So, seemingly everywhere on the internet I go, (Which, since I'm in
the middle of exams is largely very few places during my study breaks)
seems to be mentioning the recent case of malware being discovered in
Gnome-look. Is this really so surprising? I foresaw this coming along,
since Linux, Ubuntu in particular, is getting insanely popular. Surely
we didn't think we were going to be invincible forever.

I think some of the problem is that the Linux community has seemed to
explode in size lately. Maybe it's just my own biased view, since I've
only joined in the last year and therefore been made aware of the
endless articles, guides, how-to's, what's-its and every other
possible conceivable article and blog post about it. But Ubuntu has
started making Linux accessible to the common power user, and with
that comes the caveat that you don't have to be smart to be a power
user. I don't mean to disparage new users or anything of the sort,
since most of the Linux community have been using linux far longer
than I have. But we seem to have reached the tipping point where we
attract non-technical people interested in a change of pace.

The important thing to take away from this is that this stuff is going
to happen, because as always it comes down to what you install. In the
end, if you're not careful, no matter what system you're using you're
going to find yourself running something you didn't mean to. Don't let
your choice of system dictate whether you're going to worry about
running random stuff on your machine. Love your machine, treat it
nicely, and don't feed it horrible malicious programs. This is no
different from not trusting random commands to run in the command
line. I've never been tricked into typing rm -rf / because I looked
into what I was doing before running commands blindly.

I expect you to do the same.

Malware. It exists for everyone. Deal with it. Be smart when using
your computer, regardless of your operating system. PEBKAC, as it
were.

So, I don't know if it's just me, but ever since I got to university I
get the general impression that when it comes to programming, I have
an inferiority complex. On the one hand, everyone I know will probably
at this point jump up and say "No you don't Jeff, you're an
egotistical *something or other*. You're always telling us how awesome
you are!" Yes, I'll concede I'm not exactly noticed for my overarching
modesty or anything, but that's not quite the truth. I used to think I
was awesome squared back in high school, when I was completely alone
in my smart person bubble, but sadly we must all come to realise that
delusions do not a good software developer make.

So I've got a confession to make. I know absolutely nothing in the
grand scheme of things. Going to the University of Waterloo has taught
me that, because while I'm more talented at programming than some
people, there are a great many more who blow me away with how much
they know. I see complex systems built by guys my year who've been
programming since they were 12 years old and I can't help but wonder
how i'll ever catch up to these people. Or I'll look at a friend who
is crazy hardcore enough to be building his own game framework in his
spare time just because he can. (I'm tempted to blame the Unix beard.)
It's these people that've really inspired my ridiculous drive to learn
more and more things in order to catch up to the pack, I think.

Looking back at my past I sort of feel I've wasted a lot of time. If I
knew how far I was behind in high school I could have used some of
that slack-off time to have become more skilled. I learned more in my
first year here than I did in all of high school, and it was largely
because coming here showed me that there was so much more I could
learn before I could consider myself a good programmer. I imagine
another revelation will come along and I'll realise how much more I
could be learning now than I do, but I think at least now I'm moving
at a brisk pace to always improve my skills.

So I think I should kind of thank all of my classmates who've shown me
exactly how much I sort of suck. It inspires me to improve, to get
better, to do something awesome instead of coasting by like I always
used to. After all, it's the arrogant who think that there's nothing
left to learn that really get left behind in this industry. You should
always be learning something new or you'll never get anywhere. My
Inferiority complex when it comes to programming is just what I needed
to kick me into gear.

Anyway, end of break, I should get back to work. Just thought I'd put
this down somewhere.

So right now I've just got to mention the scourge of my free time as
of late, which is exactly how fun web programming is. Some point
during this term I decided for some reason, probably boredom, that I
needed a website. I "technically" learned HTML way back in grade 10,
and by that I mean I understood maybe the general concept of Markup
language and I absolutely hated it because it seemed dull and slow and
made gross looking sites at the best of times. So I wasn't exactly
master of the web at that point, I guess I'm going to have to say.
Anyway, that was always my opinion on HTML and web stuff coming into
University in general.
So at my last co-op job, I wasn't doing much programming. It was part
of my job, but it wasn't the part I was hired to do so much as the
projects I was given to ensure they didn't have a tragically bored
programmer doing work better suited to a security researcher. While I
mostly coded in perl, I was making CGI(Common Gateway Interface, for
those wondering) web based tool and therefore all of my display
elements were, you guessed it, HTML. So I had to use that, and I
managed with my limited skills, and it wasn't as terrible as I thought
because I got to think "Hey, this isn't so bad when you've got
server-side code doing something legitimate behind it" and that was
probably the beginning of my mental shift.
Anyway, back to the start of this school term. Every decent
programmer, or at least the savvy ones when it came to employers (Aka
Beardrew is insanely good but last time I mentioned web programming he
was very, "Bah humbug" and went back to his C++, so meh) all seemed to
have fancy websites and blogs to lure in employers. So I learned HTML,
and I learned CSS, and they seemed much better than I had ever
remembered them. I finally figured out how Divs and floats and all
that worked when it had confused my naive grade 10 "I still couldn't
program" brain. This is where the addiction started, because once I'd
figured out how to build a site that doesn't look like it was puked
out by 1992, I spent forever tweaking it. Admittedly it still looked
like it was from the early 2000's at best, but I was new.
But since then it's been getting progressively worse. I've learned
enough to give my website a Web 2.0 look, with some kind of design
forethought and ROUNDED CORNERS AND THINGS!(which is a headache and a
half and requires some magic and making sure all the browsers know
you're following web standards and I kind of don't want to know what
IE 6 thinks my site looks like...). I also learned Javascript, which
has just opened up the floodgates even more, because now it can be all
wonderful and interactive. If anyone has looked at it, it currently
has some silly Javascript to change the header for each page, but on
top of that every link calls the page via AJAX just to avoid a page
reload, and that's completely because I wanted to learn Ajax. (which,
I might add, is way more trivial than I always feel it was made out to
be...)
So anyway, I'm just documenting the madness of how my website is
getting exponentially more ridiculous because it's a great timewaster
to tweak superficial elements of things. That's the beauty of web
stuff I think, you can just tweak things and see them with a simple
reload. It's programming gone even more interactive than usual, which
makes it cool again. I imagine once exams are over I'll start doing
crazy things to the site, and I know it's going to drive me mad, but
oh well.

Anyway, that's about as much madness as I feel like mentioning on
here. Also, I was thinking of writing space invaders using javascript
and the HTML5 Canvas element. I realize this is super duper pointless
but when I was trying it out I just kept thinking back to my turing
days manually drawing out aliens and the idea to revisit that game
with more knowledge and skills seems deliciously fun. instead of
procedural and with funny hacks I can make it beautiful and object
oriented! :D

I'm looking forward to it already. Anyway, of with me now.