BASeCamp Programming Blog

This is the type of thing that is wrong with today’s youth:

youtube

Anyway, the story here is this fellow commented on one of my videos (some gmod thing, if I recall). OK. Anyway, I was bored so I visited his channel. I was greeted to the above. It reminds me somewhat of that tracer-t fellow. NextgenHacker101, you can find a link here .

Basically, it’s somebody who seems to think a basic VBScript that uses sendkeys is a virus. Well, actually, he doesn’t. In fact, he states the opposite, sorta… in a notepad window that he scrolls at the beginning. In typical fashion I will rip it apart because I am bored.

Before watching this you have accepted a Contract saying you won’t act like a retard and say “Dude wtf this isn’t a virus I’m a 1337 h4x3r and this shit ain’t no virus”

I have accepted no contract. shrink wrap EULA’s aren’t legally binding I don’t see how you saying I agree to something merely by watching a video is. It’s not. and lastly the leetspeak is H4X0R . Not that it matters.

Ok this isn’t exactly a deadly virus that will make your friends computer go x_x but I do know how to make those.

Judging by the rest of this video, No, you don’t.

I just don’t want to get kicked off Youtube by posting them.

You wouldn’t. all you have on your desktop there sir are a bunch of VBScript’s unlikely they do anything more dangerous then a few sendkeys.

Anyways this will teach you how to make a virus/Data ruiner bomb.

Ok readers! this is my favourite bit…

This is an original, so don’t say ZOMG that Son of a b**** stole my idea. Or don’t pretend your some 1337 (word for elite (it looks like leet say it and it sounds like elite in Derp talk (Derp= retard)) h4x3r (hacker in derp talk)

Now, I will attest that it probably is original in many ways. If we exclude such things as the MSDN sample for sendkeys. I mean really, you stick a Do Loop into a sample script, change some string constants, and suddenly you know what you are doing? No. Get your head out of your ass. Stick to BMX videos, thanks. Hell, stick to BMX’s entirely. I also like the explanations. Like his terms are so high above anybody and niche that he has to explain what “1337″ is. and then he repeats the incorrect “hacker” leetspeak.

because if you weren’t a wannabe you wouldn’t be looking at this in the first place

I see… only wannabe’s watch your channel? As I stated above I was merely bored and wanted to see what kind of videos you had. I have been disappointed and amused at the same time.

Now that that’s said and done lets get to business.

Well thank goodness for that. I take it the video is over then?

damn. oh well.

And please don’t call people fags because they want to temporarily ruin someone’s life.

Ok, there are a few things wrong with this sentence: One, I wouldn’t call them “fags” I fail to see how tobacco products even remotely tie into this line of thought. I’d call them insipid idiots for being idiotic enough to actually look up to the creator of this video. Actually come to think of it I believe I feel sorry for them.

If your on this then that obviously means you want to know how to.

No, it doesn’t. It could also mean somebody saw one of your comments on their videos and decided to have a look see. But continue with the handwavey generalizations if you must.

And anyone else looking for teaching continue watching!

As long as it’s not grammar, apparently.

Anyways, I can’t be bothered to copy down the entire script, but it’s pretty much this:

So, basically, they just have some sendkeys in a loop. This is hardly original. It’s certainly not destructive. I was curious at this point as to exactly how this technological dilettante figured it was a virus, let alone destructive at all.

Anyway, they actually went to great lengths to bestow upon us his vast knowledge about what was happening.

After you opened it up You will want to put it in the code below exclude the (*)’s and the words inside the (*)’s
Set wshshell = wScript.CreateObject(“WScript.Shell”) * Press enter after this. This is the most important command as this tells what the wshshell object is supposed to do*
wScript.Run “Notepad.exe” *Press enter after this. This tells what is supposed to open I’m not sure you can run it without the wshshell.run “Program.exe”*
Do < Yes you have to type it in most important part is the do and the loop (you will see later) if the do and loop isn’t there it will just do this one time
wshshell.SendKeys “(whatever you want it to say exclude the ()” * this tell’s what it is supposed to do.*
wscript.Sleep 200
wshshell.Sendkeys “{ENTER}” *this makes it put in enter, not the word but the command
WScript.sleep 200
loop *finally the last part of it all, loop, this makes it loop back all the way to do causing a replay or loop
*Save the file with the extension being .bs*
Meaning put in the filename and have .vbs at the ending or it will not work.

