keeping the community informed

You will notice a slightly different format than usual this month, with the newsletter being largely dedicated to our member of the month interview. Duoas turned out to be such an interesting chap, with so much to say, that we decided to take the unusual step of publishing pretty much the entire unedited interview. Hope you like it…

every month one member makes the DaniWeb hall of fame…

Please welcome our newest member of the DaniWeb hall of fame, Duoas, who has since joining us in October 2007, become a 'Posting Virtuoso' with more than 1600 forum posts spread across DaniWeb. You can most often find him posting in the C++ forum where he is a source of great advice and technical knowledge. Duoas can also be found participating in the Pascal and Delphi forum, the C forum and the Assembly http://www.daniweb.com/forums/forum125.html forum. Here's what we discovered about our latest proud recipient of the Featured Poster badge when we decided to probe that little bit deeper…

Where are you from originally and where do you live now?

I was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. But for the past 25 years or so my permanent address has been Cherry Hill, New Jersey. It is quite a difference. Personally, I don't think there is a place more beautiful on earth than the area from Colorado Springs to the Wasatch Mountains to Dinosaur National Monument. I'm a mountain man. Amazingly enough, though, I find that I've developed a certain attachment to the Tri-State area... and cheesesteaks. I suppose one day I'll find myself back in the mountains.

How old are you?

Well, I was born in 1974... I don't think of myself as being very old. People usually take me for five to seven years younger than I am. Apparently, though, I am too old for anyone to want to date...

What is your occupation?

Currently? *cough* Finding a job *cough*

I've worked as an assistant manager in a number of stores for a large chain of gasoline stations. From that I have learned a great deal about managing inventory, employees, cash flow, security, etc. I have also worked in heavy-earth construction. I have been told I am a natural at the S-blade bulldozer --which is sweet because it is my favorite piece of equipment. Bulldozers are typically classified by the type of blade attached to the front:

• The S-blade is long and flat, and is used for fine-grading (placing the earth to within a half an inch of where it is supposed to be)
  
• The U-blade is tall, curved, and fat, and it is used for hulking around large amounts of material
  
• There is also a combination kind of blade.

As with all construction equipment it is very dangerous, particularly as a bulldozer is easily the most agile piece of machinery around. The general rule is "no unauthorized pedestrians within 150-200 feet of the work site". If you were to back over someone you wouldn't know it until you started churning up blood. Funnily enough, the only thing that makes for an unpleasant ride is rocks. Tractoring over even a few little rocks is like taking a ride in a paint mixer.

I have also done some consulting work with computers, and learned something of the silly business of low-end IT business work. Alas. Despite all that, I think my greatest expertise is in computer programming. When I was about ten or eleven my dad gave me a copy of GWBASIC, and after I started writing more than fifty percent of my programs in Assembly to get past BASIC's immediate limitations (and yes, you can link assembly into GWBASIC!) my Dad bought me a copy of Turbo Pascal 4.0, and I have been hooked ever since. He still gives me a hard time for using the TP4 manual so hard that I broke the spine in several spots. :-)

I bought myself a copy of Delphi 5 way back when it was new and I still use it to edit just about everything. (I am using it right now to write this.)

I am studying to become a High School Mathematics teacher. Most of the time the response I get from telling people that is one of those plastered-on, "I've got to get out of here" smiles and a quick escape. For some reason people fear both math and teens, and consequently anyone who voluntarily works with both.

What is your favorite computer and why?

I suppose I would have to say my XP Pro desktop. I have my system set to dual boot on XP Pro and Kubuntu, but I admit to spending most of my time on the dark side. I have used Sun OS, various Linuxes, and everything from Z-80 CP/M to DOS to Win XP. I didn't think I would like XP better than 98, but I find that it is more resistant to crashing when I start poking around... Oh yeah, I've also got an old Palm IIIx that I like OK. The only programming I've done for it is some simple utilities with the Onboard C compiler.

I'm still something of an old-fogey when it comes to my computer. I can't live without my command-line prompt. I tend to gravitate toward Open-Source and Free-Software products, both because of money but also because such software is often very high quality. That said, I think that Richard Stallman's philosophy is a little too religious. As with all things, people tend toward the ends rather than the middle. Alas.

You have only been with us a relatively short while, so it should be fresh in your memory, what first brought you to DaniWeb?

Heh, actually it was a really weird question about templates which no one could answer. Link. I have come to accept that you cannot pass a NULL value as a template argument. I still don't know if this is part of the C++ standard or not...

What makes you stay here?

Well, after posting my first, I noticed that there were a few unanswered questions, so I spent some time with them. After that I guess it was just my natural interest in helping people. So the first thing I did was tick off Salem and Narue.

Fortunately since then I think I have generally avoided being too obnoxious. I do enjoy the occasionally interesting problem, and I personally feel that a good programming mentality is fostered right at the outset. In all the time I have put into helping with and teaching programming, I have learned it is often simple things that could have been avoided that cause problems. For neophytes, the two greatest obstacles are these: First, realizing that computers are too stupid to help anyone program them. Rather, programming is the process of organizing one's own thoughts over a system --solving problems oneself first-- and only then telling the computer what you know. And second, learning how to gather and test information available on the internet to answer questions.

