Friday, May 25, 2007
What I know about the top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills
A ComputerWorld article (via /.) lists "The top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills."
It's a real blast from the past. As a programmer from the early 90s I have experience with almost all of these technologies. The only ones I'm missing are #3 Non-IP networks and #4 cc:Mail.
It's a real blast from the past. As a programmer from the early 90s I have experience with almost all of these technologies. The only ones I'm missing are #3 Non-IP networks and #4 cc:Mail.
- 1. Cobol: Took a course as an undergrad at Carnegie Mellon. Fortunately, as it was my last semester prior to graduation, I did poorly in the class and was not tempted to make Cobol programming a career.
- 2. Nonrelational DBMS: For several years, I was an Omnis programmer, using its built-in hierarchical DBMS schema. Then, it became a front-end for Oracle and other DBs, and finally faded into obscurity.
- 5. ColdFusion: They still teach this at Harvard. In 2005 I took an extension class on web databases and learned ColdFusion development. I'm still doing some work with it, mainly because I believe Adobe's still alive and kicking with Flex/Flash/CS3/etc., not to mention the upcoming version of ColdFusion, codename "Scorpio." Nevertheless, I've tried to cover my bets by installing a few frameworks in PHP and getting familiar with Python and ASP.
- 6. C programming: Another CMU-era skill. Again I balked at becoming a C programmer, mostly because everything I was interested in doing was so much easier using the aforementioned Omnis.
- 7. PowerBuilder: Probably the top reason you've never heard of Omnis is because PowerBuilder outflanked, outplayed and outlasted Omnis almost everywhere I cared to look. "Today, PowerBuilder developers are at the very bottom of the list of in-demand application development and platform skills," according to the Computerworld article.
- 8. Certified NetWare Engineers: Back in 1994-1995 plotting my next move, I wanted the red-hot CNE certification. My company wouldn't pay for it, and neither would I. Instead, I went for an MBA.
- 9. PC network administrator: Another one of my earlier roles that I'm happy to have relinquished.
- 10: OS/2: I'm one of the few people in my cohort who's written a REXX script for OS/2. We used an OS/2 environment to host a PCAnywhere server for remote file access to a certain client, and there was a process we wanted to automate using the OS/2 scripting language.
Labels: Japan, softdev, web design
Saturday, May 05, 2007
Japanese Refresher
Last week, I picked up Breaking into Japanese Literature: Seven Modern Classics in Parallel Text
by Giles Murray.
It's a very clever idea: take public-domain works written in Japanese from Aozora, run them through Jim Breen's Japanese-English dictionary server, create an impeccable translation, and hire an actor to perform a reading for digital audio. Package the collection and sell as an easy-to-carry paperback – no need to carry word lists or dictionaries (paper or electronic). Just take along the book and an MP3 player with the spoken word.
At the Cornell FALCON program, we were taught that reading actual texts was by far the best way to learn the written language. Flashcards may be useful for passing tests, but it's hard to sustain interest in a pile of flashcards.
Nevertheless, I recently discovered japanese-kanji.com, and decided to get a sense of how much I know after about 10 years of having the Japanese language as a sporadic hobby, and eight years after FALCON.
The chart at right shows my results, with the characters (in traditional order) along the x-axis, and the comprehension level on the y-axis.
Note that each character has two readings: "on" (from the Chinese root) and "kun" (native Japanese pronounciation).
Despite atrophy from lack of use, I have a solid grasp on the first 400 kanji or so, although there are some for which I don't know the relatively obscure on/kun readings. For the next two hundred kanji, I know most of them well. After that? Not so good. While I know many of the more difficult characters in context from reading actual texts, I wasn't so good at picking them out of a lineup.
I'm not going to radically change approaches at this point, but it's good to have a method to periodically benchmark my progress.
by Giles Murray.It's a very clever idea: take public-domain works written in Japanese from Aozora, run them through Jim Breen's Japanese-English dictionary server, create an impeccable translation, and hire an actor to perform a reading for digital audio. Package the collection and sell as an easy-to-carry paperback – no need to carry word lists or dictionaries (paper or electronic). Just take along the book and an MP3 player with the spoken word.
At the Cornell FALCON program, we were taught that reading actual texts was by far the best way to learn the written language. Flashcards may be useful for passing tests, but it's hard to sustain interest in a pile of flashcards.
Nevertheless, I recently discovered japanese-kanji.com, and decided to get a sense of how much I know after about 10 years of having the Japanese language as a sporadic hobby, and eight years after FALCON.
The chart at right shows my results, with the characters (in traditional order) along the x-axis, and the comprehension level on the y-axis.Note that each character has two readings: "on" (from the Chinese root) and "kun" (native Japanese pronounciation).
Despite atrophy from lack of use, I have a solid grasp on the first 400 kanji or so, although there are some for which I don't know the relatively obscure on/kun readings. For the next two hundred kanji, I know most of them well. After that? Not so good. While I know many of the more difficult characters in context from reading actual texts, I wasn't so good at picking them out of a lineup.
I'm not going to radically change approaches at this point, but it's good to have a method to periodically benchmark my progress.
Labels: Japan, literature
Friday, May 04, 2007
Melancholy Elephants
As a student of the literature, culture and language of Japan, I humbly request that any readers of this blog who are citizens of Japan sign the Aozora petition, which seeks to block the proposed extension of the term of copyright protection from 50 to 70 years.
Personally, I'd like to read some more contemporary works in my lifetime, and their availability in digital form makes it feasible for me to use automated translation programs to aid in my studies. Keeping contemporary works from the mid-1950s onwards in paper-only form raises the barrier to comprehension by requiring hands-on, line-by-line translation at a higher level than I currently possess. The availability of a modern corpus of Japanese literature in digital form would do more to promote the Japanese language abroad than any other initiative I can imagine.
Furthermore, retaining the upper limit of a 50-year copyright in Japan may also spur creativity and innovation by Japanese artists that could demonstrate to U.S. policymakers the benefit of moving away from the ill-considered concept of perpetual copyright.
As a U.S. citizen, I will do my part to support candidates and officeholders who recognize the value of allowing cultural artifacts to enter the public domain for free, unfettered use.
And for a story about what may happen if we take copyright to the extreme, read Melancholy Elephants (1983) by Spider Robinson, freely available at the author's web site.
Personally, I'd like to read some more contemporary works in my lifetime, and their availability in digital form makes it feasible for me to use automated translation programs to aid in my studies. Keeping contemporary works from the mid-1950s onwards in paper-only form raises the barrier to comprehension by requiring hands-on, line-by-line translation at a higher level than I currently possess. The availability of a modern corpus of Japanese literature in digital form would do more to promote the Japanese language abroad than any other initiative I can imagine.
Furthermore, retaining the upper limit of a 50-year copyright in Japan may also spur creativity and innovation by Japanese artists that could demonstrate to U.S. policymakers the benefit of moving away from the ill-considered concept of perpetual copyright.
As a U.S. citizen, I will do my part to support candidates and officeholders who recognize the value of allowing cultural artifacts to enter the public domain for free, unfettered use.
And for a story about what may happen if we take copyright to the extreme, read Melancholy Elephants (1983) by Spider Robinson, freely available at the author's web site.
Labels: Japan, literature, politics
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]
