The "Aha! Moment"
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Constantly. It's an indicator that you are doing some real coding and not just some boiler plate stuff and plumbing. Just yesterday I was giving the rendering of my XNA user interface an overhaul. When drawing a tree of forms or controls you have to juggle with several coordinate systems and also have to perform clipping on partially hidden controls, no matter what coordinate system you must use at the moment. There were some bugs like hidden controls that were not clipped or objects which were drawn at the wrong places due to some confusion in the coordinate systems. A mess, because everything I tried had side effects on other things, And finally, after a while, I had gathered enough information and everything fell into place at once.
And from the clouds a mighty voice spoke:
"Smile and be happy, for it could come worse!"And I smiled and was happy
And it came worse.I quite agree, it's an exaggeration to say it happens daily, but it certainly feels that way. What is more unique, is when you are with a group of senior, bright people, pondering a problem and you realize you are the one that is delivering the correct solution to the problem. The hairs don't go up on the back of my neck, but I feel a heat there and a lightheartedness as though I have levitated a few inches higher. It's like I can't believe for that brief moment, I was the smartest one in the room. It's sort of a delicious tickle. But a more interesting moment, is when you are with a group of people discussing a problem, and usually there is an older and wiser head that comes up with the solution that will be followed, but then you realize everyone is looking at you. The realization that you have become that "older and wiser" head is a little daunting. You no longer have a safety net and are expected to supply the solution. There will be no warning when this occurs.
Psychosis at 10 Film at 11 Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.
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Any support I provide is from afar. Anyway, you know you're getting old when you realise that it's stupid to pass up on a toilet opportunity.
Panic, Chaos, Destruction. My work here is done. Drink. Get drunk. Fall over - P O'H OK, I will win to day or my name isn't Ethel Crudacre! - DD Ethel Crudacre I cannot live by bread alone. Bacon and ketchup are needed as well. - Trollslayer Have a bit more patience with newbies. Of course some of them act dumb - they're often *students*, for heaven's sake - Terry Pratchett
Hmm, does that have anything to do with your previous comment:
Nagy Vilmos wrote:
Either it won't come at all or too much comes.
? ;P
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you have been stuck for hours and hours trying to solve something or fix something , whether be it an assignment, work or a home project. You feel you have checked every single tutorial Google had to offer and none of them helped :wtf: . Just as you are about to give up, a random thought comes to you,to which by some miracle is the unified solution to your problem. You get this rush and suddenly you scream out "Aha!" Have you ever had that moment? Please share your aha! moment.
When this happens to me, it's often in the bathroom. I'll be working on a problem at the computer for hours, then when I take a bathroom break the answer suddenly comes to me. I suspect the change in my environment and activities causes a change in my thinking on the problem. I then think about the problem from a fresh perspective, avoiding the cycles of unproductive thought patterns that weren't getting me anywhere. At the same time, the details of the problem are fresh in my mind, allowing me to easily consider them from fresh perspectives.
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you have been stuck for hours and hours trying to solve something or fix something , whether be it an assignment, work or a home project. You feel you have checked every single tutorial Google had to offer and none of them helped :wtf: . Just as you are about to give up, a random thought comes to you,to which by some miracle is the unified solution to your problem. You get this rush and suddenly you scream out "Aha!" Have you ever had that moment? Please share your aha! moment.
I was writing a routine to plot dots on a graphics screen used to design various dot matrix printer fonts. One of the font formats used partially overlapping passes to produce extra quality. My attempts to muddle through arriving at the correct point to plot for each dot weren't working. After staring at the problem for a few minutes, a fairly complicated expression to solve the problem suddenly popped into my head, and it worked.
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you have been stuck for hours and hours trying to solve something or fix something , whether be it an assignment, work or a home project. You feel you have checked every single tutorial Google had to offer and none of them helped :wtf: . Just as you are about to give up, a random thought comes to you,to which by some miracle is the unified solution to your problem. You get this rush and suddenly you scream out "Aha!" Have you ever had that moment? Please share your aha! moment.
"Bob! Glad you're here - we have a quick in-house database we need you to put together for next week's partners meeting. Nothing much; just something for tracking information from past projects and contracts to use in future resumes, estimates, and requests for proposals... that kind of thing. "Here's a sketch. "Oh, and reports, too. One that looks like the government proposal response thing would be good to show at the meeting. "Have a great weekend!" My aha! moment was realizing that each project and contract was a separate and distinct entity tied together by a single parameter - type of project. There was no need for a full-blown database solution. I ditched the whole database/cloud thing and opened a Visual Studio web site project. God bless XML, XSL, DHTML, and my quirky habit of backing up everything I ever do for anyone to a drive that doesn't take adminstrator rights to access, recover, and restore. I asked our graphics guru for a minimalist web interface and pieced the whole project together from the Frankenstien lab of past efforts on my backup drive in less than a week. It's been running for a little over 4 years now and marketing (especially marketing), management, and the rest of the staff like it and use it. Reports are now available in word, xml, and HTML. No one is sure if we're actually getting more work because of it, but we're spending a LOT less time tasking staff for inputs to put together bids and proposals on new work. And, we seem to be making more money on the work we do get. </tootingOwnHorn> :-D
-Bob
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you have been stuck for hours and hours trying to solve something or fix something , whether be it an assignment, work or a home project. You feel you have checked every single tutorial Google had to offer and none of them helped :wtf: . Just as you are about to give up, a random thought comes to you,to which by some miracle is the unified solution to your problem. You get this rush and suddenly you scream out "Aha!" Have you ever had that moment? Please share your aha! moment.
