(tutorial) jqGrid cell edit example

Since I seem to be getting regular visitors to my first jqGrid tutorial, I thought I’d make more.

In this tutorial, we’ll see how to make a table editable using the “celledit” property of the grid.

“What the internet is doing to our brains”

One of the things that often comes up for students like me (and for people who work primarily with the internet) is the great distraction it poses to “real life” and “real work”. Suffice it to say, there are many arguments against this phrasing, but the fact remains that the internet can be as great a distraction as it can be an aid.

HBO’s creative new advertising

Anyone who knows me knows I love Game of Thrones. The books are amazing – pick up a copy at your local bookstore.

The companion show is coming back for its third season this weekend, and HBO has kicked off a creative new web campaign to promote it.

How to find the length of an array in C

I think this is one of the most common questions that I see when I look through stackoverflow’s C section (and one that I myself struggled with after I first started learning C). C is not like Java. There are no dedicated functions to calculate the length of an array. You can’t even declare an array without first specifying the length (so C can allocate the appropriate amount of memory on the stack).

Anyway, but back to the question at hand: How do you find the length of an array in C?

Divide and conquer your education

I was perusing one of the blogs I usually frequent today, and I came across this interesting “theory” on education that the author calls “The Cake Story”. It goes like this:

What you are about to learn is like a cake. A giant cake. It’s a knowledge cake. And you are given a tiny tiny spoon, for massive massive cake. Now here comes the best part. Somebody keeps slapping on stuff on the cake, new layers, more decoration (all eatable of course). It keeps getting bigger and bigger, faster and faster than you could eat it. How do you go about eating this giant cake? A spoonful at the time, right? But the way you eat it will define the whole experience, you just don’t know it.

Say there are two people, with a tiny spoon each. The first person takes a bit of the knowledge cake. This person is giddy, exited, about what has just been learned. The taste and effect is savored, motion is remembered. He or she shares this with everybody: “wow- look at what I can [do]. I can [eat] all this of this bite, and I will know all that when I take all those bites”.

The second person takes bite. Looks at the hole after the bite, then looks at the rest of the cake. Another layer is slapped on. The hole seems even smaller. The cake even bigger. The person thinks: “I know so little, and there is so much to learn. It’s impossible.”

… The second person [is] more likely to do worse and fail. The cake would win.

(some missing words filled in by me).

I think it’s an interesting way of approaching the success/failure rate of education based on the person’s attitude. No doubt, there is some truth to this. If you set out thinking “I am going to fail”, you will self-sabotage at some point and end up failing. Remember all those people telling you to “put out positive thoughts to the universe”? Well, they’re not completely off. Your attitude directly or indirectly affects the way you approach anything in life – be a problem, a relationship, or a new experience. If you set out with a “can do” attitude, you are less likely to get hung up on wonder “Can I do this???” and more likely to just push ahead and start searching for the solution. If you are constantly worried about your ability to do something, you will most likely never get to the point where you actually try doing whatever it is that you want to accomplish. As the quote goes “90% of success is just showing up”.

(tutorial) Getting started with shell scripting!

So, I’m back to school this semester (part time for now) and one of the first things we’re doing in our class is Shell Scripting. As a girl who got into this whole “computer science thing” after playing around with several Linux distros and loving the terminal, this is very fun for me! The course’s focus is mainly UNIX and C, but this is how we’re getting introduced to the terminal and I have no qualms. Shell scripting is almost like a game, and fairly is easy to pick up, even for someone who has little to no knowledge of the shell/terminal. So here’s a little script to get you started!

“I would rather be broke in a start up reinventing the world than anything else”

A great talk by LUXr founder Janice Fraser about her career path so far, and the life of an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley.

I love her little cartoon post-its! She’s like the Tina Fey of Silicon Valley, lol.

What Is Bad Writing?

BAD WRITING from Morris Hill Pictures on Vimeo.

What Is Bad Writing? | Thought Catalog.

The movie Bad Writing, a well-reviewed documentary about the craft/art/thing that is writing, is streaming for free on Vimeo. The doc includes interviews with such well-known authors as George Saunders, Margaret Atwood, and David Sedaris. Vernon Lott, the filmmaker, was inspired to make the documentary when he came across some poems from his younger days, when he wanted to be a writer.

Looking forward to watching this! Margaret Atwood is one of my favourite authors (and a fellow Victoria College alum!).