When I start to get lazy on my studies, I remember that I need to get Java
> down so I can move onto Perl and Ruby so I can at least have an intelligent
> discussion with you guys about what you're doing.  I'm just familiar enough
> with Perl to sort of see what you've done in Ruby if I really work at it.

	Wow!  I didn't know anyone was interested in our little snippets of
Ruby!  I have tons of stuff I have written.  Most of it is very specific to a
job I needed to do, but Paul and I have discussed building a custom system for
the BendUG page.  It would be fantastic to have some other feedback.

I think that my friend, Joseph, mostly uses console application because he can
read them better.  At least for email.  I'll write to him and get a list of
things he recommends for high visibility hacking on unix.

--TimH