Why using a online web composer is a bad idea.

Yes I am have a degree with specialisation in web development and yes I know people whom are in the need of a job. But hear me out before you go all crazy on me. 

I will be using the term web composer, in this blog post. To me a web composer, is a tool which helps you automatically generate web site code and styles. In this particular article I am referring to the online tools which exist 

Requirements

You as a basic customers, knows normally very little of the web design and how it works. Often you can compose a site to your liking and seemingly it is doing what you want. 

But do you really know what you are doing? properly not. Of course most people can put together a good colour scheme and use web composer to make a pretty design. But that is not what good design is. 

A web developer is trained for the job of making a website pretty, functional and easy to use. This while the web site still holdes a wast amount of features and functionalities. The reason for this, is the understanding of requirements. A web developer has tools in his or hers toolbox, which allows the web developer to better understand the requirements you have, or maybe even the requirements of your vistitours and customers, The web developer can even unveil requirements you did not even knew you had, and these unknown requirements are often the most important ones. 

Usability

You can as stated above, easily use a web composer and design a fairly decent web site. How ever you might have absolutely no idea how to make things user-friendly and easy to use. Even though your website looks brilliant and pretty, it might be hard as hell to use. A web developer is trained to design things pretty, functional and efficient to use. 

Branding

Properly the most important part about ANY web site is branding, and this is where a web developer really come into his or her own. Because most web composers allows you a different amount of standard themes, which is either very little or not at all customisable. Though I should mention some offers a very good customisable theme generator. 

However, a good web developer can give you a 100 percent customised design and brand, which stands out amongst all the predefined themed sites and gives the users a good and memorable  experience, which will have people returning. 

So even to a startup site the brand is important, and here no web composer can help properly, only a trained designer can do this. 

Code base

This not so relevant in the beginning, but what happens when your site becomes so big, you do not have the time to maintain yourself? You will have to hire a web developer anyways, and then everything has to be rewritten and in some cases even redeveloped. 

And the code generated by some of these web composers are useless and very bad designed, and by such is by good web developers thrown straight into the trash bin. 

A organised web developer, will ensure an up to date, well documented and moste important well structured codebase, so in case you need to switch developer or a new developer comes a long, it will take hours, in stead of days to get to know the code based. This can never be achieved with a web composer. 

Conclusion

Of course these web composers, are good if you want a small personal web site, where you share information about your personal life. But if you are a blogger (like my self), or have a web shop, or corporation web site. Have it done properly, it saves you time and money in they end.

Hypocrite some may say, because I use blogger as the base of blog, and I can only agree. How ever the reason I started using blogger in the beginning, because I could not find the time to develop it my self from ground up, which I would preferred. However I am pleased to announce, that as soon, as I can afford a web hosting site. My blog will go online, on a static based form, developed with Pelican, python and bash. 

What am I working on???

As stated early this year I am now a student developer at Steinwurf, which is awesome and I am challenged every day and expanding my knowledge of RLNC, C++ and C, which interest me a lot.

But what do I do besides my work? 

NOTHING... HAHAH kidding. So what has actually happened, since last? Well not much on my personal projects I am afraid, the Terminal books has been slowly developed the reason for this is I do not has as much spare time as I am use to, and I have started spending more time on fiction writing (ooh yes). But the Terminal book is still in development and after the 19th of december it will get a lot of focus I hope. 

DynStr: 

Has been discontinued, the reason for this is simple. The people whom use it likes it (which I am happy about), but they have realised the world must go on, and by such has adapted to use memset and so on themself. 

Fiction writing

As some know, I once would have liked to be an author instead of a computer programmer. But what few actually know is, that it is still a dream of mine, though I am bit dyslexic. Therefor I have started working on small fantasy fiction book series, about one of my favourite subjects, which is religion. 

A small teaser about the content seems in order: 

The story is based in current times, and is concerning the ancient war between good and evil. More precise the battle between heaven and hell, and how perhaps the human perspective on this war is wrong. 

More I will not tell at the moment, but I hope some will be able to enjoy it some day :) 

- Lars 

 

Arduino - WHY?

