After three years of hellish finals weeks I’ve developed what I call, the UCI Study Center Shuffle. The Study Center Shuffle came about because UCI has a variety of study centers and libraries of varying quality and with differing hours. I like to spend my time at the most pleasant, and best equipped, study centers. However, the best ones close the earliest. Forcing me to migrate from study center to study center.

The following is my typical Study Center Shuffle and my thought process behind it.

Science Library: 9pm-11pm

The UCI Science Library is a wonderful building. It’s a outstanding 50 million dollar, six story library but all the students really just use it as a glorified study center because 1) libraries aren’t very useful anymore and 2) it’s a really nice building. Alas, it closes early at 11pm. There is a small study center on the first floor that is open till 2am but I do not like going in there because it is too cramped and often full. At 11pm I pack up and walk a third of the way around Ring Road to the Engineering Gateway.

Engineering Gateway: 11pm-2am

The Engineering Gateway is a great study center. The students in there always seem really dedicated and I’m regularly been able to get serious about studying in there. There are lots of computers to use which is nice and for some reason not too distracting when I do need to use one. Probably because they are not my distraction prone Macbook. Normally the Engineering Gateway is open 24 hours, however, on Tuesday’s and Saturday’s the Engineering Gateway closes from 2-4am forcing me to vacate the premises.

Gateway Study Center: 2am-whenever

If the Engineering Gateway is closed the only option left on campus is the dreaded Gateway Study Center. It is another third of the way around Ring Road to get to Gateway Study Center from Engineering Gateway, a calm, yet eerie walk at 2am. Gateway is my last choice because it is generally the nosiest of the study centers, impossible to find an electrical outlet for my laptop, and the desktop computers setup there are beyond obsolete. In short, Gateway is the study center ghetto at UCI. The only benefit is that it is the closest to food that does not come out of a vending machine, which at this time is only Jack In The Box but its better than nothing.

After a solid night of studying, I now have to walk back to my car which is probably parked no where near the Gateway Study Center forcing another middle of the night hike.

Fast forward to the present. Last week, I borrowed Joel’s new book “More Joel on Software” from Michael Arrington which contains the “Perils of JavaSchools” essay. Reading the essay again I was blown away. What a difference a few years of CS education makes! This time instead of just feeling that Joel is right, I know he is right. Learning Computer Science completely in Java instead of C with a healthy dose of functional languages like Scheme is two different worlds.¹

All CS degrees are not created equal

Is the value of my CS education less than that of the traditional CS education Joel reminisced about? All other things being equal, I would say absolutely say “Yes”. I can not help but agree with Joel when he says that an all Java education can never be of the same caliber as the CS programs that preceded the Java “revolution”. People like Guido van Rossum, Paul Graham, Steve Yegge, Linus Torvalds and many other great hackers all received their degrees before the notion of a Java school existed. And as Joel puts it, they all went “stark, raving mad trying to pack things into bits”. The bit level is considered foreign territory for students at Java schools; a place we dare to venture only once or twice and will quickly return to the safety of the Java virtual machine.

Joel’s essay is best summarized by this paragraph:

You used to start out in college with a course in data structures, with linked lists and hash tables and whatnot, with extensive use of pointers. These courses were often used as weedout courses: they were so hard that anyone that couldn’t handle the mental challenge of a CS degree would give up, which was a good thing, because if you thought pointers are hard, wait until you try and prove things about fixed point theory.

I have never even heard of fixed point theory!

Finally we come to my dilemma. I have one year left at my Java school and I desperately want to avoid mediocrity. Since adopting Ruby as my primary programming language last summer, I have experienced several small victories. Ruby is a very powerful language which is gradually breaking me away from the ridged programming practices I picked up from programming in Java for 3 years. Ruby has introduced me to things like metaprogramming, reflection, DSL’s, anonymous methods, and several aspects of functional programming. All are things that I never would have been able to fathom had I stayed inside my Java bubble. I will say that CS students at Irvine take a Programming Languages class which introduces unfamiliar languages like Haskell. Unfortunately, the class doesn’t make up much ground. Like all classes it is only 10 weeks long and students only get a brief look at the various languages they are introduced to. To top it off most of the projects are still done with Java.

