[H-GEN] Challange for you

Andrae Muys amuys at contal.net.au
Wed Oct 23 04:28:02 EDT 2002


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Harry Phillips wrote:
>>The idea that there are these hordes of programmers out there eager and
>>willing to write your program for you, if only you can find them, is
>>laughably far from the truth.
> 
> I don't know why but I sort of had the as a fuzzy notion, hence my
> question to the list. When I thought about the above comments I realised
> how wrong I was.
> 
That's alright, the main reason I made the point is that we all (including 
myself) sort of have a fuzzy notion that it's true.  I think it's a result 
of the prodigous quantities of free software out there, and the ravings of 
journalists/pundits who don't know better.  The trouble arises when we act 
on this perception rather than the reality.

>>use simple programming skills.  Now I'm not suggesting that you aren't
>>intelligent, on the contary I'm suggesting that you are underestimating
>>your own capacity to develop small applications.
> 
[snip description of non-trivial script]
> If anyone wants to see it or have a laugh at how primitive it is or maybe
> even check out what I did to give me a more elegant script writen in perl
> so I can use variables then I would be glad to have some help.

Well I don't care how primitive/advanced it may be, or how [in]elegant the 
script.  No one will have the right to laugh at it.  That a busy 
non-programmer has been willing to take the time to successfully aquire 
this important skill is only worthy of praise, no matter how clearly the 
result exhibts their inexperience.  Because inexperience is all it would 
be, and you will only be showing it to people who are either less 
experienced, or have been less experienced (even if they might find it hard 
to remember sometimes.... ;).

btw.  You do have access to variables in a shell script, not as elegant as 
in perl/python/php/lisp/C/.... but they're there.

#!/bin/sh
A=10
echo A = $A
A_SQUARED=`expr $A '*' $A`
echo A Squared = $A_SQUARED

$./script.sh
A = 10
A Squared = 100
$

> Is that RT1 or RT2? I was able to get RT1 up and running in one night
> with ALOT of help from Robert who worked out why my Apache wasn't doing
> what it was supposed to. (It turned out to be a setting that needed to be
> inside a sub config file instead of the main apache config.)
> 
I honestly don't know.  This RT:

http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/download.html

whichever one it is.


> Having said all that I don't know why I didn't do it before but I just
> checked sourcforge.net and found a multitude of 'Helpdesk' apps that use
> perl or PHP with a mySQL database. I'll check them out.

heh, well sourceforge/freshmeat help too :).

Andrae Muys


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