©1996-2010 Roedy Green, Canadian Mind Products
Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.
~ Eric S. Raymond (born: 1957-12-04 age: 52) The Cathedral and the Bazaar
I have discussed most of the projects many times at length over the last decades on BIX which retained all postings in archives.
Pretty well everything I have to say about each project is spelled out here. I don’t have extra material to give you, unless I explicitly mention it. I don’t have the time to lead you by the hand through a project. If one project is too difficult to tackle at your current level of skill, pick a simpler one.
If you are unemployed, or just out of school, you might hone your skills by tackling some of these projects. They are more like the real world problems you will be given in the workplace. In the real world you have to write the specifications too. They are not handed to you on a plate the way they are in school. I give you many hints on how to solve the problems, far more than you would get in the workplace. These problems are intermediate in degree of hand-holding between school and the workplace.
I would be happy to implement any of these projects for you, for a fee, though I do not do homework.
Students imagine I have complete detailed specs written on every class. The key skill students must learn is writing the spec, and doing the overall design of a decently large project. Any boob can code given a detailed class specification. In the real world you are never handed tidy perfectly-specified little problems than can be handled with two or three pages of code. In the real world, you won’t even get project outlines anywhere near as detailed as I have given you here. They will never contain any implementation hints as my outlines do. You have to pull teeth to get even the vaguest information about what the program should do. You have to write prototype systems. Only then are your users smart enough to tell you what they really wanted, or are you smart enough to suggest to them possible options they might enjoy.
My advice for a student who thinks a project is too difficult, is to create a sub project that he thinks he might tackle successfully, or try a simpler different project entirely. After that experience, he can add a bit more complexity. Trying to solve the problem all at once just leads to overwhelm. Don’t feel embarrassed that the sub project would have no practical use. It is just a stepping stone.
Though I have no additional materials to send you, I am willing to answer specific questions about the projects. I will normally add that material into the project descriptions for others too.
For team projects underway you can join Asynchrony, Enhydra or SourceForge.
Takeover consists in diverting some fraction of the earth’s life-supporting capacity from supporting other kinds of life to supporting our kind. Our pre-Sapiens ancestors, with their simple stone tools and fire, took over our for human use, organic materials that would otherwise have been consumed by insects, carnivores or bacteria. From about 10,000 years ago, our earliest horticulturalist ancestors began take over land upon which to grow crops for human consumption. That land would otherwise have supported trees, shrubs or wild grasses and all the animals dependent thereon — but fewer humans. As the expanding generations replaced each other, Homo sapiens took over more and more of the surface of this planet, essentially at the expense of its other inhabitants.
~ William Catton Jr. (born: 1926-01-15 age: 84) , Overshoot 1980
From the point of view of the other species on earth, we humans are as welcome as Viking invaders or pancreas cancer.
 |
You can get the freshest copy of this page from: | or possibly from your local J: drive (Java virtual drive/mindprod.com website mirror) |
| http://mindprod.com/project/projects.html | J:\mindprod\project\projects.html | |
 |  Please email your feedback for publication, errors, omissions, typos, formatting errors, ambiguities, unclear wording, broken/redirected link reports, suggestions to improve this page or comments to
Roedy Green :
 | |
| Canadian Mind Products | ||
| mindprod.com IP:[65.110.21.43] | ||
| view Blog | Your face IP:[38.107.191.111] | |
| Feedback | You are visitor number 426,283. | |