Ruby is not the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything

Ruby is great but its not going to teach me any of the low level knowledge I am lacking. I can program in Ruby for another decade and still not achieve a full understanding pointers. The only thing I can do to understand why while (*s++ = *t++); copies a string, is to actually program in C.

Why I am not learning C now

Learning C is something that you generally need to be forced into. In today’s world you are not going to able to write very much software if you are coding the entire thing in C from top to bottom. It is a very anti “Get Things Done” programming language. In addition, there are very few things that actually need to be written in C. Operating systems and compilers are the two big areas where use of C is nearly always required. Both are territory that I am not interested in venturing into at this point. The most common use for C among software developers is to optimize slow chunks of code by rewriting them in C. However, everything I write does not need to “scale” so while I always do my best to not write inefficient code, I can not be bothered to rewrite any of it in C when it is “fast enough” already.

What I am going to do about it

This is a problem that I have not thought of a solution for. I can not bring myself to sacrifice productivity in order to use C. At first I thought I would learn Objective-C which is based on C in order to create Cocoa applications for Mac OS X. That solution is flawed however. Just like Joel says learning C++ is not a substitute for learning C, the same is true for Objective-C. My best chance is if something in my school work for next year comes up that requires the use of C. If it does happen it will be an elective; the chance of a required course using C at Irvine is very slim. I am just one person, what I am experiencing is true for Computer Science students across the county at Java schools. We are collectively being handed a disadvantageous education and in the long run it will have a direct impact on the level of software engineering that is being done in the United States. For instance, I would guess that a graduate from a Java school is far less likely to ever contribute to the Linux kernel, GCC, or a similar project. This is of great consequence because we need innovation at the lowest level of software in order to continue innovating at the top.

Obviously, if American Universities are going to keep up, they need to switch back to the “middle ages” of Computer Science and resume using C in the classroom. For those of us that are already in the system, or recently graduated, individual crusades are required to attain the level of understanding that is obligatory for Computer Science graduates. For myself, this will likely include working through the exercises in Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and the accompanying lectures. I am still looking for a good, practical way to learn C. Just reading Kernighan and Ritchie is not going to be sufficient. There is a big distinction between learning to program and learning a language. I need to learn to program—for real this time.

• Basecamp - 2004
• Ta-Da Lists - 2005
• Backpack - 2005
• Whiteboard - 2005
• Getting Real book - 2006
• Campfire - 2006
• Highrise - 2007

For any other small company I would not even care if it had been a year since their last product release. So what? The difference is 37signals has a seriously kick ass dev team. To give a quick overview:

• David Heinemeier Hansson - created Ruby on Rails
• Jamis Buck - Capistrano, Net::SSH, sqlite3-ruby, Rails contributor
• Jeremy Kemper - Rails core member
• Sam Stephenson - wrote Prototype, Rails contributor
• Mark Imbriaco - Rails contributor

That is a bona fide team of hackers. So much so that the significance of each individual’s open source contributions far outweigh their work at 37signals.

It’s likely that 37signals is pushing to mature their current offerings. This is supported by their release of Open Bar and an affiliate program as but both are building on their existing product line, not growing it.

That said, I still expect that we will be seeing something from 37signals before the end of the year. And if they follow their advice in Getting Real there will be a teaser with a lot of early buzz so we’ll know about it well before it actually hits.

Rails-doc.org is an fairly ambitious project to create a community driven Rails documentation site. Basically they let users sign up and contribute notes to the existing Rails documentation. This certainly has the potential to be very useful, especially for new Rails hackers because sometimes the people who have been around the framework for a while just take things for granted.

Take the documentation for strftime in the Date class for example. There is no documentation listed for that method. Despite the fact that you clearly need documentation of the strftime options in order to use that method. Instead you have to know to look under strftime in the Time class for the documentation. While this is an example specific to Ruby documentation, these are the kinds of obvious problems that a community documentation website can help solve.

Right now Rails-doc.org has only been live for a month the so amount of community documentation feels very low. In the mean time I’ll be using the site for the official documentation that is already in place. Plus its the best looking rendering of the Rails documentation site out there. The Nodeta guys did a good job with the design. They also have a nice looking blog.

