Stack Overflow has always been a better-than-average resource for finding answers to programming questions. In particular, I have found a number of helpful answers to really obscure questions on the site, many of which helped me get past a road block either at work or in my hobby programming. As such, I decided I’d join the site to see if I could help out. Never before has a website given me a worse first impression.

In an effort to keep the community as clean and orderly as possible, new users have very little rights from the get-go. On paper, this is a pretty nice idea. In practice, it makes it difficult for new users to gain any traction. I read through a number of questions today and had several comments for the original poster. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make my comments, since new users cannot post comments on articles they themselves didn’t write (you have to gain “reputation” in order to gain that privilege). Posting my comment as an “answer” to the original question seemed like bad form, so I didn’t do that.

Looking elsewhere around the site, I found a few questions I felt I could answer. As soon as I went to answer said questions, someone else (in some cases, a number of other people) had jumped in and beaten me to the punch. I never had a chance to provide a helpful answer. Not only do you have to be very knowledgeable about a subject, you’ve also got to be very fast in providing said answer. I eventually did provide an answer for a question, then realized that my approach wouldn’t work. Before I could take action and modify the answer, my submission had already been modded down by several people, several of whom left snarky remarks. What a warm welcome for a new user! I subsequently deleted my answer.

I later searched the Meta Stack Overflow site, looking for advice for new users. It turns out I’m not the only one who thinks that it’s very easy for new users to get dumped on. Take a look at the questions revolving around new users on the site, and note how a number of them revolve around how hard it is for new users to improve. Documentation for how best to contribute as a new user is sorely needed.

The folks who manage these websites need to examine the barrier of entry for new users. I fully understand the need for keeping spammers and trolls out, but someone needs to develop a tutorial (or better yet, a set of tutorials) for how to properly use the website. New users do occasionally need hand holding, especially with websites as complicated as Stack Overflow. I think the community as a whole would benefit, and it would certainly help people like me who have been quickly overwhelmed by what the site offers.

My desktop computer at home has been giving me some occasional graphical problems ever since I updated to Windows 7. I have the latest and greatest drivers for my graphics card, but every so often I get graphical trash on screen that, usually, corrects itself. Tonight, it seems to have died for good. I can’t get the system to boot reliably, even after trying to reseat the card. To add to my woes, I’ve also been having the occasional “double-beep” at startup, indicating that I have a memory problem. This has been an issue ever since I switched to the abit motherboard I’m currently using.

Anyways, I’m going to bite the bullet and buy a bunch of new hardware to fix all of this. New motherboard, CPU, memory, graphics card; the whole shebang.

If you have recommendations as to what to buy these days, I’d sure appreciate it. I’ll be putting in some orders ASAP, so the sooner you can recommend something, the better.

I’ve recently had a perfect storm of email woes here at this site. Last month, my email servers changed at DreamHost (for reasons I still don’t fully understand), breaking all of my approved SSL certificates (not to mention my SMTP settings). Around the same time, I updated to Thunderbird 3.0 from 2.x. The new interface is bizarre, and I’ve only had problems from day one of the upgrade. As such, I am now actively working towards moving all of Born Geek’s email (including this website) to GMail.

Unfortunately, someone is apparently squatting on my domain over at Google Apps. I attempted to reset the account password there, but no secondary email address is on record, making things much more difficult for me. I have started a manual password reset process (via proving to Google that I do indeed own the domain), and hope to have things up and running by this weekend.

Long story short, any direct emails sent to me through the contact form at this website may not be answered for a while. Please bear with me during this painful process.

It is being reporting that Firefox will replace menus with an Office-style ribbon interface. Personally, I couldn’t be more against this. I’m no fan of the Office ribbon (it takes up way too much screen real estate and looks clunky), and I fail to see how this interface will make things better for the user. Mozilla is known for screwing around with the GUI, however, so I won’t be surprised when something like this shows up. I can’t imagine how this change will affect many extensions out there, like Googlebar Lite, that add UI elements.

What do you think about the Office ribbon interface? And what do you think of this decision? Thankfully for me, someone will undoubtedly come out with a theme to fix this stupid design decision. Consider me signed up for it already!