(For any questions, complaints, or etc Please send it to me. I won’t look through the comments just to find it. I f you want to see the program run let the video continue playing, if you don’t, Begone fron which you came? I can’t run the .vbs because it will force me to log off or it will do a form bomb.bat on me. Sorry. But I can show some of the things it did to the files!

Several WTF’s, most notably, he hasn’t got a clue what he is talking about. It’s truly a case of the blind leading the blind. That doesn’t even count the quantity of spelling and grammar issues. Or the fact that they clearly don’t know about the comment character for VBS. Oh well. I particularly like the “because it will force me to log off or it will do a form bomb.bat on me” wtf does that mean? is he seriously just pulling terms out his ass? I believe so.

Anyways, his “corruption of files” really only amounts to opening a new notepad window and filling it with text. It never saves the file. The rest of the video… ugh. It almost makes me want to replace this entire blog post with a link to that video and a gigantic picard facepalm.

One last thing if you want to know how to end it. Just press CTRL+ALT+DEL, Go to Start Task Manager, go to Processes, and end process wscript.exe (IMPORTANT YOU END THIS ONLY OR IT COULD RUIN YOUR LIFE! You can let it run to it won’t damage your computer as long as you’re smart and leave the virus be. Don’t open any files or it will just attach them and no, this .vbs won’t delete your computer’s memory. It will just mess up somethings that use notepad or any other writing program. THe code is in the description (leave me alone I know I forgot how to spell description)

pure GOLD. This guy is a comedic genius. “end this only or it could ruin your life” and calling it a virus… and of course “it won’t delete your computer’s memory” HAHA. And then, irony of ironies, on of the few words he believes he misspells he spells correctly!

332 total views, 12 views today

Following the posting of my previous entry, I tried Firefox 4. It was then that I realized another huge problem with the latest browser versions, or, more precisely, the latest “trend”.

The “tabs on top” idea. It’s completely against the entire concept of tabs at all. Let me explain.

Now, we are already familiar with tabbed dialogs and tab controls; the basic idea is you have a set of tabs, and clicking on that tab brings the “contents” of that tab to the front. One of the tenets of a good UI design is the completely scrap tabs if you need to have multiple rows, with horizontal scrolling being acceptable as well. The main reason for this is that when you clicked a tab that was “behind” (on top) of the row, it would move that entire row of tabs to the  “front” so that it’s tab would connect to the client area.

The thing is, the main idea here was that the tab was “connected” to something. With the “tabs on top” approach, it’s not even close to following the whole metaphor of actual manilla tabbed folders as much as it is just randomly putting a UI element at the top for no reason. only items that are changed should be present in the tabs client area. With Chrome, you’ve got the addressbar (changed) favourites (not changed) bookmark bar (not changed) options button, not changed, etc. with firefox 4 it is worse, every single element is underneath the “tab-bar”. I can’t even begin the express my confusion. What the hell happened? Did UI developers all become mentally incapable of basic reasoning?  Having “tabs on top” hasn’t been done before because it’s stupid, not because it hasn’t been thought of before. My old editor that I wrote had a plugin that would show active documents as tabs, I accidentally put it on top and I quite remember saying “hmm, maybe I should make it an option?” and responded to myself ” No, only an idiot would think having the tabs on top was a good idea ” Tabbed browsing works great, but you aren’t going to improve it by shuffling some of the UI elements around any more then you will increase the likelyhood of getting a royal flush by simply shuffling a deck multiple times. And last time I checked UI design wasn’t supposed to be a game of chance anyway.

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Starting with the recent release of Internet Explorer 9, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend about the latest generation of Applications that run on Graphical desktop environments.

Absolutely none of them give two shits about user-interface consistency.

An Application running on windows should look like a windows application. a Application running on Linux should look like the other applications the user is running It’s not really that hard to do; the functionality is free with the Operating system. With windows you merely create a window and it has the proper decorations for the version of windows; the same code on windows XP will produce a Luna themed window (if a Luna theme is used) or a Aero Glass themed window on Windows Vista, or a standard window on Windows 2000. Similar themes are found in OSX, Linux, and so forth.(I will get to Chrome OS in a moment). My point is the functionality is free. Additionally there are any number of cross-platform environments that can be used that will make your windows look as they should on the appropriate system. GTK, Qt, and so forth. Additionally, with some languages and environments that isn’t even necessary; the very core of Java is basically built on the premise of portability so these burdens are pretty much held by the class library. .NET’s Windows Forms can be run via Mono (MonoDevelop doesn’t yet have a working designer for them, but everybody knows true programmers don’t use designers! ).

