There do seem to be some questionable UI pieces. I don't like the look of the reply/reply all buttons. They're especially bad if using the 3 pane (veritical view with message pane).

The tabs are pretty sweet though. I like having everything open in the same window vs a bunch of separate email windows.

I think that this is horrible advice for someone new. But if you've been around for a while, and understand that what you're doing is a hack because you need to get a product released, it's more acceptable.

It's a case of making sure that you know you're doing the wrong thing, vs just assuming that it's the right thing. The latter causes all code to be bad, and the poor code never gets fixed.

Desktop all the way. Used to be laptop, but the large code base, the huge amount of files, and the memory/CPU in use by the compilation of this app would make laptops scary. Yes I understand there are better ways, but this place has seemed to use the hardware is cheaper approach to getting things done.

We're quad-quad-cores with 8gig of ram here. Tough to beat that power on a laptop. When I need to work from home I ssh/NXClient in..

I live in Calgary, we don't home-school our kids.

I have two children, 11 (grade 6) and 8 (grade 3). The homework is about an hour each night for the 8 year old, and can vary greatly for the 11 year old, anything from 1-2 hours (practicing what they were taught that day) to "projects" requiring about 16 hours of work over 2 weeks. They're both very bright children (yes, I know that all parents say that about their kids).

Do I think it's too much? Tough call. I do think it's ridiculous that my daughter is carting around a backpack to and from school that weighs half as much as she does. Also irritating is that the onus is on the parents to ensure that things get done, I'd rather that my child is taught responsibility than taught dependence but there is a lot of "sign this and return to indicate that your child did the work" kind of stuff.

Lastly, I recall as a child having time in school to do work around projects, and more often than not I had no homework because that time was given. From what I can tell, that kind of time no longer exists (or it does but there is more work).

I also don't recall having homework at all until I was in grade 6. It starts now in grade 1 (every night was about 15 minutes).

I'm not sure that the poster's point. When I was in grade school, the only thing my parents had to sign was my report card each quarter. It was my responsibility to do my homework, and my responsibility to shoulder the consequences if I didn't.

Not sure how I misunderstood. It sounded like he was irritated that it was his job to ensure his children completed their assignments by being forced to check and sign something, and would rather that they be taught, in school, to handle that responsibility themselves.

My point, probably poorly expressed, was that it's not realistic to expect the school to instill that sense of responsibility in the child, and that the "check and sign this" policy is really just a gentle encouragement to parents to take an active role in their education.

I understand what you're saying, and perhaps I came off as not wanting anything to do with my childrens education, which is definitely not what I meant.

I guess what I was getting at with the irritated part is that without my signature on the homework, it's deemed 'incorrect/incomplete'. This is teaching my children that they must rely on me for their own success. It's not that the school is not teaching responsibility (agreed that's my job), but that it's teaching dependence.

I also suspect that in many cases the work itself isn't looked at, a signature from me is looked for and that's it. If that's the case, it's a situation where the school is giving homework for the sake of giving homework, which I don't think is correct.

Keep in mind that this will continue to be the case for a while. Sometimes you have to worry less about understanding what's happening to start off with, don't let not knowing how to do something stop you from doing it. Sometimes it all becomes clear once you see how things are used.

One thing I would suggest, it really provided the "aha" moment for me, is finding something that will dump out or print our your datastructures. If you don't understand what a hash is, and there's a tool in language (x) that will spew out what's in there, you will probably very quickly "get" what it is.

Two immediately jump to mind. One that had a massively bad impact to the company, another that might have..

First, using perl a (later-fired) co-worker added a hardcoded check like the following:

if ($client_id = "specific_id") { #email reports }

Needless to say, we emailed reports for all of our clients to a specific client, didn't go over too well considering that many of them were competitors.. It was particularly bad because he had previously been talked to about flipping the constants to avoid the = vs == bug.

Second, possibly abused but not known for sure, was found a few years after initially being put out. Our webapp created a session ID for each user, MD5 hash.

Except it started like: StringBuffer md5HashedBuffer = new StringBuffer(userId);

Which, because the userId was an int, simply creates a string buffer of size userId, not a string buffer initially populated with userId.

The rest of the hash was added afterwards, then the one-time created, with the result that everybody's session id was the same. Changing your user id in the GET or POST would allow you to be logged in as a different user.

Why weren't both of these bugs caught during code reviews?

It's interesting. My wife has recently started using linux on a regular basis, and this is what she hates about it. She doesn't "get" it.

For one thing, the package manager has horrible descriptions for the stuff being installed. "core libraries and binaries for all KDE applications" might make sense to us, but she doesn't know what that means at all.

For another, she's used to going somewhere to get an application to install it. Forget apt-get, forget launching a package manager, why can't she just go to the website (ie: google earth), download the executable, and run it? Why does linux have to make things so different and hard?

Lastly, there are more updates coming from the Ubuntu package manager than I ever saw in windows, again with those horrible descriptions for a standard user.

Having said all this, I do like it, it's a huge advancement from where linux was when I started using it, but for those people that haven't used linux before, it's sometimes more confusing than helpful. Possibly because software updates in Windows or OS X are software updates for Windows or OS X, not software updates for "samba-common - samba common files used by both the server and the client"

I think part of the reason for the horrible descriptions I think is that Linux package managers try to shoehorn one mechanism into working for both system updates (libraries, kernels, daemons, etc) as well as end-user software.