A recent newspaper review for the new computer animated movie 9 warned that the movie isn’t necessarily kid-friendly, and that young children will most likely be scared from the post apocalyptic setting. Shouldn’t the PG-13 rating indicate that kids under 13 probably shouldn’t be watching it anyway? Why does the reviewer jump to the conclusion that, because it’s animated, the movie is for kids? It frustrates me that Americans think animation belongs solely to children. The medium should be taken way more seriously than it is. Foreign films like Princess Mononoke (another PG-13 film) are proof that animation can be used successfully for adult topics. Someone out there needs to buck the current trend and develop an animated movie purely for adults; maybe something that’s rated R. Though I can only imagine all the angry parents complaining that the movie was “too adult” for their kids.

Why can’t Americans just grow up?

Year of the Code Monkey has been destroyed. I am working feverishly to restore it. Please bear with me during this highly annoying process. I hope to be back up within the next few days.

If you use WordPress, I advise against upgrading to version 2.8. I attempted to do so to this site this evening (via Subversion), and everything appeared to go smoothly. Unfortunately, upon logging in to my admin panel, I noted that everything was broken. The external site still performed as expected, but I couldn’t get around in the admin area.

Zero steps forward, twenty steps back.

Maybe others will have better luck than I did. I have since reverted back to 2.7.1 for the time being, though my database may now be corrupt. If you notice anything funky around this site, please, please, please let me know.

A recent trend among websites for games that have a “M for Mature” (or similar) rating is the use of age gates. These gates require the user to enter their birth date before they can view information on the subject in question. Usually, the user is presented with three pull down menus: one for the month, one for the day, and one for the year. From a legal perspective, I can understand why companies want to use this feature. But who are these gates really keeping out? Every kid should know that by providing an old enough date, they can gain access to the site. After all, this isn’t rocket science.

Every time I visit a website with one of these gates, I enter the most ridiculous date possible by selecting the oldest year offered (usually 1900). Maybe if enough people enter ridiculous dates every time, this annoying website ‘feature’ will go away.

It’s no surprise to anyone that obesity in America is getting worse every year. This animated map shows the progression in the US between 1985 and 2007, and it’s quite a depressing sight. Lots of factors are contributing to everyone’s weight gain: poor eating habits, no exercise, etc., but part of the blame certainly lies with food manufacturers. In recent times, food portions have increased by an incredible amount, and they only seem to be getting worse. Not only are the larger portions contributing to our weight gain, they are also making it much harder for people like me to shop in the grocery store.

Before I go much farther, I must confess that I’m not a big eater. Growing up, I knew guys who could eat two or three times as much as I do at each meal. And there are plenty of my peers today who can do the same thing. So I realize that I’m already starting out on the low side of the curve. However, this doesn’t change the fact that food manufacturers have gotten out of control with portion management.

Shopping for one is difficult enough to begin with, but I’ve noticed that it’s gotten more so in recent times. While at the grocery store recently, I picked up some potato chips for lunch through the week. The bag I bought had “20% more chips free,” making it even larger than the normal bag (which is a little too big to begin with). A sign below the bags of chips offered the following deal: buy 2 get 2 free. So, you have to buy four bags of chips to get a deal! Who in their right mind eats four, full-sized bags of potato chips? Even in reasonably sized families, that’s an insane number of chips to buy at once.

Similarly, doughnut manufacturer Krispy Kreme apparently no longer sells their half-dozen doughnut boxes. Instead, they offer a new box of 9. Every once in a while (maybe once every two months), I used to pick up a half-dozen doughnuts and eat them through the week with my breakfast. By the end of that week, the last doughnuts had nearly grown stale, but were still good enough to reheat. A box of 9 would certainly not last the way I eat them.

There are plenty of other examples, but these two stick out in my mind since I encountered them recently. If food manufacturers would provide smaller portions, at somewhat lower prices, I would be able to enjoy their products more often and I wouldn’t be wasting perfectly good food. As an added bonus, I wouldn’t eat as much, and would feel better as a result. Does anyone else feel the way I do?

It looks like Time Warner is expanding their broadband bandwidth caps to new markets. One of those new markets is in Greensboro, NC, about 1 hour from where I live. To add insult to injury, it looks like prices are going up as well. The 40GB tier will cost $55, which is $5 more than what I pay today. As they say, this stuff is getting real.