Despite this- or perhaps in spite of this- we have these new browsers, starting with chrome, providing what is termed a “next generation” interface. Take Chrome, for example. It completely redoes the entire non-client area of the window. I wouldn’t mind the spartan interface that it presents (no menu, no real toolbar, etc) if they didn’t decide that they could just change the basic window arrangement as if they owned it. The title bar, in their infinite wisdom, for example, no longer has a title. Instead it is merely a short strip that sits above the Tabs, which in and of themselves appear to sit inside the title bar itself (if you click and drag an empty area to the right of any tabs you can drag it, so it is treated as a non-client area if no tab is there, and as a tab button otherwise. Last but not least- the interface appears to be more or less designed for windows. To be fair it actually doesn’t fit in on any Operating System, but they appear to have unanimously decided that Chrome is going to use the windows-themed caption buttons for minimize maximize and close. It doesn’t matter if you want your windows to look “classic” in windows (have the classic theme selected) google chromes title bar will still look the same. The only real theme change I’ve noticed make a difference is with Aero Glass enabled they actually properly extend the title bar glass frame to within the tab bar, but aside from that it doesn’t respect theme or user preferences at all.

On Windows Vista and 7 it seems to use the “standard” Aero glass buttons for the caption buttons. But with windows 7 there is a bit of a woopsee:

The bottom is the Chrome Caption buttons. the top is from a firefox window in the background. Firefox (without any addins to do otherwise) uses the default OS rendering for the window chrome (outer elements). Ironically, or perhaps to live up to their name, Chrome draws this Chrome itself; for absolutely no good reason except to make a stylistic impression. This is pretty much a non-issue; the X button does stick out a little, but it is no doubt an easy fix, and the function of the buttons is the same, so no loss, right?

Well, consider for a moment- that if they hadn’t gone and redeveloped the wheel for the window chrome here they wouldn’t have this bug, which is clearly based on theri own hard-coding of the offset of the caption buttons from the right side of the window when the window is painted. problem is while they seem to use a hard coded offset (or otherwise an incorrect value) they are painting the standard windows caption buttons using the theme API (this is good, on the whole) the issue is because Windows 7 made some of the buttons slightly larger, so now they are drawn inproperly.

it’s not just the fact that skinned windows (and truly, let’s not fool ourselves- what Chrome is doing is absolutely no different then winamp skins or itunes skins or windows media player skins) are entirely inconsistent, it’s that it’s absolutely impossible to do them properly, and they become a maintenance nightmare.

Even Microsoft’s own teams have been bitten by this bug; A good example is Word 95.

Microsoft Word 95 was, perhaps expectedly- designed to run on Windows 95. Windows 95, as us old folks may remember, was a rather major shift as far as the general Windows Interface was concerned. the windows were designed to be more “3-D” and the caption buttons of windows were redesigned. Microsoft Word 95 had a- feature, however. See, rather then use the boring old standard window manager (which was of course sparkling fresh at the time) they decided to basically rewrite and subclass their main application window to all hell and draw it on their own. I have no doubt this was in part considered only because they had to do some other stuff that involved them needing to do that so they figured what the hell.

The result was that Word 95 had a title bar with italicized text and a gradient background. Fun? No. Useful? No. Good to show off at the executive meeting? Yeah.

Now this was all well and good; aside from the gradient and title bar, the word 95 title bar looked and acted just like any other windows 95 title bar.

But then came around XP and Luna themes. Now by this time it was 6 years later and most people were using at least word 97 for a number of reasons that I won’t get into here, but the point is still valid; in any case, with Luna themes, Word 95 still looked the same way it did before. This was because during compat testing they discovered that word 95 didn’t work at all with the Luna themes so there was an appcompat patch that forced windows to deal with word 95 in a different fashion (And to all those screaming “OMG they were taking advantage of their monopoly”, they did this with a variety of programs, not just theirs).

