Archive for January, 2008
January 25, 2008 at 1:48 am
The phrase “object-oriented” is thrown around a lot. It’s a very interesting concept and paradigm, but it can be a hard one for non-programmers to understand.
Imagine that you want to write a recipe for making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Imagine that the person you’re writing the recipe for has no idea what a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is, so you have to write explicitly what to do, step by step.
The resulting recipe would be very long and contain a lot of seemingly-trivial tasks that any idiot should take for granted like “find a jar in cupboard labeled ‘Crunchy Peanut Butter’” and “transfer a glob of peanut butter from the jar onto bread using a butter knife.”
To relate this example to programming, the person you’re writing the recipe for is a computer (compiler), the sandwich is a program, and the recipe itself is an algorithm. All a program is is a set of directions telling a computer what to do, step by step.
So, back to object-oriented programming… imagine now that you’re writing the same recipe for a person who knows a bit about the culinary arts. You won’t have to explicitly tell them every step. You’re recipe will be much shorter:
- Get 2 pieces of bread, 1 jar of peanut butter, and 1 jar of raspberry jam
- Spread peanut butter and jelly onto corresponding slices of bread.
- Put two slices together.
- Eat! (optional)
This is object-oriented recipe-making. You assume that the person knows what they’re doing and thus you can give higher-level instructions. In object-oriented programming, the program that you write takes advantage of already-written packages of code (called object classes), and allows you to tell the computer what to do without having to go into the nitty gritty details of every complex task.
In the sandwich example, the more complex steps of the second recipe can be abstracted as objects to be used in the sandwich-making algorithm.
Who said algorithms can’t be tasty?
Tags: Programming
January 15, 2008 at 3:15 pm
The internet’s ablaze with talk of the the freshly-announced MacBook Air, so naturally I’ll speak my mind.
The MacBook Air is definitely a step in the right direction. Like almost everything else Apple touches, its industrial design resembles perfection. Smooth, curvey, and paper-thin; the thing looks slick as hell.
Also akin to everything Apple touches, it’s obscenely priced. Starting at $1800, it’s definitely the bank-breaker of the sub-laptop class. Asus’ EeePC is like $400, for comparison’s sake.
What’s amazing is that if you want to swap out the stock 80gb 4200rpm hard drive for a 64-gb solid state drive (ZOMG NO MOVING PARTZZ!!1one), it’ll cost you $1300 more. (see Apple store) I know solid state drives are new and shiny, but seriously, Apple? $3100? Sigh.
Another minor gripe, at least for some people, is that <a mce_thref=” />it lacks a user-replaceable battery. Not necessarily a deal-breaker, but something to keep in mind, knowing how wonderfully stable Apple’s history with batteries has been.
So, in a nutshell, The MacBook Air is, like the iPhone before it, a definition of “overpriced,” but exactly what the industry needs.
Hear that, Dell, HP, Sony, et al?
Tags: Apple, Hardware, Tech
January 11, 2008 at 12:35 pm
I just set up a new feed with FeedBurner, so any subscribers should switch to the new feed.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/evanmeagher
Thanks and have a great day!
Tags: Site-related
January 11, 2008 at 2:25 am
Most people will agree that one of the most annoying things about Windows Vista is how it prompts for confirmation before embarking on any task with the slightest semblance of administrativeness. For example, if you want to install a program or open up msconfig, it asks if you’re ABSOLUTELY SURE you want to do so.
Generally speaking, if you’re one of the people who finds this incredibly annoying, then you are fairly adept at computing. When Vista dumbly asks you if you really want to do something, you most likely know what you’re doing and don’t need to be arbitrarily warned of the profoundness of your potential actions.
That being said, this is an example of software being designed for the people who don’t know what they’re doing. Linda Luddite is going to come to a Vista confirmation prompt and only then become aware of how her subsequent actions can possibly negatively affect her future dealings with her computer.
Thinking globally, this is all well and fine. Computing systems should be designed to be fully usable by everyone, including those lacking finessed expertise. For years, many people have been afraid of technology mostly because of their inability to deal with and use it.
This usually isn’t their fault, though. The software industry has always been, to varying extents, plagued with confused menu systems and shoddy user interfaces. I blame this for my fathers pessimistic dislike of computers as a whole. His only experience with them has been with Windows, and thus he attributes computers to having to struggle to do what he wants.
However, for technologically-knowledgeable people this kind of thing does nothing but slow us down. We know what we’re doing, and we don’t want some bullshit popup to impare our ability to efficiently do it.
Often as user-friendliness increases, as does the tendency for software to talk down to the user. The key is the find the balance between toning things down for the computer-illiterate while maintaining full usability for the rest of us.
Tags: Gripes, Software
