There are people who can code, and people who can't[1]. If you're one of the ones that can't, wondering where you're going wrong, or one of the ones that can, wondering why people find it so hard, you'll be glad to know that the answer is in this PDF. It's an academic paper in which some CompSci academics spend a fair amount of energy trying to work out what the difference between the two types is.

After a fair amount of (fairly amusing and informative) waffling, wherein they reveal that

"Programming ability is not known to be correlated with age, with sex, or with educational attainment; nor has it been found to be correlated with any of the aptitudes measured in conventional ‘intelligence’ or ‘problem-solving-ability’ tests."

they get down to the real finding, which is that there are three types of responses and

"...what distinguishes the three groups in the first test is their different attitudes to meaninglessness."

One group refuses to engage with things that they can't see meaning in, one tries to impart meaning to the information, and one deals with the information without imposing meaning on it.

The third group is the one that makes good coders.

Bad coders except computers to understand things. They expect computers to do the right thing. They can see the meaning behind what the coder is asking and expect the computer to work it out.

Good coders know that all that's happening is that data is moved from place to place, transformed in various ways, and (possibly) displayed in some way. The code itself is a series of instructions that in and of themselves have no meaning - they only take on meaning when it's agreed that the changes they produce can be mapped onto the outside world. You can't rely on any internal meaning to produce the "right" output, because as far as the computer is concerned there is no right output - there's just the output you told it to give, and if that's not what you meant, it doesn't care, because it doesn't understand meaning, it just understands instructions.

And to show that it's all about meaning, they tested and discovered that the success/failure of the students didn't break down in the same way when dealing with more meaningful tasks. In that case they generated the standard "normal" curve you'd expect from a range of ability, rather than clustering at two points of pass/fail.

If you expect computers to understand things then you're in for a nasty shock. I, personally, have no doubt that eventually we'll have computers with human-like intelligence, but if you expect that to make life much easier you're fooling yourself - I have just as much trouble explaining what I want to other people as I do to computers.


[1]Joel Spolsky divides it further into those coders who can deal with pointers and those who can't (see here and here, which seems to be another thing that's an ability rather than a skill. Pointers require higher levels of abstract thinking and are one of those things that coders either take to (after a few weeks of headaches) or bounce off of entirely.

So, having sat down to do a small C# project, I realised I was still using the beta of Visual C# Express.  No problem, I thought - I'll grab the latest version.  So I downloaded the setup, started the install, and it told me I had to uninstall the beta versions _in a specific order_ before I could install the full version.

Now, the install/uninstall of software is easily automated.  This being the case, why the fuck doesn't the full version's installer _automatically_ remove them all in the right order?

More to the point - part of what .Net does is allow the installation of  software into its own folders, without cross-dependencies.  This being the case, why does the installation/uninstallation of software have to go in any particular order at all???

I've been thinking about email, and the ways that it's fucked, and possible solutions.  And sadly, I'm not a deep technical expert in the area, although I pay a fair bit of attention and I'm not completely ignorant, so I was hoping that someone would be able to point out the error of my ways...

Anyway, the major problem with email is that idiots can use it to send spam and viruses.  And you can't easily trace it to its source, because the protocols it uses to send email aren't even remotely secure.  You can, in fact, pretend to be President Bush, or God in the headers, and the receiving server will have no idea you're not telling the truth.

Now, one proposed solution is SPF, which checks a list for the domain of the supposed sender that specifies which domains are allowed to send email for it.  So, for instance, I could set SPF up so that ducker.org.uk mail is allowed to be sent from both *.ducker.org.uk and smtp.orange.net (my phone provider - who won't allow me to send email through my standard mail provider, and insist on taking care of it themselves).  The main problem with this, as far as I'm concerned, is that it means that hundreds of millions of not-terribly-technical people will have to set up quite arcane settings that may preclude them from sending email when they get them wrong.  Hardly ideal in anyone's books.

Now, the simple solution is to say that when it comes to sending email, mail from andrew@ducker.org.uk should only come from a mail server that's *something*.ducker.org.uk.  Anyone up to the take of setting up their own servers is perfectly capable of also setting up the names so that the mail server is in the same heirarchy as the hosts that email is sent for, after all.  And this is almost certainly fine for absolutely everyone who uses their server to send email.