The problem was that word was handling a series of events and messages that were almost always given to the Default window procedure. The default window procedure would perform the default actions; these were handled by the window manager, and in later windows revisions was used to support “theming”. This isn’t quite the same as an application like WindowBlinds which aggressively hooks into every single window and pretty much forces it’s styles onto them, though. In any case, because Word handled it, it never called The DefWindowProc() so default processing never occured, one example being, for example, when it painted the non-client area.

A secondary issue was of course that word 95 was written for windows 95 and the API had changed since, so some of the things that worked without issues on windows 95 and that word 95 gleefully performed no longer worked in Windows XP.

In any case, after that, people sort of realized “shit, we better start respecting themes and may as well let the window manager do the grunt work, that being it’s job, after all”. So for the most part, programs looked like they should.

Then there was chrome. I don’t generally resort to expletives, but Chrome’s theme management and look and feel are utterly fucking stupid.

Let’s see a few screenies of it running on XP for starters:

Mac Inspirat

Royale Noir

Classic Theme

So, what do we have? well, at the left we have a Luna theme, some mac inspirat thing, I don’t remember. Anyway, notably, nearly all applications (except command prompt) adhere to the theme. Except chrome. In fact, even chrome’s colour being similar is a huge coincidence. Next we have Chrome, again, running on XP, this time with Royale Noir as the theme. Does it respect a damned thing about the theme? Hell no, it still draws everything as if it has exclusive control over what I see. Fuck you chrome. Respect my theme, dammit. It’s drawing it’s buttons in a Vista-ey style, too. This is windows XP, you are running on windows XP, don’t try look like you are running on Vista/7. And while you are at it, could you respect my colour and text settings? I went and changed my window background and text colours, with the fizzling hope that maybe chrome would actually, you know, have a configurable UI, but nope. It only changed the background of the search and favourite buttons, which I might add aren’t bloody windows so why the hell are they even affected anyway?

So I decided to try to set the “use system theme” option.

There isn’t one on the windows build. Seriously, what the hell Google? Why the FUCK does google not only get away with this utter blasphemy (oh, your custom font size? No, fuck you, it’s going to be ten point, so if you are blind or hard of vision you better bring a fucking magnifying glass) but they are actually being <copied> for this. It’s like a software company went out and raped a bunch of puppies, and now Microsoft and Mozilla are like “oh hey, that looks like fun” and they go and rape puppies too. It doesn’t make raping puppies right dammit.

And why the completely arbitrary colour choice? sky blue? FOR ALL my themes? I even went and fiddled with all sorts of the advanced appearance settings, couldn’t get chrome to respect a damned single one of them.

Windows is hardly the only OS with which chrome has this complete disrespect for User-selected themes and colour options. On Mac OSX, it’s closer- it still has the OSX themed window management buttons… for what that’s worth to usability. In any case, I speak of Linux.

As I type this, I am on my laptop, running Linux Mint 10. Linux as far as I’ve experienced is extremely solid. I still don’t think it’s a major contender (alongside Windows and OSX) but it is definitely climbing that hill. But regardless that isn’t what this post is about. My current “default” configuration is one of the default mint themes. I forget which one, but it’s not really that important. In any case, as I understand it, many of the common desktop environments support the use of plugin “window decorators”. mine is the default; most applications use it. But as can be seen in the above image, Chrome doesn’t.

And again, with the blue. what the hell is with chrome and the colour blue, anyway? In any case, I found the option in the wrench.. menu… thing, and was able to enforce the use of the system theme:

FINALLY

So, finally, I was able to convince chrome to use the default Window decorator- or, at least, it is pretending to, not sure. It still has no menu, because apparently using 23 pixels of screen space is a blasphemy… as if those 23 pixels will mean the user won’t need to scroll anyway. regardless of that, it’s rather stupid that it’s a non-default option to use a system default. It’s the analogous of having an application that has a “preference” for “use system colours and fonts”. I mean, what the hell? the option, if provided, should be to allow the user to use non-default colours and fonts, not to default to some retarded colour configuration chosen seemingly arbitrarily (blue when absolutely no elements in the desktop configuration of mine called for it, for example).I fiddled about with some of the theme settings; there was a setting to “use GTK theme” selecting it made the huge change of making all the blue areas green. Again, why I have no idea. Why not just call it “use green theme”. seriously. a few icon changes and making it “green” seems unrelated to a Windowing toolkit, especially since most GTK applications actually respect the users choice of window decorator.