A related thing is the general malaise programmers have with UI design concepts. I really like C++'s streams, but they have had the unfortunate effect of encouraging some bad thinking when dealing with user input. The number one rule when programming UI is: make the program do what the user thinks it will do. The corollary is: protect your program from really stupid input. Unfortunately many educators have a greater interest in teaching other concepts, and often fear UI themselves, and so de-emphasize its importance --resulting in people who might know how to sort a list but have no idea how to represent it to the user.

Fortunately UI and program/data transformation are two of my interests.

What is your favorite forum and why?

Pascal and Delphi. I have a particular attachment to the language. People still like to mention the old Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language paper by Brian Kernighan as if they are dropping an atom bomb on me, blithely unaware that Kernighan's assessments are now obviated. They also forget that Pascal variants are to the Macintosh and PC what Unix is to mainframes and minis, and that it was largely Pascal that introduced structured programming as an escape from FORTRAN/COBOL/BASIC. Pascal had object-orientation before C, and what you see as the Borland Delphi variant today was born out of Apple's work with Nicklaus Wirth (Pascal's inventor). Those of you who like programming with all your friendly IDE tools at home have Borland Pascal to thank for it.

I don't think Wirth was ever really satisfied with Pascal, and the ISO 7185 standard is still underpowered in several important ways (Kernighanites notwithstanding). While the ISO 10206 standard is a significant improvement, I think that the X3J9 committee must hate Borland. Their Object-Oriented Extensions to Pascal proposal seems to go out of the way to be directly incompatible with Delphi's extensions, even when proposed features are otherwise identical in scope and purpose.

That said, there is some technical merit in several features, particularly schemata (analogous to templates in C++), and the scoping powers built into the module system. I would dearly like to see both in Delphi.

I also have a great affinity for C (but not C99) and, in particular, C++. Other languages of interest are Assembly (MASM32), Scheme and Tcl/Tk.

What are your interests outside of IT and outside of DaniWeb?

I do line art. Hopefully I will be working on a comic book for the state of Pennsylvania pretty soon. Martial arts of various kinds. I occasionally teach self-defense classes to friends. The only scar I can boast about is three stitches on my left hand. (Good thing the bone stopped the blade...) Hiking, canoeing, woodworking, etc. I am still a Boy Scout at heart. I like 3D computer modelling and animation. My favorite software is Blender. The BlenderArtists forum is one of the friendliest on the net. I also like XSI SoftImage.

Any fascinating facts about yourself that you would like to share with the DaniWeb community?

I have always wanted to learn how to operate a helicopter.

I am a voracious reader, particularly of sci-fi and fantasy fiction. Favorites include Harry Potter, So You Want to Be a Wizard, Battle Angel Alita, Usagi Yojimbo, Groo the Wanderer, Bleach, and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki. Oh yeah, and Star Wars. Well, other than that I'm pretty boring. My two-year old niece likes me though. She likes to be outside, and we will often take walks around the block.

Aside from my native English, I am fluent in Spanish and moderately capable when dealing with other romance languages. One thing I enjoy is when I am able to respond to someone who is posting for help with code which was coded in another language, and the enjoyment of those who like the idea that someone has learned their language. Many times we tend to be a little curt with foreign speakers simply for their lack of facility with English; we forget that we are dealing with those who are intelligent enough to handle themselves relatively well in English --which is itself a difficult language to follow.

Thanks for taking an interest in my experience with DaniWeb. It continues to be a positive thing for me.

by GuyClapperton

It's up there now and according to the BBC its makers want it to be the most downloaded software in its first 24 hours ever. Firefox 3 is now available for public download, although the final release candidate has been so close to commercial standard you wouldn't be able to see much difference.

Personally I've adopted it as my browser of choice after using the final release candidate for about a week. It's solid, it's reliable anjd it does things I like - tabbed browsing is of course a given by now, but its memory of where you've been - offering you frequently-visited sites as you enter the address regardless of whether you've bookmarked them - is a plus.

Mostly, though, I like the speed. No doubt some more technically-minded individuals will be along any moment now to confirm exactly why it's so much faster than its predecessor or anything else I've used on the market (which in my case on the Mac takes in Camino, Safari, Internet Explorer and Flock) but it seems to me to just whiz along. When you're researching a story and on deadline as I often am, the absence of a wait does marvels for your blood pressure.

It does other stuff nicely. When I log onto my bank it gives me a bit of the address bar telling me who really owns the site rather than the headline name (this isn't anything similar, by the way - my bank is a subsidiary so I get the name of the 'main' bank as well). Searching for visited sites by keyword is also good. I could go on.

This is going to challenge everyone in the browser market. I wonder how long it will be before a manufacturer starts preloading it on their computers?