Okay it is rare that I rant about a product which is not Windows, but I would like to do so now.
I have just had to help a friend of mine working with a Arduino board for an exercises, and my problem is not the board itself. But rather the implementation of the C language which it utilise, what I hate is:

• Special functions
• Automatic include 

Special functions

But Lars how can you hate them, they are awesome, I love Serial.println? No you do not, not in two years when you have to code proper C, you will hate it and you will hate it good. These special functions, which comes as implementations of standard C library functions are just plain stupid, let the student use printf and so on, and get to know special things such as '\n'. It is not fair towards the students, to teach them to be lazy and not understand the programming language properly. 

Automatic include

TO THE CREATE OF THE ARDUINO C LANGUAGE: May you burn in what ever hell you believe in, for this monstrosity. 

But Lars it just makes C so much more accessible, if that is your opinion fine. But for the future generation of programmers, I hope you never will be a teacher. It is even worse than special functions. Auto include of libraries such as stdlib og stdio, is madness I started learning Java that way, and I have always cursed my teacher for that. You hide a very important thing of programming away from your students WHY, give me one good reason and to make it easy is not one. Later on when they have to learn proper coding, they would think well this is stupid. Instead of cherish the fact, that they have more or almost absolute control of what is actually in the application they build and ship. 

Of course the functions for setting pins high and so on is okay, but in extension of the above written, show the students that they need a library to do this. 

Conclusion

My initial thoughts of the Arduino platform is; that it is a fun and engaging way to teach your students how to program. But this is totally overshadowed by the two subjects mentioned above, if those are removed from the Arduino it would be a fantastic tool. Until then however, I can not recommend it to newcomers in programming. 

Sorry Arduino people :( 

- Lars 

Stop the madness

Pretty much every one who knows me, know I am agnostic atheist and that I respect people of other religions and believe systems.

But enough is enough. I have over the last couple of weeks followed the "work" of ISIS, and their mental perspective on the world. I have seen Islam used as a way to destroy, the life of humans and small communities. Yet if you read the core part of the Qur'an, it focus on peace and co-existence it is only newer parts which focus on this mental Muslim only world. And it is not only the followers of Islam that fuck up the world, Christians as well I have friends from extreme Christian communities, who have either been dishonoured, beaten and threatened on their lives. Because they do not follow a doctrine.

This is insane that we use text written by man to determine what a god, that may or may not exists, means or have said to people. The bible is assembled by election for, well yes, god sake. People (I believe males only) choose which parts should be in and which should not.

It is pure insanity that we follow ancient doctrines in a modern world. I don't try to make all atheist or agnostic, nor do I aim to make them leave their religion. What I want people to do is to start using the damn brain and question ancient authority with basis in a books, where of some is over 400 years old and over 4 different version of each. We modernize our legal system check the laws do they still make sense, we never do it with religious texts.

Also a complete separation of religion and government, why let people basing the laws on 400 year old text control you, and even worse why even let them control people that way, if they don't believe in the same things?

All I ask for is that we start using our brains.

Please understand that I do not try to offend anyone, besides extremist psychos, I try to make people think and consider their perspective on religion.

- Lars  

Small personal status and project status

Hello I am still studying at the University of Aalborg and starting at third semester in September.
Besides that I am now a student programmer / developer at Steinwurf.
I am primarily working with packaging of software for linux distributions such as RHEL, OpenSUSE and Debian, development in bash, python, java, C and C++.

dynstr:
check last blog post, I am really looking for testers

Introduktion til Terminal:
The books is an almost done but is still split in to a lot of smalls parts. So I am currently working on assembling all the small parts and so the book should be ready to proof reading

Website:
I am working on getting my website back online - BUT I need to find someone whom offers cheap RoR 3.0 and Postgresql hosting

So that is my small personal and project update

- Lars  

Small status on dynstr - Looking for testers

As state in my previous blog post. Dynstr is part of some volunteering work I have been doing. But I have spend some time on it, making it neater, cleaner and faster.
But I am looking for testers, so please either downloaded directly from github:
https://github.com/looopTools/dynstr/releases
or add me to your package repo:
http://software.opensuse.org/download.html?project=home%3Alooop&package=dynstr

Please give me some feedback or things you would like to see

dynstr and Introduction to Terminal

Hello I would like to share a bit of information about a couple of projects I am working on.