In any case, I decided to do some more experimentation with another Window decorator I picked up, Emerald.

Emerald

Emerald is a awesome window decorator. They’ve done a stellar job on it. And every single one of my applications that I have (a rather wealthy assortment, thanks to the diversity provided by Open Source projects, even if it takes a little while to find a “ripe” one) works perfectly fine with it.

Except, of course, for chrome:

What? use default system decorator? No, you need to change a preference that. I will use blue, you like blue anyway.

With emerald enabled (I closed down chrome, used Alt-Arrow to move to another desktop, and started up emerald in a console with emerald –replace, switched back, and restarted chrome) I was greeted with.

The exact same damned thing it gave me the first time. This was with the “default” setting to use the non-default system theme. I’m not sure which project manager was able to dictate this to the staff but he needs to be given a copy of a UI design book… particularly about respecting the options the user has already chosen . This theme as you can see is clearly to emulate Windows Vista/7′s “Aero Glass” design. It works very well, even if some of my performance goes down the drain; either way, it’s damn fine for running on an intel chip. In any case, it’s blue again. The fact that the caption buttons (for minimize,maximize, and restore) look the same is pure coincidence; the fact that they happen to coincide with the window decorator settings I’ve chosen has nothing to do with the actions of chrome. So I decided to see what would happen if I told it to “use system theme”…

sigh.  Chrome… why do you even try? Seriously? I tell it to use the system window decorator, and it decides that it won’t show caption buttons. I really don’t know why. I suspect it still draws parts of it itself, so really when you choose the “use System theme” setting, you are choosing “use system theme, but I’ll still draw shit for no reason despite your option not to”. Not having caption buttons at all for what should look exactly like the window caption area shown above the blank chrome titlebar is not forgivable at all.

At this point I have no doubt some people are thinking that maybe this is emerald’s fault. The utter lack of reasoning required for such a thought process I cannot fathom; no other application I’ve tried has this problem. Only chrome. coincidentally it’s also the only application that has a complete disdain for using any theme settings on any OS I’ve tried so far, deciding that it’s going to use themes, colours, and fonts that it wants to use, not that the user prefers to use as set in appearance options. I cannot help but think there is a connection.

Now, to be absolutely fair here- Chrome is hardly the first application to do this. it’s merely following in the footsteps of equally badly GUI designed applications, such as Winamp and even Windows Media player itself, both of which supported themes and weird skin shit that made no sense. I mean, it’s a bloody MEDIA PLAYER. you use it to play music and you minimize it. What the hell is wrong with looking like a normal application? It’s called CUA(Common User Access) people,

Microsoft made sure to apply this pointless principle to Internet Explorer 9. You would think they would have damn well learned something from the utter nonsense that was Word 95. “OHHH! let’s make our title bar italic and gradient and shite!” was the tagline there, seems now it’s “let’s just do what the other browsers are doing” which given the bullshit that IE has had to go through isn’t a unsurprising verdict. At the same time, IE only runs on windows and it doesn’t look like a windows application. That doesn’t even touch the fact that you have to reboot after installation. What the hell year is this? 1993? Does it need to make changes to my autoexec.bat and config.sys files as well? The only type of applications that seem to respect user options as chosen are office-type applications (excluding lotus notes, but that’s an entirely separate ball of WTF I don’t even have the webspace to adequately describe the extent of), and “professional” grade Open Source applications; for example, pidgin, looks like a windows application. Windows Live Messenger doesn’t. It’s like they put “Windows” in it’s name to remind people that, No, this isn’t a picture of art created with induced vomiting after eating crayons, it’s a Windows program! See! it has WINDOWS right in the name!

The reason for this? well, while there might be a few differences here and there and some of the functionality that is focussed on by them is often trivial or only useful to a small set of people, largely Open Source developers concentrate on features that will be used . Companies develop their commercial offerings in the interest of what sells, and this is the major difference; what sells is what looks good to the executives who have the authority to hand out the cash, and what looks good is apparently pastel vomit covered windows. So that’s what they make.

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Recently I had a rather short discussion (more conversational then anything) about RAID. Yes you know who you are. And I am talking about that skype conversation that coincidentally occured during minecraft gameplay.

