(Names have been changed to protect the guilty… namely me.)

Notes on Professor Dweeb’s Class

When your only tool is a hammer, it’s time to get a new tool chest

These are a couple of observations I made of Professor Dweeb’s Lecture Series. I’m not an anthropologist, but I do note some details that are interesting.

• The suck-ups sit right next to him, while those that don’t care or disdain him sit far away. His personal favorite sits on his left. I believe that the distance between a student and Prof. Dweeb is proportional to the amount of dislike that student has for Prof. Dweeb.

  This is an approximate seating chart of the class today:

  *	D	*			#		#		*: Suck-up
  *	*	*				#	#		#: Other student
  *	*				#		@	#	D: Professor Dweeb
  									@: Me (thinking about Nethack)

 

• He is absolutely obsessed with the Web, Apache, and HTTP.
  • When your only tool is a hammer… Prof. Dweeb doesn’t seem to know much about or care about anything but HTTP.
  • The reason for this obsession is an ex-student of his. This student played a large part in defining the infrastructure of the Web, and therefore could be seen as having “reinvented the Internet.” Prof. Dweeb seems to be living vicariously through this ex-student.
• He enjoys torturing students and listening to himself talk.
  • Woman gives presentation on Configuration Management system that resembles every other revision maintenance system out there (the paper is five years old). She is impressed, but Prof. Dweeb isn’t. Prof. Dweeb asks her if she’s ever used any other configuration management tool; she says no. Prof. Dweeb asks her how the Web would change the structure of the system, as a precursor to his gushing over the WebDAV protocol. Another student says that the impact would be minimal, crushing Prof. Dweeb’s hopes of getting a lead-in.
  • Man gives a presentation on workflow management via CORBA. Prof. Dweeb is a big fan of workflow management; he has written a “tool” that uses HTTP as a communications protocol. The tool is all but unusable. Prof. Dweeb tries to convince student that HTTP is superior to CORBA. Student remains unconvinced.
  • Man gives a presentation on configuration management. The problem is that the author of the paper (and the presenter) confuses system configuration management (such as the management of routers, servers, and the like) with software configuration management (such as the control of changes to a software development effort). Prof. Dweeb sees this problem right away, but does not tell the student what the difference is; instead, he asks the student a lot of complicated questions that simply demonstrate the student’s confusion without enlightening the rest of the class.