It will be interested to see how many of the notes contributed to Rails-doc get ported to the official Rails documentation. This certainly feels like the easiest and most straightforward way to contribute to Rails documentation and I can see it becoming a testing ground for future contributions to the official docs.

So what about the actual movie? Wanted pulls its style from a variety of different action movies. First it borrows a little bit of The Matrix’s disregard for Physics. Mix in Shoot ‘Em Up’s abundance of manslaughter. Finally throw in a high speed car chase plus gunfight that is standard for any action movie and you’ve got Wanted.

Luckily the “curving bullets” thing doesn’t end up being as lame as it looks in the preview. Instead it serves as a nice touch that differentiates the movie from every other action movie. Although it’s really entertaining to watch the actors shoot a “curving bullet” because it looks more like they are throwing a baseball sidearmed than shooting a gun.

The movie is such that when it finishes and your sitting in your seat as the credits play your thinking to yourself “either that was really dumb or it was freaking awesome”. Ultimately you cannot decide which it is so you compromise and declare that it was both.

Unfortunately the movie has a piss poor name. After seeing the movie I still cannot determine why they called it Wanted. I am sure that people will remember the movie 5 years from now but absolutely no one will remember its generic title. They’ll say, “Oh yeah! the curving bullets movie with Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman! What was the name of that?”. Ultimately no one will be able to remember and they’ll have to look it up on IMDB.

Despite my criticisms, the occasional cheesy dialog, and not-so-stellar performance by James McAvory, Wanted is a good movie and I recommend seeing it. If nothing else it is very entertaining. But honestly don’t take my word for it because like I said, I know absolutely nothing about reviewing movies. Nor do I have any authority on the matter. Instead I referrer you to Rotten Tomatoes where Wanted is currently at a very respectable 93%.

That is all I can think of for now. And, unlike the aforementioned 5 people, you can follow me on Twitter to see what I’m thinking about.

Comparing cards has changed

Before 0.3.0 two cards objects were regarded as equal if they had the same face value. Resulting in a 6 of Spades being equal to a 6 of Clubs. After some thinking I decided that I did not like that and changed it so cards must have the same face value and same suit to be considered equal. This should not affect anyone unless they are creating and comparing Card objects directly.

PokerHand#arranged_hand has been replaced by PokerHand#sort_using_rank

To sort a PokerHand there are a couple options. PokerHand#by_face will sort a PokerHand in order from least to highest. But what if you have a pair and want to sort the cards based on the hand’s poker rank. For that there is PokerHand#sort_using_rank which was previously available as PokerHand#arranged_hand but it wasn’t documented.

Handling of duplicate cards

Before 0.3.0 Ruby-Poker would not complain if you added four 8’s of Clubs to a PokerHand. I’ve added a configuration option so that you can tell Ruby-Poker to throw a tantrum if you try and add the same card to a PokerHand twice.

require 'ruby-poker'  
PokerHand.allow_duplicates = false  
PokerHand.new("8c") << "8c"   # this throws a RuntimeError

allow_duplicates is set to true by default so you will not notice anything different unless you choose to opt-in to the exceptions.

That’s everything

As always you can install ruby-poker with the gem command.

gem install ruby-poker

Or gem update ruby-poker if you already have it installed to upgrade from an old version.

For a long time now Dave Thomas Programming Ruby (aka. The Pickaxe) has been the standard in the Ruby community as the book to learn Ruby from. Unfortunately the Pickaxe is not the best programming book ever written. In fact, its bulk and slowness almost killed my inspiration to learn Ruby. I respect Dave Thomas a lot for what he does for the Ruby community but the Pickaxe and I just did not click.

Since I didn’t find the Pickaxe to be excellent reading material, I had been eagerly anticipating David Flanagan’s The Ruby Programming Language to come out and unseat The Pickaxe as the de facto book to recommend to newcomers to Ruby.

I am happy to say that The Ruby Programming Language did not disappoint. I picked up this book solely expecting to just review it since I already comfortable programming in Ruby. However, once I started reading the book I found myself frequently learning things about Ruby that I didn’t know before. Not like little things either like, “oh that’s interesting”. I’m talking significant things like “holy crap that’s sweet”.

