Pink

There are artists that sound better live and artists that sound better on record. Last night I found out that Pink is in the former category. The concert was great! Aside from her songs she did 4 Non Blondes - What's up, and a compresed version of about 4 Janice Joplin songs (like Bobby McGuire). Because there were only old buildings around (Brasov, Piata Sfatului) you get the feeling you are in the past. Just like in the commercial for Pepsi with Pink, Beyonce and Enrique that started the show.

Robocode

Learn java and have fun: robocode.

Halfway the brainbench campaign

Brainbench is free from 1 July to 14 July. This means that we are halfway right now. So it's time to make a short assesment of my test results. I have expected to score at 80 percentile in all tests and I would have been very happy with 90 percentile. But life is cruel. Here are the ones below what I have expected:

• 40% Business Communication (weak areas: electronic and nonverbal communication)
• 48% Listening Skills
• 68% Programmer/Analyst Aptitude
• 74% Written English (weak areas: articles, misused words, etc.)
• 78% Computer Fundamentals (Win 95/98) (weak area: win 95 :) )

Here are the ones of which I am content:

• 84% Technical Writing
• 85% MS Access 2000 Fundamentals

And there are some with really good scores:

• 92% C
• 93% Math Fundamentals
• 93% XML Concepts
• 97% Java 2
• 97% XML
• 98% OO Concepts
• 98% Programming Concepts
• 99% C++

The whole distribution is revealing. Most of the tests on which I got high "grades" (C++, XML, Java 2) are about knowing lots of information or.. knowing how to find it. I must admit that for the XML and Java tests I knew the answer for about 15% of the questions. However, 3 minutes were plenty to find the answer (usualy thru google). Note that this is not against brainbench rules. This probably means that I am good at locating and parsing information. The sadest experience was the score I got in the "aptitude test". This time the main problem was not the information quantity but rather how well you can handle it. And I did much worse than I expected. Most of the questions were relatively easy but I missed a lot of them feeling that I would have needed just a bit more time. But speed comes with practice so I guess this shows that I have exercised my problem solving skills not nearly enough. I have spent more time trying to understand masses of information organized by others, including problem solutions, but I have rarely sat down and tried to solve a problem by myself. I need to remedy this.

Dijkstra: The Humble Programmer

"It [the confrontation with the programming task] has already taught us a few lessons, and the one I have chosen to stress in this is the following. We shall do a much better programming job, provided that we approach the task with a full appreciation of its tremendous difficulty, provided that we stick to modest and elegant programming languages, provided that we respect the intrinsic limitations of the human mind and approach the task as Very Humble Programmers." [October 1972]. This is the conclusion of Dijkstra's Turing Award Lecture. As usual, a very convincing piece. In fact, I think it contains the best argument I've seen that C++ is a bad language for being productive, even though it was written more than 10 years before C++'s conception (1983).