Mark DuBois Weblog

Just to be a bit different, I thought I would compile a list of human error terms. Used one of these a couple of days ago and began wondering what others existed. If you have more terms, add them to the list (via a comment). Use these at your own peril in appropriate (or inappropriate) situations.

• BDU – Brain Dead User
• EBCAD – Error Between Chair And Desk
• ESO – Equipment Superior to Operator
• ID 10 T – pronounced eye dee ten tee (obvious, isn’t it)
• Layer 8 – OSI networking model has 7 layers (thanks Phil – forgot about that one)
• ODM – Operator Driven Mechanism (came across this one on urban dictionary)
• PEBCAK – Problem Exists Between Chair and Keyboard
• PICNIC – Problem In Chair, Not In Computer
• TSTO – Too Stupid To Operate (I found this one on WikiPedia)
• UBAD – self-explanatory and rarely used (too obvious)

Just received notice that my book review was published in the Feb. 2011 issue of CHOICE. For those who don’t have ready access to a copy, here is a reprint.

97 things every programmer should know: collective wisdom from the experts, ed. by Kevlin Henney.  O’Reilly, 2010.  229p index ISBN 9780596809485 pbk, $29.99

“Write code as if you had to support it for the rest of your life.”  This is just one of many nuggets of wisdom offered in this book.  Instead of focusing on a specific technology, the work contains a wide range of insights from numerous authors.  Each author has two pages to state his/her thesis.  The book is not filled with acronyms or technical jargon (although some is scattered throughout).  There are a few code snippets, but one does not need to know the specific language to garner the larger message.  Interspersed are many interesting tidbits of programming lore.  For example, a software bug in the Apollo 11 lunar module should have made the lander unstable.  However, another bug compensated for the first, and the software was used for both Apollo 11 and 12 moon landings before it was fixed.  Although this reviewer, who has worked with computers and done some programming for many years, does not agree with all the opinions and insights, many are quite valuable (and typically only learned after many bad experiences).  Read this book and heed the advice; one will become a better programmer for doing so.  Summing Up: Highly recommended.  Academic, two-year technical program, and professional audiences, all levels.

I took a little time this afternoon to modify an example of some materials provided by lynda.com in a PaperVision course. PaperVision is a class of Actionscript libraries which allow you to do some fairly magical things. Given that I have a limited amount of time (and really should be grading assignments), I made some small modifications to the example. If you examine this “hello world” example, you will encounter two images (both are JPEG files). These are wrapped around a  sphere and a particle field is added for some additional interactivity. Yes, this is a fairly processor heavy example (and may take a moment for the entire file to load and begin playing. Just trying to give students some ideas as to what is possible with Actionscript. Note that this example will open in a new browser window/ tab. I also provide the source code for those who are interested. This was created in Flash Builder 4.

I participated in an interesting presentation by Karrie Karahalios (University of Illinois) this morning concerning conversations, people and the relationships between them. examples of her current work can be found at http://social.cs.uiuc.edu/. Karrie presented many novel and interesting approaches. Included in her discussion was mention of a prototype website that displays relationships based on your Twitter account. Decided to give it a try and the results are  shown below (had to reduce the image a bit to get it to fit in the available real estate). I actually gained some insights based on this analysis. Those who wish to try this out are encouraged to visit http://wemeddle.com/. For those of you reading this – I wonder what you think if you are in my “inner circle?”

In honor of our major snow event starting today, I put together a little bit of Flash Actionscript code to generate even more snowflakes. It just populates  a small array with one snowflake symbol which is re-sized  and rotated and placed. I will be showing students in my CMWEB 225 class (Flash and Actionscript) how I did this in a couple of weeks. The above link opens in a new browser window/ tab. Every time you refresh the linked page, a new array of snowflakes is generated. All told, this was 50 lines of  Actionscript code (the majority of which were lines of comments for my students).