The topic? RAID and backups. At some point I remarked that “RAID is not a backup solution” or “isn’t a replacement for backups” to which the reply was “RAID-1 is”. I couldn’t remember the specific reasons why RAID wasn’t a backup solution but I have since regathered them.

The main reason RAID 1 (or any RAID level, mirroring, striping, or otherwise) isn’t a substitute for backup is because there are a lot of risks that it can’t protect against. If you accidentally delete a file, it will instantly be removed from both mirrored copies. Sure, you can recover it via the recycle bin; but what if you delete it- or it is deleted by- other software programs? Or you don’t notice? My point here is that a backup would have that file for you to recover if you found out you did need it either way; for RAID, the file will be gone. A backup is in effect a way to save the “state” of your work or filesystem at a given time; wether it’s a drive image or just a backup of the folders you predominantly work in, it stores the complete state of things, and you can go back to that state. It’s like a photograph. RAID, however- is a duplicate. The “mirror” drive is always the same as the first drive. RAID is designed to reduce the downtime of a server or other high-usage machine from the failure of one of it’s hard disks. It’s not meant as a replacement for data backup. Because it’s a duplicate and not a “saved state” so to speak, If your disk is corrupted by a software bug or virus, the corruption will be done to both mirrored copies simultaneously. If you’re hit by a bad enough power surge, it’ll probably fry both disks at the same time; If someone breaks into your house, they’ll steal the box that holds both disks;If your house gets flooded or burned, both disks will be ruined, etc. Those last few are often regarded as corner cases or “things that will never happen”. And while it’s true they are unlikely, there is no such them as overpreparedness. If you value your data at all you will have it in several places at once; Just do a thought experiment about how much you would lose if your main computer were to explode and everything on and in it was unrecoverable.

Basically, although the chance of data loss due to drive failure is reduced, data loss due to viruses or user errors, e.g. overwriting a file or deleting it, is not. If a file is deleted or overwritten the RAID array cannot be used to retrieve it. The file is gone. When a file is deleted it is deleted from all the drives. When a file is overwritten it is overwritten on all the drives. This is why a RAID array is not a backup solution. And don’t pull he old “well I’m always careful” routine. You aren’t. One day you might be sleepy or tired or otherwise trance-like and do something stupid. We all do it. Don’t try to make excuses. This doesn’t even begin to cover the fact that a lot of RAID solutions are implemented in software, and software contains bugs; and it means you now have to carry this extra driver around in memory, and you are reduced in the various hard drive utilities you can use. And, occasionally RAID issues will occur that will simply prevent you from rebuilding the mirrored set.

The Basic difference is that RAID is redundancy- a back-up is a backup. The difference between Redundancy and a backup is pretty easily illustrated; If you accidentally overwrite your PhD thesis with garbage, redundancy ensures that you have multiple copies of garbage, in case one gets bad. A backup ensures that you can restore your PhD thesis.

Sometimes people will say “well, RAID-5 is different! it provides mirroring in the form of block-level striping AND distributed parity! Well, alright then; consider this. In a RAID-5 array consisting of disks over 400Gb, if you lose a disk there’s something like a 75% chance of having an unrecoverable read error while the array is being rebuilt.

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Needless to say, Computers, and the internet, have become nearly ubiquitous today. And it’s no surprise that they have found a spot in our schools. However, the way I see it being taught in school feels somewhat backwards to me.

The common concept is that “children should be exposed to computers at an early age”.

my response is “why?” I mean, it seams reasonable at first glance- there is no doubt they will be a central pinnacle for both communication as well as data management of all forms- but people seem to think that only children can learn anything. You don’t need eidetic memory to learn how to use a computer. I didn’t even own a computer until I was 16, and that was in 2002 (or something) and it was a 20 year old computer at the time (286).

What did I use it for? I learned basic batch programming. Why? because that was pretty much all I was capable of doing with it.

That I feel is a failure of almost all Computer education courses; they teach what is current. They teach Microsoft word. They tell you key bindings, how to copy and paste.

None of them ever go into the history of such features, or of the computer as a whole. Computers are treated like an appliance- similar to the way nobody really cares about the history of the toaster.

“But computers are an appliance” you might say- that is true, to some extent- at the very least you wouldn’t be the only one to feel that way.