Dynstr - a dynamic string/char* library for C

Do to some volunteer work I have been doing on the side. I came in the need of dynamically being able to manipulate strings/char* in the C programming language.

This project I have decide to make public, and I will be working on it for at least 3 months, it is under GPL and free to use:

https://github.com/looopTools/dynstr.git

Introduction to Terminal

I was asked to make a basic introduction guide to the Terminal application for UNIX/Linux systems.

I have had to restart for a while do to problems with some local repos. 

But now I am up to speed and my first chapter is almost done

Small personal update

I have received some mails about my post "Software engineering at Aalborg University" and every one seems to think I still attend the Business Academy of Aarhus and their program for Computer Science.

So just a little update:

I graduated from the Business Academy in start of June and worked at the University of Aarhus for 3 months.

Then I moved to Aalborg to attend the software engineering program at Aalborg University so that what I do now.

Work: currently unemployed, so if you know a place with a position for a backend student developer I would be really happy 

Grow up iditos

Funny caption?

Well it is a cover for a subject which annoys me a lot.

It seems like lately people in the hardware industry, seems more interested in ranting on others products instead of developing some awesome projects themselves. 

Why would Microsoft compare a Surfaces to an iPad, or Samsung comparing a Nexus Note to a smartphone and yes the iPhone colour are coloured - and not just compare but trying to completely destroying the other product?

I think a Surfaces is for another user group than an iPad, so why the need for a comparison? in the end a Surfaces is to me not a tablet and Nexus Note why compare a tablet to phone?

It seems to me like the manufactures has lost it, they should be learning from each other not steal nor blame

know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss

Seriously start to use some more time developing and create awesome stuff, like you already do. This is to all of you: Apple, Nokia, Microsoft, Samsung and so on. 

Software Engineering at University of Aalborg #2

The different courses so far

As a part of the software engineering program, one will undertake approximately 3 courses per semester. And since I am currently on the first semester I will talk about the three I currently are following.

Imperative Programming 

Is programming course, where you will be taught the principles of imperative programming and simple algorithms and basic structures in programming. The language in which the taught skills are utilised is ANSI C.

C grands the students a basic understanding of what programming, with out the need to learn more advance thermos like Object Oriented design.

Later in this course we will also be taught basic data structures.

For me this course is a bit boring since it is more a welcome home course - Since I have been coding for a long time. 

Linear Algebra - A matrix approach 

At AAU Linear Algebra is a must have course, which teach you the principals of Linear Algebra, with basis in matrix and the utilisation of these 

Problem-based learning in science

is a course which introduce the students to the way of teaching, which is the foundation of the science educations at AAU.

Under this course students will also be taught how to write a scientific report at utilise it and work in teams. 

 

Software Engineering at University of Aalborg

For the first time in 3 years I am back in college studying at the University of Aalborg (AAU) and following the program for a bachelor degree of science in Software Engineering, which is a program under the School of information and computer technology.
So now I been back in "school" for about 5 weeks and here is my thoughts on the program so far.

Problem based learning

AAU base their way of teaching on a principal of problem based learning, which in basic means you are given a problem or have to find a problem and the solve or try to solve it. 

This means that the way you learn is by a pratical approach and often in teams, so not only do you learn to solve a problem. You also learn to work in a team and you learn to think and analyse problems with a scientific perspective 

What they do for the social enviroment

First day all new student meets in the city centre and share breakfast and you are sitting with your new fellow students. 

Then the next couples of weeks there will be a hole lot of social arrangements to russell all up and 

together, parties, sports events and boat race.  Unfourntually for me I had to work so I can't describe this in all its glory.

Later I will talk about the different courses 

A small rant about Apple

For about 5 years now I have been back on the Apple platform, and what has happened annoys me a bit.
The overall points are:

• Product line-up 
• Userfriendly 
• Shitting in the developers backyard 

Product line-up

Diversity is good and design is good. But in both cases it has to make sense. Perhaps I  am blind, but to me the Apples line-up has become bloated. They try to do to much, with a single line-up and there focus has moved from Laptops and Desktops to more well not unimportant, but in my case less userable products.

I mean seriously, no one, NO ONE. Can use an iPad for programming or application designs, nor pro photo edditing.

