Life’s little (and not so little) annoyances
June 30th, 2008So my life has somewhat stabilized again, partly thanks to classes starting (so no more MMORPG playmates) and partly to my own classes having started. I only have 2 subjects this semester, so I thought it’d be easy. But alas! Things aren’t always what they seem. Here’s a series of things that suck or things I suck at lately.
1. Symbolic logic is a bit like math, specially algebra. You get one symbol, just one sign, wrong, and you get a whole bunch of stuff wrong. So when your logic book has lots of typographical errors, specially in rules or principles that are supposed to be the foundation of all other stuff, then you know you’re in a world of hurt. And like algebra again, it’s not simply enough to leave the student with the rules and one or two examples. For first time students, you need to explain how and why an answer was reached. Unfortunately for me, I lost the logic book I had in college years ago, and I can’t find it again on sale (not that I’d want to invest on such a big book for only 2-3 chapters in my subject). So more online research for me. Yay! Not…
2. I wish that web designing would be as easy as using QLayout. When I started learning HTML way back late 90’s, I was a big fan of frames. Then I soon learned that it would be deprecated and that layout using tables was the way to go. And then comes CSS, where structure/content and appearance are separated. The separation is actually very useful, and is sort of similar to MVC stuff in GUI programming. But the devil, as always, is in the details. And not only do you have to fight with flimsy “standard” CSS, you also have to wrestle with browser differences. A few years back, I was planning to do a bit of diving into web design and development, mostly just for my own site. But after this, I’m kinda hesitant to go deeper. I’ve tested the waters and it’s soooo cold.
3. It sucks when there’s some fighting in the community. Of course, no community is perfect, but that’s not an excuse not to hope and strive for an ideal. And even if no community is perfect, it’s still saddening nonetheless. Not to mention destructive and distracting. Developers lose time and motivation and then leave. Users lose trust and patience and leave as well. Nobody wins. Both sides lose. But what’s more disheartening is that there even has to be sides. Can’t we all try to get along? (Yeah, I’m dreaming, right?) I don’t know what effect it has on other people, but as an aspiring developer and programmer, I sometimes question whether it is all worth it…
4. Now it’s my turn to suck. I suck at tutorial-based learning. Tutorials are great for quick fixes and solutions. They are great at explaining what to do, and some even have a detailed explanation on how to do them. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to last that long in my brain. Most of the time, I end up just parroting what I’ve read, without really understanding what makes it work. So what happens is that when I try to apply the tutorial to a different context and it doesn’t work, I’m practically lost. I don’t know if it’s an epistemological anomaly or a neurological disorder or what. I just think that different people learn differently, just like how some are visual learners while others are more audio. I guess I learn more when things get explained more, when the “why” is answered as much as the “what” and the “how”. So I’m off to find non-tutorial, non-”for Dummies” type of materials… which is pretty scarce if you’re talking about dead tree books around here.
Right.. now back to proving arguments using chain of reasoning (direct proof)…
Just some small updates, while I'm trying to get off my ass and migrate the site completely to Textpattern.
June 30th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
Well, annoyance #2 is easy to fix: use Wt for web-development. They have introduced WLayout in CVS (will be in the next version, 2.1.4), which works exactly like QLayout, including WVerticalLayout, WHorizontalLayout, WGridLayout, etc. In fact, the whole Wt API mimics the Qt API
June 30th, 2008 at 6:22 pm
By the way, Wt packages for Ubuntu are available in my PPA: http://launchpad.net/~pgquiles/+archive
June 30th, 2008 at 8:21 pm
Regarding #1:
Depending on what level you are studying symbolic logic at and which parts you are interested in; this resource might be useful: . There are links to some online free textbooks there. Buss’ book I find particularily well written. Sadly only the some of it is freely available.
Good luck with your studies,
Tom
June 30th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
Sorry, must have done something wrong when pasting the link:
http://www.prooftheory.org/
June 30th, 2008 at 9:24 pm
@pgquiles: I came across Wt almost a year ago when I was looking for how C++ can be used on web pages and stuff like that. But immediately struck me as “AJAX”, so I sort of put it aside for future reading. I think I’ll have a good luck at it now. Thanks for the tip.
@Tom: Thanks for the link. Most of the stuff is a bit too heavy, but I think Logic for Computer Science covers the topic. The first 3 chapters of the book we’re using at school basically covers Propositional Logic (rules of inference, equivalence, proof methods) and First Order Predicate Logic. It’s kinda hard to research on the Internet since it seems that terminologies are quite ambiguous. I’ll try to take a look at the book. Thanks again!
June 30th, 2008 at 10:16 pm
regarding #2
I’m currently writing Orchid which has a similar purpose like Wt but will have a different design. It is my entry for the Qt Center Programming Contest and as such should have a first usable version in autumn.
Greetings Josel
July 1st, 2008 at 5:26 am
Propositional logic and First order logic shouldn’t be at all ambiguous! At least from a quick glance, Wikipedia seems to be a reasonable reference on the subject…