20 September, 2004

The Marvellous Breadfish

Tell me, have you seen the marvellous breadfish?

Our Web Developer’s “Line Of The Day”

Yet again my concern for the value of an Internet Computer Science degree from UWA is raised, as a dippy co-worker with two years of such a degree behind her asks me for help:

“Dan,” she begins, “How do I make a table in PHP?”

For those of you that don’t know quite as much about web design as she should, PHP is a programming language used, amongst other things, for developing dynamic, flexible web sites which integrate with other data sources. This weblog, for example, is powered by PHP. It is most frequently used to output HTML, the language of the web.

“I think you mean HTML,” I reply, seeing what she’s trying to achieve – the alignment of two text fields with their corresponding labels. She’ll need a simple two-by-two table. The code for this is as follows:

<table>
  <tr>
    <td>
      Top-Left Text
    </td>
    <td>
      Top-Right Text
    </td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>
      Bottom-Left Text
    </td>
    <td>
      Bottom-Right Text
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>

What are they teaching them these days? I remember learning this at about age 14, using Netscape’s examples. This girl has been studying Internet-fucking-Computing at degree level for two years and hasn’t been shown this?

Don’t even get me started on the fact that she shouldn’t be using a table for the purpose she was trying to use it for.

Update 2023-12-07: In hindsight, I made a knee-jerk reaction in writing this blog post. I should have treated this junior developer as what I’d now call “one of the lucky 10,000” and been more-supportive and a better teacher. We’re all learning, and back in 2004 I clearly had a lot of learning still to do.

Illness, Alton Towers, And Troma Night

Found myself ill again on Wednesday and Thursday last week (in partial explanation to my lack of weblog posts). I think I gulped down some green-and-lumpy orange juice before I went to bed on Wednesday night and as a result found myself quite sick. Even after I’d recovered, I spent several days with almost no appetite at all. Eyrk.

Still went ahead with my plan to go to Alton Towers, though. On Friday, Claire, Paul and I braved the 6½+ hour round trip there and back. Bryn, sadly, ~~chickened-out~~ wasn’t able to come, so we gave away our second free ticket (using, as we were, buy-one-get-one-free vouchers) to somebody at the gate (it’s amazing how mistrusting people are: “We’ve got too many tickets,” I said, “Who wants a free one?”… it took awhile before we got a volunteer!).

Air is a good ride (I hadn’t been there since it opened). The rest of the park remained good, as always. Claire won a stuffed toy white lion from a guy who couldn’t guess the month of her birth (he guessed November, which is what we’ve now named the lion). Paul spent most of the day taking off his glasses (to go on the rides) and putting them on again (in order to see again). A good day was has by all.

Oh, and Troma Night was good, too.