Friday, September 24, 2010

The Little Prince - Programmer's Version - Chapter 12, 13, 14

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The last post about this "The Little Prince - Programmer's Version",
which I saw originally in Korean version in here.
I contributed all of my translation to the Google Translate.

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Chapter 12.

A debugger was living in the next planet.
It was a very short visit, but plunged the little prince into deep dejection.
"What are you doing?" said the little prince to the person who is typing with a bunch of code and comments.
"I'm debugging." He said somberly.
"Why do you debug?"
"To catch bugs." He said with his head bowed.
"Why do you catch bugs?"
"For a clean and beautiful program." he answered.
"Why do you code such a program?"
"That makes debugging easier!" answered the person and remained silent.
('Adults are very odd') told the little prince to himself.


Chapter 13.

In the 4th place the little prince visited, a file sharer was living.
He kept his head so close to the monitor so that he didn't raise his head as the little prince arrived.
"Hi, your noodle is overcooked." said the little prince watching the instant noodle on the desk.
"Those three files here and two files of torrent and adding the 10 files which I uploaded on rapidshare... hi. And 36 files to send to pirate bay... hu! So totally 512GB, and 1440 and one."
"What are 10000 pieces?"
"Oh, you're still there? I'm too busy ... when I add three to two"
"What are those million pieces?" asked the little prince again.
"The entrepreneur raised his head."
"I was disrupted only three times since I booted my computer in 25 December 2009. The first time was when the server was dead attacked from DDos, the second was because of my nerve aches, as I'm computing sitting in this position, and the third is... now!"
...
"What are you doing with those 10000 files?"
"What do I do?"
"Yes."
"I'm doing nothing. I own them."
"You own the files?"
"Yes."
"But according to the terms and conditions I saw before..."
"Companies don't own the contents. They . That's a very different story."
"But what is that good to you that you own those files?"
"My mileage raises."
"What is it good for that your mileage raises?"
"It's useful for downloading the other files in high-speed."
(He's talking like the debugger) thought the little prince.
...
"So, what do you do with those files?" asked the little prince.
"I keep those in my hard disk compressed. And then I do disk defragmentation continuously. That's a hard job".
The little prince was still not satisfied.
"I, I can do some calculations with Open Office, I can connect to the network with browser. But you can't do anything with your illegally obtained programs!"
"I won't. But I can share them."
"What does it mean?"
"I upload my files in file sharing sites compressed."
"And that's it?"
"That's it."
...
(Adults are very odd) mumbled the little prince to himself.


Chapter 14.

The fifth place he visited was a very interesting place.
There was a very huge computer and a programmer.
He was keeping making a patch of some game.
...
Approaching him, the little prince greeted him politely.
"Hi, that's a command." said the patch maker.
"What is a command?"
"That's creating a new patch. Here you go."
And then he handed over the overwritten USB.
"Why did you give me the USB again?"
"It's a command."
"I don't understand." said the little prince.
"Because command is a command. Here you go, the new version."
Then he wiped out his sweat and did coding hard.
"I've got a hard job. It was ok before. I just needed to redecorate some contents every month. Then the other times I needed to maintain them."
"Then did the game go wrong after that?"
"No, that it did not go wrong is the problem! Because the users are consuming contents faster and faster, my bosses wanted me to make patches continuously."
"So?"
"So the this game's contents change a little bit every minutes. For example the colour of the NPC changes a little bit.."
"That's odd! Your game is being patched continuously!"
"That's not odd at all. While we are talking, the new prototype of a new donjon was published." (That was because probably the computer was very good and there were a lot of those developers.)
"Already?"
...
The fact that he could not be in a blessed place was because 1440 version ups were possible in 24 hours, which was the little prince could not confessed even to himself.


Friday, September 3, 2010

Platform independence in Mac OS X

As OS, I'm using Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.
So, in choosing software programs, I prefer platform independence rather then any platform dependent software, as I do for choosing something for development.

And those platform-independent free or open-source programs are great in their features as well.
So, here are my platform independent software apps on my Mac OS X:

1) Picture management, import, viewing program:
I use Picasa instead of Mac OS X's iPhoto.


It's very good, with many extra features for photo editing, blogging, uploading on web albums, and further functionality like tagging, etc.
And it works very well on both Windows and Mac OS X.
I haven't tested it on Linux yet, but it is supposed to be working fine on Linux as well, as as far as I know it uses Wine to make the originally Windows program working on both Mac OS X and Linux.

2) Video playing, watching program:
As a Korean (mainly for reasons of subtitles for foreign movies), GOM Player was the (kind of - it would have been a lot better without all those adverts) best choice for video watching program, on Windows (only!).
Its very easy and intuitive user interface is very addictive!
And very good support for subtitles (of course especially Korean)!
But here is another option: MPlayer!
Works fine on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
On Mac OS X, I use MplaerX.

Nice, simple user interface with the convenient and intuitive interface (almost the same) as the GOM Player.
And no adverts!
The Korean subtitle just works!

3) Music playing program:
I don't quite like, or I didn't appreciate yet to this point, the complicated interfaces and functionalities of the iTunes.
On Windows, I very much liked the simple interface of the Winamp.
For OS-independence, and even better as an free-and-open-source program, there is:
VLC media player
It is actually a media player, not only for music but also for videos and streaming media, but I find MPlayer better for video and VLC media player better for music.
Well, MPlayer is also a media player, so that it plays music etc..., but that might be a personal preference.

4) Internet Browser
Firefox and Google Chrome.
I guess not so many words are needed for those.
There are pros and contras for each of those programs.
I quite like Google Chrome's extension sync function.

5) E-Mail and Contact management program
Thunderbird

There has been a time where it had some issues so that I preferred using Microsoft Outlook (Windows), Apple Mail (Mac OS X) and Evolution (Linux), but I think now it's so good that I'm using Thunderbird on all of those platforms.
And I think it's even better than the other e-mail and contact management programs mentioned above, because your contacts can be managed by one program for all.

6) IDE
Eclipse IDE.
I guess not so much word to say about it.
You can develop almost any language on it.
I've been posting about Eclipse IDE in this blog.

7) Virtualization
Quite often we need to run virtual machines, because there are some programs we need to run, which run only on specific OS.
I've posted about choices and aspects of virtualization programs in my previous post here.
I'm using VirtualBox.

7) Image editing program
Gimp is a very fine image editing program, runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
Some proprietary programs might be better, but it's free, open-source, and does the job for normal image editing use.