This book covers both Ruby 1.8 and Ruby 1.9. Initially this concerned me because as impressive as it is, it must have been quite a headache for the authors and was not sure how they were going to pull it off. It turns out to be pretty much a non-issue. The authors make a note of what is 1.8 or 1.9 only and it does not disturb the flow of the book since it doesn’t come up too frequently. I do hope though that after Ruby 1.9 stable is released they upgrade the book and tear out all the 1.8 specific material. Since I currently use 1.8 on a daily basis I don’t mind having 1.8 material in there but after everything has shifted to 1.9 it would be rather irksome.

The style of the book is fairly straightforward. It starts with an introduction to how Ruby programs work and then goes into an explanation of Ruby datatypes and objects. The later chapters cover advanced topics like reflection and metaprogramming. The authors opted not to go the tutorial route, which I think, was a good approach since the book is not designed to be an “intro to programming” text.

In the preface of the book, the authors state:

[The Ruby Programming Language] is loosely modeled after the classic The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie and aims to document the Ruby language comprehensively but without the formality of a language specification. It is written for experienced programmers who are new to Ruby, and for current Ruby programmers who want to take their understanding and mastery of the language to the next level.

O’Reilly is hoping that The Ruby Programming Language becomes the equivalent of K&R’s The C Programming Language for Ruby and I hope it succeeds. I think that every language needs their own K&R book for people to turn to as the definitive authority. That’s something that I feel like the Java programming language never had and it creates something of a hurdle when browsing for a Java book.

The third edition of the Pickaxe is in beta and will be coming out soon. I really hope it makes a strong showing when it hits the press because after the bang-up job Flanagan and Matz did with The Ruby Programming Language, there is no reason to look at the Pickaxe till then.

Some of the questions were given to me by a classmate and I don’t know where she got them from. The rest I wrote myself. I dumbed down the questions as much as I could because I wanted to make sure people would get them right. Having a trivia game with questions that no one knew that answer to would not have been much fun.

If you need to sort a very large list of integers (billions), what efficient sorting algorithm would be your best bet?
Quicksort

What mega media company merged with AOL at the turn of the century?
Time Warner

What do they call people who register domain names with the hope of selling them for a profit?
Cyber Squatters or Domain Squatters

Name the authors of the book The C programming language. The authors are often referred to as K&R
Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie

Dennis Richie also developed what computer operating system at Bell labs with Ken Thompson and Douglas Mcllroy?
Unix

Name the primary creator of the Java programming language.
James Gosling

In 1914, Thomas J Watson renamed the Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation (CTR) to what?
International Business Machines (IBM)

Name the famous computer scientist who worked to break Nazi codes at Bletchley Park during WWII.
Alan Turing

Who single handedly built the first Apple computer that launched the personal computing era?
Steve Wozniak

What is the day and time of the Unix epoch?
Midnight, January 1, 1970

What is the name of the recent female CEO who stepped down from HP?
Carly Fiorina

What does the company AMD stand for?
Advanced Micro Devices

Who headed the team that created FORTRAN in 1957?
John Backus

Who developed LISP in 1958?
John McCarthy

Who developed PASCAL in 1968-70?
Niklaus Wirth

Who wrote a BASIC version for the 8080 microprocessor, Altair, in 1975?
Bill Gates & Paul Allen

Who created the C++ programming language?
Bjarne Stroustrup

What is IEEE 1394 refer to?
Technical code for Firewire

Who is the Ada programming language named after?
Ada Lovelace

Which Google vice president co-designed TCP/IP is regarded by some as the father of the Internet?
Vint Cerf

Vint Cerf is regarded as the father of the Internet but who is the person that actually invented the World Wide Web?
Tim Berners-Lee

Which UCI alumni co-authored the HTTP protocol?
Roy Fielding

Into how many zones are DVD’s divided worldwide?
Eight

What was the first computer to have a GUI and a Mouse?
Apple Lisa

Name the founders of Yahoo
David Filo & Jerry Yang

What prolific entrepreneur founded Silicon Graphics (SGI) and Netscape?
Jim Clark

Who founded the Free Software Foundation?
Richard Stallman

Which company is the largest manufacturer of network equipment?
Cisco

Who is famous for developing the Mosaic web browser at the University of Illinois? Mosaic was later renamed to Netscape Navigator.
Marc Andreessen

