Satya's blog - 2004/04/

('apprenticeship' may be the wrong word. Oh wait, www.m-w.com says it is correct.) My boss was saying today how he would go with his father to his father's job (elevator repair), and eventually started helping him out by observation. He said that his father said that a good helper knows what the boss wants before the boss knows that he wants it.

That reminded me of something my father once said: when you're helping someone, have the tool that they need ready in hand before they know that they need the tool. This applies to surgeon's assistants, electrician's assistants, plumbers, everyone. It's a good way to learn a new trade.

Which brings me to apprenticeship. New programmers should be apprenticed to an experienced programmer, above and beyond stuff like internships. Actually, maybe they do that already, I wouldn't know. I work with computers, so my example's computer-related.

This is specially aimed at mcg and weezer: my ISP requires SMTP AUTH unless you're on their network. We may have discovered this before and I may have forgotten. I just re-discovered it.

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/09/1734229 (though there's no reason for it to be on /.)

It has always been said that one must use strict and use warnings in one's perl programs. This has just been made painfully clear to me while writing the new sitemaker[0].

I keep getting SQL errors. I trace the problem back, and one of my arrays is blank. Trace some more, and I find that it's coming blank out of the Configuration module.

Notice that the Configuration module has no 'use strict'. Tack on 'use strict' and 'use warnings'. Get bunches of errors about "Global symbol requires explicit package name". Go "Aha!"

[0] http://mysitemaker.sf.net/