Category: Personal

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via NEW PopToo is under Development! — PopToo.net

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My father joined 30 year old Mac family

It has been about a month for my father switched his computer from Windows environment to Mac’s. Knowing he would never be encouraged to do it by himself, somehow it’s been forced by me, disguised as presenting him a gift of Macbook Air 13″. Many of us were growing up with computers as joyfully given gifts from our parents, and reciprocating their love with same joy was one of my recent happy memory.

Macbook Air for my father

Like so many of his age group in Korea, my father couldn’t have a right opportunity to get acquainted with modern digital technologies. Also for being a white-collar government official who had to deal more with political or human issues, he couldn’t have enough time to train his hand to type effectively on a keyboard, to learn about how to exercise his ownership over his machine.

After his retirement, occasionally he had to learn more about how to control his computer in a different level. He had to learn how to type a document, save it as a file, send it via email, sync his iPhone, etc. What mostly had been helped by his secretary whom he had when he held his office in the government, should be handled by himself nowadays. It has not been too bad to do normal activities under normal circumstances.

But what could he do when bad things happen? Should he keep purchasing virus cleaners? How could he fix the situations like losing his important files? And unfortunately, it did happen to him. Being forced to take an effort to free his Windows from malware grasp, he had to erase the system, losing his files.

Anyone may encounter bad situation like this from any types of computers. But I can’t still accept that such defeat had to happen like this easily. And why is it always Windows? Being a professional with conviction, being his son, I had to rescue my father from Windows hell.

So far his conversion experienced almost no difficulty. Once realized his web-based activities are not changed at all, he felt enough confidence in using Mac. As expected, system-based activities like finding a file or deleting an application were much easier to learn than Windows. There is one challenge caused by being a user of Korean banking systems, which requires Windows’ Internet Explorer with ActiveX. By helping him to acquainted with virtualization application like Parallels, my father were able to use Windows inside Mac only for a limited time.

Though my goal to free him from Windows had to be compromised, minimizing his exposure to dangerous world could be suffice at least for a while. After all, my father were never more happier to have truly his own computer which makes him proud. My father began to understand why it means to be like owning a BMW, when you own a Mac.

Being a Mac user for five years myself, I couldn’t help but to believe that if anyone has to choose a system for his or her digital livelihood, it should be Mac for safer and less irritating experiences. Maybe I’m a little biased, but I think it’s quite difficult to judge millions of happy users for 30 years to be wrong.

One of the best films of the Alfonso Cuaron, showing his most famous specialty in camera works

Some films have very special attraction. Before actually seeing whole film, you instantly know how you will feel about it, how you will like it.

When I saw the trailer for the first time, I began to think it’s going to be one of my best films in 2013, and once the director’s name was revealed to be Cuarón’s, I instantly had satisfaction as if I’d watched whole movie already. It was so predictable, in a good way.

Finally saw it, and the film did exactly what it promised to do. Since watching Children of Men, knowing and being fascinated by Cuarón’s specialty no matter they are artificial or not, his great works in extreme long sequences were so effectively done in the film. Taking advantage of being in space, where no up or down exists, the camera flew around so freely, becoming the main character of the film.

I believe the positions of cameras in the film are more important than the objects they are taking, and Cuarón’s Gravity gave me the best example for emphasizing such idea, and I’m very thankful for it.

While the narrative itself is great too, I think there will be more interesting story about how film making was done, and I’m sure I will spend some amount of time searching for “Making of…” videos or blogs, speculations from other professionals. Hope our techniques in film making continue to innovate themselves, and the great examples like Gravity will not stop being presented and beloved by many.

P.S. At the end of the film, I’ve notice the name of the actor, who did “Mission Control voice.” Knowing his past involvements in some famous films, I couldn’t help but smirk. I wonder if the producers did know there will be reactions like mine when casting him.

Fully informed and experienced decision

My comment for “Why I Don’t Use Interface Builder”: http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/why-i-dont-use-interface-builder

IB is about Organizing, not about Replacing. IB is a tool, not a regulation.
Once you know the limits of IB and developed good programming habits, IB can be extremely useful.

I saw too much terrible spaghetti codes, which could have been helped by adopting MVC principles and knowing the life cycles of UIViewController & UIView instances.
As a way to help those developers to learn about the principles, I show them how to complete a project using IB and later replace it using only codes, to help them to realize the limits of XIB files and see how whole structure is preserved, to show the real reason for using IB: Separating codes.

And once VIEW components are separated from others, I point out patterns or repetition, which are just configurations at loading of the instances.
Other than iteration, they are not so easy to be solved creatively and quickly, without taking precious seconds, minutes, or hours.
Also, there are more important tasks for fulfilling the requirements of the app, than tasks for calculating frames for labels.

Unless you like it (I saw some people who like it), it’s smart or even necessary to use a tool which was developed to avoid working mechanically. Fortunately in Xcode, we have Interface Builder.

Depending on the characteristic of the projects, the decision to use or not to use IB is totally up to the developers. When they decide not to, I hope it’s fully informed and experienced one, instead of one caused by estranged or uncomfortable feeling toward IB.

Don’t punish Yourself

It’s given as a PUNISHMENT to a student to write sentences REPEATEDLY on a blackboard.

If you are not careful, it’s quite easy to REPEATEDLY paste copies of identical code snippets. Not using iterative methodologies and not trying to find algorithmic solutions, is like let yourself to be in the state of uncomfortable incompetency, which is a PUNISHMENT.

Sensitive Programmer

As a learner of programming, you may feel stressed and uncomfortable, trying your best to maintain control over the machine, not to be controlled by it.

There are too little time to complete the assignment. Your mind is not clear enough to come up with the best structure of different classes. Inheritance, polymorphism, DRY, MVC and all other essential concepts about quality programming are just ideas without visible lines of codes.

Even if you could finish your work on time, it’s quite painful to see resultant chaos in your own codes. You don’t like your own work, knowing every line in it. And this is a good thing.

Being sensitive enough to realize inefficiency and incompetency in your own work, even if no one criticize it, is a great attitude, especially if you are a beginner. Congratulation! Make sure to keep it as sensitive and sincere like that.

Until you become a true master of programming, who can bring undeniable great architectural solution without taking too much time and resources, please don’t try to avoid or ease the pain for producing quality result.

It’s necessary to feel the inefficiency of scattered snippets within your codes. You need to experience the frustration of attempting to change a small thing, repeatedly about thousand times. After experiencing this, you will never forget the critical importance of DRY principles and will force yourself to learn how to use global variables and methods, apply proper hierarchical relationship among classes. Soon, it will become natural to you as you become a better programmer.

However, it you let yourself to be insensitive to pain while programming; e.g. listening to music or copying & pasting mindlessly; you will lose the opportunity to see the need to improve. Simply for the sake of finishing the work as soon as possible, you will just pass by the situation which may teach you very important principles.

Such insensitivity will bite you back, as you maintain the chaotic structure, slavishly patching the effects without fixing the causes. And finally, you will give up, unless you can start all over again.

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