What was the first OS for Personal Computers?
CP/M by Gary Kildall

What is CE in Windows CE stand for?
Consumer Electronics

What is BSD in BSD Unix?
Berkley Software Distribution

What is the name of the popular free software license written by Richard Stallman for the GNU project?
GNU Public License (GPL)

What was the first codename for the Intel Core 2 Duo line of processors?
Conroe

Who founded Amazon.com?
Jeff Bezos

What year was Google founded?
1998

Who created PERL in 1986?
Larry Wall

What free loving programmer created the GCC compiler and the original Emacs?
Richard Stallman

Who founded Dell Computer Corporation?
Micheal Dell

To which company acquired the ICQ instant messaging computer program?
AOL

What is Error 403 mean on the Internet?
Site Access Forbidden/Password Protected

What company is the world’s largest maker of computer mice?
Logitech

What was the first full-length computer generated feature film?
Toy Story by Pixar and Disney

What does ZDNet stand for?
Ziff Davis network

Which company invented the floppy disk?
IBM in 1971

What is the name of Linux’s Mascot?
Tux (a penguin)

What South African entrepreneur funded the creation of the Ubuntu Linux distribution?
Mark Shuttleworth

A nibble is how many bits?
4

What Apple portable debuted in a choice of two fruity color schemes, Blueberry or Tangerine?
The iBook.

What game system was the first to offer online gaming?
Dreamcast.

What Apple media file format became the basis for MPEG-4 files?
QuickTime.

What does the computer acronym PnP stand for?
Plug and play

What file-sharing software was named for creator Shawn Fanning’s frizzy hair?
Napster

What company, while still called AuctionWeb, registered its first sale when bidding for a busted laser pointer topped out at $14?
eBay.com

What does the “W” stand for on a WAP phone?
Wireless.

What computer accessory did Apple try splitting in two in 1993, in an attempt to reduce injuries?
The Keyboard

How many zeros are in a Googol?
A googol is 1 followed by 100 zeros.

Donald Knuth wrote what, still unfinished, multi volume work on programming algorithms and their analysis?
The Art of Computer Programming

What chess-playing computer developed by IBM that defeated world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997?
Deep Blue

Ted Stevens, Republican Senator from Alaska referred to the Internet as what?
A “series of tubes”"

What was the dominant spreadsheet application before Microsoft Excel and Lotus 1-2-3?
VisiCalc

Amazon has recently released a variety of services for web developers. Some of these services are Elastic Compute Cloud (ECC), Simple Storage Service (S3), SimpleDB, and several others. Collectively these services are known as what?
Amazon Web Services

Up until the 1990s, IBM has a very strict public uniform for IBM employees. Describe the uniform.
A dark (or gray) suit, white shirt, and a “sincere” tie

Who was the creator of Lotus Notes that is now the Chief Software Architect at Microsoft?
Ray Ozzie

What is the name of the Movie that documents the rise of the home computer through the rivalry between Apple Computer and Microsoft. In the movie Anthony Michael Hall plays Bill Gates and Noah Wyle as Steve Jobs.
Pirates of Silicon Valley

What geeky TV Network was acquired by G4 in 2004?
TechTV

Before founding the social bookmarking site Digg.com, Kevin Rose was a co-host of what TV show?
The Screen Savers. (Attack of the Show! is also an acceptable answer)

According to Samuel Sidler, Team Coordinator of the Camino Project, the money came from the generosity of various people. First of all, kudos to the various people. I really respect people who donate to open source projects, but is advertising really what Camino needs?

Camino certainly deserves more attention. Camino is currently my favorite web browser on OS X and I would like to see it be more widely adopted. Firefox 2 is slow and fugly and Safari does not have some of the features I demand like quick searches. I’m expecting Firefox 3 to give Camino a good run at being my default browser on OS X. I would certainly love to go back to using extensions without having to open another browser.

I remember when Firefox was making a big push to build up their user base. They did a great job of getting their users to promote Firefox in a zillion different ways including homemade commercials, a crop circle, and a New York Times ad. The Firefox marketing team always got their users involved and never “just bought ad space” to my knowledge. Why isn’t Camino doing the same?