Learning Journal #2143

Not actually that number but anyway, NCSSC Learning journal backdating because I'm really bad at doing it at the right time. Also because hindsight is fun to use.

So, the Challenge had five weeks for all three levels. I had chosen to do the beginner level despite having probably more coding experience than a few people there. Why would I do that? The answer is because of the way I taught myself to code; by diving head-first into Valve's Source Engine with no prior knowledge. GENIUS.

So invariably I missed a lot of fundamentals, which is why I did the beginner level - to make up for my own hastiness.

Of course there are some things I can do easily enough with out help;

This being the most prominent example.

For the uninformed, this is a bit of a programming history joke. Because it was the first program ever created, people quite make it the first thing taught in programming courses.

 Next up we have input commands. Allowing us to print text based upon what the user types, ranging from easy versions of the program to slightly more difficult ones.

It's all quite straightforward, really.

Anyway, more Grok/NCSSC next time.

So I'm Pretty Lazy, But Hey

So, I've been participating in the Australian National Computer Science School Challenge, which is an online competition in which you program in Python for points.

Python is an object oriented programming language that's fairly useful, and not that difficult to learn. Been around since 1991, but still apparently relevant, which is a good thing for a programming language.

Honestly, the way I first found out about it was thanks to the 3d modeller "Blender", a few years ago. At the time it was to me just a way to extend Blender's functionality, and it was only recently that I discovered that it was a separate thing. Shows what I know, huh?

I looked at my pageviews.

I am surprised at the fact I have total 30 or so page views already. Thanks, I guess.

I also found the information page useful. See, given that I had never really put any thought into the subject, I thought there were only five web broswers; Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera.

Turns out there are far more than I thought. And a lot more to the internet browsers system than I thought.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers
 That's a useful page for some basic and intermediate learning about browsers, though potentially somewhat incorrect given that it's on Wikipedia.

If you care, the specific browser that made me find out is called Konqueror. It sounds kind of interesting.

(Konqueror's icon, taken from the Wikipedia page)

Big Fat First

And with this I make my First Post!
Though given the lack of other people with control over the blog, no one else could really do that...

So, if you're here, thanks for giving this page a look. This is (rather clearly, I imagine) my very first blog. I'm not entirely sure as of yet what this will be used for, so bear with me on that. Something will happen soon, though; that much I'm sure of.

I leave you with a pleasant yet odd gif. I have no idea why those dogs are spinning, so have fun coming up with a reason if you really want to.