And it provides total security, providing you use authenticated to make sure that only people who are allowed to use mail.ducker.org.uk can use it.  Which is, in fact the case - if you don't have a password, you can't use that server to send email.

The problem is for ordinary people, who _can't_ use their server to send email.  For people who are stuck sending email through their ISPs mail server, or through their mobile phone provider's email server, this is just going to leave them unable to send email at all.  They can still read email (no ISP, as far as I know, stops people _reading_ email from other servers), but they can't send it.

At which point it hit me - there's a perfectly good mail reading protocol called IMAP, which allows you to store your email on your server in a series of folders and read them remotely without permanently moving them from the server to your local PC.  It's a vast improvement over POP for general email reading, and having switched to it, I can't think of a single reason why anyone who ever reads their email from more than one place would use anything else. 

The important bit in that last paragraph is "series of folders"...  One of those folders tends to be "Sent Items" (or equivalent) and it occurred to me - why not have one of them be "Outbox"?  Add a 'special' folder, that would be monitored for emails being placed in it, and they would then be passed onto the correct outgoing mail server (and also to Sent Items, according to your preferences).  This addition would mean that the current method of sending email - SMTP - would be used _only_ for server to server communication, and IMAP+Outbox would be used for sending email from client to server.

Is there a massive flaw in my suggestion - other than it'll take a fair bit of time for any such thing to become standard?  Has it been suggested many times before?  Does anyone have any suggestions who would be a good person to tell me why it's a stupid idea?

Spent the evening playing Super Smash Brothers Melee with Ed, downloading and installing Quake 2 so we can play it when I get back from Yorkshire, packing for the WorldCon (pretty easy - I'm back here on Friday night, so only packing for one day) and watching Frasier.  Oh, and helping azemeleth make sure that his web page looked ok in IE6.

Sounds like a good one, so I'm going to assume it was.  Now for bed - I have a long day ahead of me tomorrow - see some of you in Glasgow!

Got _back_ on a bus earlier and trekked over to Erin's again, to see her sister's one last time before they leave the country again.  Then all the way back home (buses now thankfully fully functional).  The time in between was largely spent talking about the difference between sociopaths and psychopaths and which of us had the best piano teacher story (I won, but only by a hair).

Then I arrived home, realised that I hadn't packed the returns parcels for dabs.com (two power supplies and a Hauppage MVP, all dead), and mae three phone calls to Ed to find the various bits.

Oh, and allergies have been fine all evening, until Denver jumped on my lap and demanded to be stroked - nose now itches really badly.  Possibly this is a sign - and a damnably annoying one at that.

That seems to be all of my worries sorted, time for bed!

I'll leave you with two questions - one of which suddenly occurred to me mere moments ago:

Poll #526133
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

The difference between a psychopath and a sociopath is:

Artificial penis substitutes are socially acceptable but artificial vagina substitutes aren't because...

The new PSU works a treat - the only remotely noisy thing in my PC is now my CPU fan, so I'll be replacing that as soon as I have some more cash (I was supposed to be paid for some coding work I did nearly three months ago, and expecting it at the start of June, I kinda spent most of it, before realising that it was coming late...).

I'm off now to pick up a parcel from the post office, and then to wander around town, to see how the demonstration is going.  I hear that the anarchist hordes are running amock with chainsaws, demanding babies to eat, so I'll try an get a few pics on the camera-phone...

Right, so now _my_ power supply has gone. Which means I've gone through 4 in the last month - Ed's original one, two (shite) replacement one's for Ed (who now has my old one from an old PC, happily working in it - so it's not his PC at fault) and now the one in my main machine.

It's not a good week.

So tomorrow I'm off down to either Ideal Computers or Maplin to purchase something powerful and quiet. And hopefully after that nothing will break at all...

Oh, and in other news, I've spent the evening tidying, with the help of Erin. The flat is now in habitable condition for Ed's return from London. Now if I can just keep it this way.

My Dad's getting a new PC.  I need to know the name of a reputable internet/mail-order place that will allow me to choose what spec I want (preferably with a nice menu system) and provide decent support if it stops working.  Somewhere that's not too expensive, but doesn't provide a terrible service.

Anyone recommend anywhere?