Forum Snapshots

The last time I posted about something here about the computing ethics subject I'm currently taking up, it had that tone of a dilemma about whether to post my experience being active at highfiber. It was due primarily to the fact that the place is pretty much an asylum sans the downright retardedness back in the time I choose to associated my activeness with the site.

It goes without saying then that to write of the experience in a relatively more formal online venue would be to advertise myself short of being an alpha male online. At least that was how I saw it.

And it didn't help me either to go on and on revising my supposed post. What had me eventually post my piece on the forum personality question was the professor's reaction towards my comment on the ethics of killing because of self-defense.

To make the long story short, the professor misunderstood what I said. I can't say I blame him though because of the way I chose to shorten my comment. The venue was definitely more formal than what I'm used to at highfiber hence the need to be more on the look out for what I leave around there.

So I answered back essentially to clarify myself. Apparently there was no harm intended from our mentor really. In choosing to answer back the way I did however, it suddenly struck me that I already showed a glimpse of my arrogance, and philosopher and grammarian tendencies. In doing so, I found it much easier to finalize the revisions to my piece and go ahead with posting what I had in mind for the question.

Who says flame wars always end up ugly? :D

Wading through Ada Programming

I got to "experience" programming in Ada back at college first. Back then, I remember having used a certain version of GNAT. It was for Win95 if I remember it right.

Now, I tried to get the same environment for my notebook to help me answer an FMA question. Never did I realize that it would be that hard. I spent more than 6 hours to get the GNAT Programming Studio (GPS) IDE going for me but eventually, I had to raise up my arms in surrender in the end. Getting my ADB file, (a simple Hello World program for crying out loud,) to work in the IDE consumed a lot of my time as the compiler and build messages were too cryptic. The scarcity of related material from the internet helped me reach the conclusion that were I to get the stuff going, it would only be because I had already sacrificed time I should be spending for other important stuff too.

Thanks to this Mississippi College resource, I was able to get some stuff going through the command line. It was not as pretty but it got what I wanted done: to test some named compatibility scenarios in Ada. The essence was particularly in the GNAT (compiler) User's Guide page.

In particular, the following lines of code could be used to generate the executable given a hello.adb file:

gnatgcc -c hello.adb
gnatbind hello
gnatlink hello

or simply:

gnatmake hello.adb

Thanks to Dr. Bennet for the helpful information.