Fuck!

I just accidentally installed mariadb and completely fucked mysql. Probably by now I've deleted my databases, but luckily nothing very important.

Time to get round to setting some proper backup system I suppose.

If anyone wants something to read I recommend http://mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html/

I just finished it and found it quite interesting.

After at least half a year of using a computer that froze or crashed at least every 10 minutes I finally replaced the faulty stick of ram.

Now it works beautifully and I'm dissapointed in myself for not doing it earlier.

Why?
Why would someone install virtualbox or wine to run internet explorer?

I don't have any experience in teaching, but I'd venture to say that teaching anything is hard. For most subjects, teaching has been refined over thousands of years to be easier and meaningful. Not CS. As has been mentioned by many people CS is a very new subject when compared to the likes of maths, for example, and education systems haven't been able to cope with it adequately (nor should they be expected to).

That the CS industry is rapidly evolving certainly doesn't help matters, but in reality that shouldn't really be that big of a problem (at least in earlier years of education). The basics of computer systems and programming don't really change that much (please correct me if I'm wrong) and logic stays the same. Even if you learn stuff that's a bit out of date it can still be useful and good lessons should be able to be applied to new technologies and ideas.

Broken computers is a big inconvenience, but a lot of very useful things can be done without a computer, and I should think the situation is a lot better than it was 5 years ago. What I think would be good, instead of trying to use broken computers would be to get students to set up and use a raspberry pi each; you learn about something other than windows, learn how to install an OS and you don't need that much computing power for teaching people computer science.

I think the main problem is a lack of inspiring teachers. Only a very few teachers will be unable to get you through the exams if you put in the effort, but quite a lot of the time students don't put in the effort because they can blame it on the teacher.

My solution would be to try and get as many students into computer science as possible and the rest will follow: more people will become teachers, more will be invested in the subject, more attention will be payed to the curriculum.

That's not to say I don't agree that many of the problems that have been mentioned need to be fixed for CS education to work properly, just that there is no way that I can see to fix them currently without either creating more problems or some very rich person giving a load of money.

This has gone on a lot longer than I expected so I'll stop now.

I finally managed to install arch 😊 (in virtualbox).

I tried a few months ago on my actual computer but got the flashing underscore, and failed to find the cause. Ever since I've been meaning to try again but always didn't like the prospect of sitting there for ages just to end up with a complete mess. Luckily the tutorial seems a load clearer now (or maybe my understanding has improved) so it worked first time (second time if you count going back because I forgot to install a network manager).

Now I've just got to get a desktop environment, thinking of trying lxqt, and I forget about it for a while until I come back and realise everything's broken.

Last year I wrote a sudoku program which did solve easy sudokus but messed up on harder ones. I had got bored after a bit and forgot about it until today I thought I'd rewrite it using new stuff I've learned since and make it work properly.

So I opened it up and look and I'm like 'WHAT!?' because I don't understand what I wrote. After a bit I start to get the idea and see that it was kind of smart even if long and complicated.

If anything, it shows how much my documentation skills have improved.

Now I just have to work out how to redo it in a way I understand.

So I come into CS class and the teacher, whom my opinion of is not excessively high, gives us a pseudocode task to do. After 10 minutes or so he says he'll run through it with everyone.

He then proceeds to opens python IDLE and starts typing pseudocode.
At this point I'm like 🤨.
Then he tries running the pseudocode. Now I'm thinking he must have had a really bad day so far or is just being stupider than normal.
When it doesn't work he starts getting annoyed and changes some = to == for what reason I am not entirely sure (though I'm not entirely sure why he thinks pseudocode is python either).

Everyone's been telling him that what he's doing is not going to work, but I don't think he really likes listening and continued frustrating himself.

After a bit we just leave him alone and carry on with what we were doing before he decided to gives us a lesson in what the purpose of pseudocode is not.

Good day/night to all.

This is my first post and I don't really know what to say so I'll keep it short...

I've been reading rants for a while now, really like the community and want to say thanks to @trogus and @dfox for creating this. :-)