But you don’t find college university courses teaching Washing machine science or dryer science or toaster science, so it sort of presents the question of why the computer is different. Clearly it’s different from any other appliance- obviously then it will have to be treated differently.

This sort of argues against my previous point (that computers shouldn’t be taught it schools) which it does- but really what I mean is that computers shouldn’t be taught in schools as if they were appliances; when we learn about math, we start with the basics. When we learn about science (outside Texas, I believe it’s banned there) we learn about stuff like the scientific method, and sometimes it even get’s mixed in with some history.

Yet when now when children first learn about the computer, they learn how to format text in word. They are learning the utility and not the means of that utility.

It feels like the entire point is to emphasize and teach muscle memory and memorization of the functions of the appliance of the computer, rather then try to teach analytical thinking or critical analysis of problems; For example, I’ve heard of people saying that things are “impossible” merely because they aren’t implemented in their program of choice. This has two flaws; one is that sometimes the feature implemented in their program of choice, it just happens to not have been covered in the rudimentary “here is the font combo, here is the size combo, good luck” course they took; or, sometimes the functionality actually isn’t in the program- but that is still only one program. For every single problem set there are countless applications.

This actually brings me to another point- It isn’t the computer itself that is the appliance- it is the applications the computer runs that are of appliance- in fact, the words themselves sort of give away the connection. What does this mean, exactly? Well, the way it is being taught and learned by many is as if the computer was the appliance, this isn’t bad per se but I feel it’s not quite the correct way to go about it for many people. The software is the appliance; people should learn how the software works, but they shouldn’t really need to have to know the details of it unless they want to. But, the very basics of the computer itself- the machine that is running these appliances- is something that should be required for somebody to own a computer. I don’t say this out of selfish elitism, but rather because confusion about the few terms that can easily be dispelled early on can cause those people myriads of issues later on down the road.

There are some people pushing for improvements in software so that people can “use the computer like an appliance; it should be intuitive, like a toaster or a microwave”; and one can see the logic in their reasoning. However, when we realize that the appliance is not the computer but the software itself, that changes the deal. The original “request” was basically to make it so people didn’t have to learn about software applications or hardware or memory or RAM or any of that stuff; however, when the appliance is the application, there is no excuse. When an instruction manual tells you to use a phillips screwdriver to remove the four largest screws on the back case, it makes several “assumptions” about what you already know; it assumes you know what a screwdriver is, what a philips head screwdriver is, how to judge size, how to know back from front, etc. This may sound silly, but really it’s not; after all, we weren’t born knowing what a screwdriver is or was for or how to use it, or what specific screwdriver types are, or how to accurately gauge distance and size, etc. These are all skills we developed over time. In the same vein, a software application manual shouldn’t have to describe to you the difference between memory and hard disk space when it quotes how much you need free any more then the aforementioned instruction manual should have to explain the difference between a flathead, Robertson, or Philip’s screwdriver. Neither should a software application be designed to hide these particulars from you any more then an appliance; aside from design considerations you can still see and access the screws holding a toaster together.

If anything, software is the appliance. Not the computer.

2,704 total views, 40 views today

despite my original misgivings that creating a Level Editor for BASeBlock would be impossible, I somehow managed to do it, and it was both easier to write then the one I had to make for my Original “Poing” game As well as far more functional; it fully supports selecting multiple blocks and balls, highlights those selections using a “flashing” effect; allows drag and drop of those selected blocks, deletions, Cut, Copy, Paste, etc. It also features a “paint” mode, which allows one to run the mouse along blocks and “paint” them into another block type.

The above is slightly old (well, a few hours) but even since then I’ve refined the keyboard control for “nudging” (it now only occurs if the mouse is in the picturebox area) as well as adding the Cut/Copy/Paste commands.

Further additions that I can think of:

-Better Level Selection UI. It’s actually supposed to look better… I didn’t realize until just now that I still had it set to “List” view, rather then Details, even though the appropriate code does indeed populate the various columnheaders as needed. A possible enhancement could be to offer a choice of view modes, and use as an icon a thumbnail of the level, which could generated as needed.

-I think I may try to find a way to integrate BASeParser.NET into here as well; Not sure how, in the poing editor it was used for a “colourize” command, but that seems a bit light for the inclusion of a complete library.

-”Import” command to import a small image to a set of NormalBlock’s of the appropriate colour.

302 total views, 6 views today