Lately I've been asked to find someone to expand our software department, and this turned out to be quite a difficult task. We'd be happy to find someone from our local area (we're looking for someone to become part of our team "forever", the focus has always been on people more than on processes) but apparently programmers are basically non-existent today at least around here. When I say programmers I'm talking about real code... of course it's easy to find someone that self-defines him/herself as a programmer, but for which the only "programming language" is HTML.
I find this quite disappointing, but even worse is the impression I get when looking at the projects made in high school; I keep bouncing in stupid "multimedia projects" that are just HTML and may be some form (wow!). The suspect then becomes that the problem is not that the good ones actually flew away from this place, but that they indeed never existed.
I keep seeing people doing their final thesis at university that in newsgroups about C / C++ ask questions or show code snippets that are by themselves a crystal clear proof they suck *horribly* at writing code. And when they get out of university way too many think that the key is to be able to draw an UML diagram, the rest are boring details for the bozos.
But seems to me that in this picture there's something wrong, high school guys will do the nice websites, and university guys will draw nice powerpoint slides about wonderful projects. But where's the meat ? Who is going to actually write the code ?
Friday, July 29, 2005
Thursday, July 21, 2005
huh.... looks like i got older
All of a sudden I feel very old deep inside. I have all those little pains, I can't sleep well, I forget things. I can't see anything clear without my glasses.
May be this is how one should feel when turning 39 :-). Bah. Sometimes it sucks getting older, but the alternative doesn't look that interesting either.
I started wondering if I'll ever run the New York marathon or not; now I always feel a pain on the side of my left knee after running a few miles.
But something that really made me feeling older was chat I had with a friend. It all started with a discussion about the new electronic piano I bought (an entry-level one, for about 1000 euros; I'm still terrible at the piano and I probably forever will, a 7000 euros piano wouldn't change that) and on how crappy it is (like how crappy is my computer, my graphic card, my shoes, my chair, Chopin and basically my whole life) and right after that I happened to get a chat message that wasn't meant for me... followed by a rather shocking "whoops... oh well, take a look you too... it could help".
The mistyped message was a link to someone that makes strange noises and burns CDs to sell them. I suppose that's meant to be music but I cannot avoid to compare what Chopin (forced to use more or less just twelve frequencies on a percussion instrument) was able to do compared to what that guy can do now with the total exact control of the waveform. The total control in those hands just produced crap. Stinking distilled crap. *THAT* made me feeling older. I'm sure that "music" will be forgot at the speed of light even from the relatives of the author.
Probably what my grandpa thought about rock.
I also felt offended. Really truly offended. Offended only like a very old person can get. I'm not going to get over it without excuses. I'd say this is also a sign I'm old... but indeed I used to get offended easily even when I was a youngster.
May be this is how one should feel when turning 39 :-). Bah. Sometimes it sucks getting older, but the alternative doesn't look that interesting either.
I started wondering if I'll ever run the New York marathon or not; now I always feel a pain on the side of my left knee after running a few miles.
But something that really made me feeling older was chat I had with a friend. It all started with a discussion about the new electronic piano I bought (an entry-level one, for about 1000 euros; I'm still terrible at the piano and I probably forever will, a 7000 euros piano wouldn't change that) and on how crappy it is (like how crappy is my computer, my graphic card, my shoes, my chair, Chopin and basically my whole life) and right after that I happened to get a chat message that wasn't meant for me... followed by a rather shocking "whoops... oh well, take a look you too... it could help".
The mistyped message was a link to someone that makes strange noises and burns CDs to sell them. I suppose that's meant to be music but I cannot avoid to compare what Chopin (forced to use more or less just twelve frequencies on a percussion instrument) was able to do compared to what that guy can do now with the total exact control of the waveform. The total control in those hands just produced crap. Stinking distilled crap. *THAT* made me feeling older. I'm sure that "music" will be forgot at the speed of light even from the relatives of the author.
Probably what my grandpa thought about rock.
I also felt offended. Really truly offended. Offended only like a very old person can get. I'm not going to get over it without excuses. I'd say this is also a sign I'm old... but indeed I used to get offended easily even when I was a youngster.
Sunday, June 12, 2005
ssssssst... keep quiet please...
I decided to start studying piano again; so the first move was finding the time (my plan is to find one hour per day) and the second move was to get an instrument that would allow me to survive to the anger of neighbors. I already have an acoustic piano, but I'm normally home only at weird hours when playing it would be annoying for the others. One thousand euros for a digital piano with a decent GH keyboard and reasonable piano synthesis. So far I'm happy of it...
May be I'll try to put some recording on the webpage when they'll be good enough to not have people running away screaming in deep disgust :-D
May be I'll try to put some recording on the webpage when they'll be good enough to not have people running away screaming in deep disgust :-D
Friday, May 20, 2005
PERL ? what's that ?
It really surprised me, but I forgot almost all about PERL. After just a few months hacking with Python I do not even remember basic syntax (and I've used PERL for long... even writing non trivial web-based applications that in retrospect do not fit in what I think is PERL target). I was able to get the job done but I had to resort to documentation (and it was a really trivial script to convert a text file with some hex data into a format suitable for importing in excel). I'm just getting old, I suppose.
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
and i want it NOW
Yesterday I watched on history channel the a documentary about the match Kasparov/Deep Blue, and I was impressed by an intermezzo that was added between that show and the next one (that was a biography of Bobby Fischer).
It was a collection of small news of the "Week of Incom" ... something dated 1943 that was sort of a TV news when there was no television yet here in Italy. The week of incom was added before movies and there were newsreports about the war, but also about other aspects like exhibitions, fashion, sport.
I stopped wondering why it's so important for the news to be fresh... even more... for them to be instantaneous. The TV channels are always fighting for who delivers something FIRST, not who delivers the better report. They even get to the absurd level of talking about something they don't have yet the faintest idea... something that may be it won't even deserve a place in the news... even just to be able to say "we'll report about this next in next edition".
Why is this really important ? For some news it's of course important being timely, but I would say not for most of them, especially if you're reporting news from other parts of the world.
May be it's the usual problem of the time resource... time looks so important to every single individual while it's probably the only resource we're not going to run out as a collectivity. Our society gives big prizes to who does it first, not to who does it better. Even if there's a common saying here in italy that goes more or less "well and quickly don't go together" few are the ones that can take their time.
It was a collection of small news of the "Week of Incom" ... something dated 1943 that was sort of a TV news when there was no television yet here in Italy. The week of incom was added before movies and there were newsreports about the war, but also about other aspects like exhibitions, fashion, sport.
I stopped wondering why it's so important for the news to be fresh... even more... for them to be instantaneous. The TV channels are always fighting for who delivers something FIRST, not who delivers the better report. They even get to the absurd level of talking about something they don't have yet the faintest idea... something that may be it won't even deserve a place in the news... even just to be able to say "we'll report about this next in next edition".
Why is this really important ? For some news it's of course important being timely, but I would say not for most of them, especially if you're reporting news from other parts of the world.
May be it's the usual problem of the time resource... time looks so important to every single individual while it's probably the only resource we're not going to run out as a collectivity. Our society gives big prizes to who does it first, not to who does it better. Even if there's a common saying here in italy that goes more or less "well and quickly don't go together" few are the ones that can take their time.
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