dmhouse

The TV stuff tends to be. The radio programmes are not. This is because one needs to pay a license fee in the UK to watch television, which funds the BBC. Listening to the radio is free, however.

I think `man readline' is more appropriate for the keyboard shortcuts, since it is the readline library that provides many of them.

Would there not have been an address on the mail?

Interestingly, nearly all ATMs (with the exception of privately-owned ATMs in bars, etc.) in the UK don't charge for services (for about five years now). However, I wonder whether an ATM owned by bank A charges bank B itself when bank B's customers withdraw cash at bank A's ATMs.

"A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary" -- Thomas Carruthers

It depends entirely on how many people you're teaching. If you're sitting in a lecture hall full of 250 students, asking continual questions is just not going to get any response. No-one wants to embarass themselves in front of an audience that large. You'll just slow down the lecture while you pause and listen to a stony 10 second silence every couple of minutes. I've had lecturers do this, and it's extremely frustrating.

Personally, I don't mind lecturers "telling" the answers straight away. Obviously give motivation and lead into it rather than just delivering it with no introduction, but I've found a lot of problems are simply too large or too non-obvious to take a straw poll from the class.

The best teachers I've had have been:

(i) Really bloody good at their subject. My probability lecturer (the Field's medallist Tim Gowers), when presenting the proof of Stirling's approximation, said something along the lines of "now, the normal method for proving this bit is a bit complicated, and on my cycle in this morning I thought 'There must be an easier way', when the following struck me. Now, I've never written this down before, so hopefully it works...", and of course laid out a simplification of a famous proof that worked perfectly. Inspirational. (See http://gowers.wordpress.com/2008/02/01/removing-the-magic-fr...)

(ii) Incredible elucidators. The ability to take a complex concept and pick exactly the right words or metaphors to explain it is a powerful ability.

I feel these criteria are far more important than asking the audience questions. You need both -- I've been taught by plenty of talented mathematicians who had no idea how to teach, and certainly a handful of great teachers who simply didn't have the aptitude to really grasp the more complex topics.

"Also: The Emacs mouse support is not great. It probably hasn't been a high priority."

In what way? It's certainly as good as it is in any other editor, with the addition of several very Emacs-esque mouse-driven commands. For example, right click marks the region from point to the click point and saves it in the kill rin (like M-w); double right click kills that region. Using M- does the same, but modifies the secondary selection. Using C- with the mouse pops up several useful context menus. Try playing around with C-h k <mouse button> in various contexts.

Yes and no. When I first started off with Emacs, I used the CUA bindings (Windows-esque bindings for C-x/C-v/C-c). That was great to begin with, but inevitably a change of settings as big as CUA never quite sat right with the rest of Emacs, and prevented me from really moving on. After a while I declared cua-mode to be a crutch that was holding me back, disabled it, and I'm extremely glad I did.

More recently I've moved mostly away from the arrow-keys navigation (not just up/down/left/right instead of n/p/b/f but Home End instead of C-a, C-e; C-left, C-right instead of M-b, M-f; C-up, C-down instead of M-{, M-}; C-Home, C-End instead of M-< and M->, etc.) to the more central commands. This is less of a win but has nonetheless sped up my editing still further.

"How is a non-hacker end user supposed to run a tarball?"

How about they wait until available through their distribution's package manager?

"used to apply the concept of a stack"

Do you really need something as complicated as a stack?

  n = 0
  for (char in string)
    if (char == '(') n++
    if (char == ')') n--
    if (n < 0) print "Unbalanced"
  if (n != 0) print "Unbalanced"

Interesting way of hiring!

I don't think there was any point in listing the demographic observations he did, the sample is way too small for anyone to try to draw conclusions.

A brilliant idea! Would love to see a blog post overviewing how it works.

Works perfectly for me now. Maybe the training's working!

... and have to take your car door with you into the supermarket?