Userfriendly

Mac App Store is a great idea indeed. But it will (not as it is now) become my main source for applications. Because there are almost no GPL/BSD licenses, and my favorit applications are not in the App Store.

And forceing users into using the App Store is plain old EVIL.

Sandboxing 

You satans minions. I like to throw my files in to random places and organize them just as scrambled as my own head. Stop forcing it up on me to fit into your pre decide boxes. This is not userfriendly this is plain old dictatorship without reason

Shitting in the developers backyard 

So what do I mean by this. First of all I agree XCODE is awesome, and the resources on the Apple developer portal is great. But as we went from Snow Leopard to Lion and currently Mountain Lion. It seems to me that Apple keeps setting boundaries for the developer rather than help them. why do we need to sandbox our apps? Why can't we access the GPU to make awesome games? ...

How to check disk usage in Terminal

Though I mainly use OS X, I am very found of using the Termnial for many tasks.

Amongst those task is to check disk usage and I am often ask how one does that, so here we go.

Command: 

The command for checking disk usages is: df Which simply gives you this:

Which is almost useless to people who are not nerdy enough.

df -h

By being at little crafty there is a flag, to the df and that is df -h, the -h gives you a human readable layout. 

This also works on Linux, BSD and Solaris.

Using OS X and Mac doing AP CS study

I have for the last 5 years used Mac OS X for my different study, for short

• Technical college Aarhus N (High School)
• B.Sc Computer Science Aarhus University (Incomplet)  
• AP. Computer Science Business Academy Aarhus - Viby J (Current) 

But enough of that, what is this post about? This post will be concerning what it is like to use OS X doing my AP study.

First 3. semstres

Well the first 3. semstres was pretty easy, with a few exceptions. 

The first 2 semstres are based on technocligeis which has no problems running on OS X. We used Java as programming language, Blue J and Eclipse as IDE's and Visual Paradigmen as UML editor, which all run luckily runs on OS X and Linux. So there was no problems with the software and techs. But of course there where problems.

SEND M$ Office to the deepest pits of tartarus

Even the teachers on a Software development education, is in love with the moste freaking annoying office suite on the planet. And the teachers of course expect all to have this office suite, so they are using .docx and pptx and so on. Which is so freaking annoying because I did not have the suite installed, but I had Libre Office and iWork installed which do not work well with .docx. So this was / is very annoying and some of the teachers where not even willing to convert the documents to .pdf.

CAOS

CAOS = Computer Architecture and Operating Systems is a subject where we among other things to a look at databases. This of course is fine since so many applications are storring persistent data in databases. But many danish companies are very very M$ loving, so of course we had had to use M$ Sql database. Which is an awesome database and have an awesome Management System. But of course that does not run on OS X. But we are givennen a MSDN (now DreamSpark) account so with VirtualBox, Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft Sql Server 2008 we where on a role. Simple solution to a simple problem, but I still hate to use Windows for development.

4. semester

The C# semester, I hoped to be able to use Virtual Box once again. But this time that was not enough.

1. of all, hardware problem:

My MacBook Pro is an fall 08 unibody, which meant:

• 1.8Ghz Core2Duo  Intel CPU
• 4GB DDR3 Ram 
• 320GB @7200 HDD

Which is not enough for a Virtual Machine and running Visual Studio 2012 at the same time. So I ordered and 8GB kingstone ram package and 720GB Hyrbid drive and believed was enough, but no.

So I had to used bootcamp, installation was simple. But a worse user experience you will have a hard time finding. My fans are almost always running at full speed and even in idel mode the damn system is using 3.44 GB of my rams, So in basic it is hell to use.

Conclusion

For the first couple of semesters it is nice to use OS X and Mac if you can convince the teachers to use .pdf. But at the 4. semester you will either need a very powerfull Mac like the new Retnia MBP's otherwise I would shift to a Windows computer, which for me would be hell.   

  

Well HELLO.

A bit of introduction.

I am young male, from Denmark and use most of my time on nerdy things like maths and programming. I have a flare for agil and open source software development, and my favorit programming language is Ruby.

Introduction DONE 

What will this blog be about? Well mostly random nerdy stuff like Linux, programming and books from time to time. 

Hope you will enjoy.