One night and as I stepped into the bath and the water rose a light went on in my head. The next day at Starbucks I was having a latte with my buddy Archimedes and I mentioned it to him. I'm sure y'all know what happened next.
while (e) { Coyote(); }
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you have been stuck for hours and hours trying to solve something or fix something , whether be it an assignment, work or a home project. You feel you have checked every single tutorial Google had to offer and none of them helped :wtf: . Just as you are about to give up, a random thought comes to you,to which by some miracle is the unified solution to your problem. You get this rush and suddenly you scream out "Aha!" Have you ever had that moment? Please share your aha! moment.
My best Aha! moment was a simultaneous double Aha!. That is, the same Aha! occurred in two minds at the same time. I was a hands-on supervisor of logic designers back in my hardware days. This engineer approached me with a chicken-or-egg type of problem. The issue was how to make digital and analog hardware play nice together in a random situation. I proposed an all-digital solution to supervise the two other pieces. After a moment's reflection, we both looked at each other as we realized that the all-digital supervisor, with a minor tweak, could eliminate the need for both of the analog and digital pieces.:cool: We were jointly awarded a patent for this.
Fletcher Glenn
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I quite agree, it's an exaggeration to say it happens daily, but it certainly feels that way. What is more unique, is when you are with a group of senior, bright people, pondering a problem and you realize you are the one that is delivering the correct solution to the problem. The hairs don't go up on the back of my neck, but I feel a heat there and a lightheartedness as though I have levitated a few inches higher. It's like I can't believe for that brief moment, I was the smartest one in the room. It's sort of a delicious tickle. But a more interesting moment, is when you are with a group of people discussing a problem, and usually there is an older and wiser head that comes up with the solution that will be followed, but then you realize everyone is looking at you. The realization that you have become that "older and wiser" head is a little daunting. You no longer have a safety net and are expected to supply the solution. There will be no warning when this occurs.
Psychosis at 10 Film at 11 Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.
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Yes, that is a VERY sobering moment! Especially when you realize you don't have "the" answer, and you can't even think of ANY answer. Humility at its best.
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you have been stuck for hours and hours trying to solve something or fix something , whether be it an assignment, work or a home project. You feel you have checked every single tutorial Google had to offer and none of them helped :wtf: . Just as you are about to give up, a random thought comes to you,to which by some miracle is the unified solution to your problem. You get this rush and suddenly you scream out "Aha!" Have you ever had that moment? Please share your aha! moment.
The biggest AHA! moment I had on this industry was when my mind switched from structured programming to Object Oriented programming. I spent my early days of programming using VB 5 and 6, that lacked many fundamentol OO aspects so my young brain got trained on structured and that is very difficult to get rid of. Even though later I spent lots of time programming in OO languages, I wasn't really doing OO, not creating, but just using it. But then at one point in time it hit me, when designing a new system. AHA!! Now I know the advantages of OO programing and for the first time I built a system with a lot of reusable code. It was a series of AHAs! One after the other, but the first one started the roll and every time I pushed Ctrl+C on my code I looked again and figured how not to do it and use the OO way.
"To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems" - Homer Simpson
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you have been stuck for hours and hours trying to solve something or fix something , whether be it an assignment, work or a home project. You feel you have checked every single tutorial Google had to offer and none of them helped :wtf: . Just as you are about to give up, a random thought comes to you,to which by some miracle is the unified solution to your problem. You get this rush and suddenly you scream out "Aha!" Have you ever had that moment? Please share your aha! moment.
I started fiddling with Aspose.Words for document generation. They claim this is easy because you can program to a objectmodel. Well, what I needed was a "MergeField" in a table cell. And their clever 'builder' kept telling me, "you can not add this", "Table already ended.".. Fun stuff. Finally after much fiddling i found something that worked:
Cell cellStart = CreateCell(rowMergeValues, false);
builder.InsertField("MERGEFIELD " + MYVALUE, "«MergeField»");
var current = builder.CurrentParagraph;
current.Remove();
cellStart.Paragraphs.Add(current);
builder.MoveToDocumentEnd();Yes, add, remove, add, move pointer... Aha! The sad part about problems like these is, it's just a few lines of code.. How could that have taken so much time? Also, reading the book "Code Complete 2.0". (Code is read more often that written.) It really changed the way I program now.
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you have been stuck for hours and hours trying to solve something or fix something , whether be it an assignment, work or a home project. You feel you have checked every single tutorial Google had to offer and none of them helped :wtf: . Just as you are about to give up, a random thought comes to you,to which by some miracle is the unified solution to your problem. You get this rush and suddenly you scream out "Aha!" Have you ever had that moment? Please share your aha! moment.
well, i had one only 3 weeks ago, i was working on a system at work and the problem I was trying to solve was related to copying and pasting Excel data to import it into the database. I agree, this is an unusual approach to upload data into database as opposed to just simply upload the file, open it and read from it. Anyway, so the problem was that if the excel worksheet had the last x consequent number of columns empty, the system was truncating those columns and that caused the upload to fail on account of accessing indices or locations that didn't exist. I contemplated whole plethora of potential solutions from re-writing the copy and paste functionality to trying to understand if its an operating system fault or the system's to even making the columns mandatory, to fix this. After a couple of days of head banging thus, i wasn't even thinking of a solution but just wondering how can i make the system believe that there are non-empty columns so that the array which reads the columns always had the same length. And VOILA!!! there it struck, it just shone on me in one brief second and literally I jumped from my chair, punched the air and let out a semi-loud "YEAH!" (sorry not AHA! :) ), even before writing the code which would just append empty strings in place of empty columns based on length comparison of the header array and the data array. This code became so visually clear to me that testing it would have been an insult to my work ;). So I just deployed this code to live web server and needless to say its been working flawlessly to date. Cheers
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you have been stuck for hours and hours trying to solve something or fix something , whether be it an assignment, work or a home project. You feel you have checked every single tutorial Google had to offer and none of them helped :wtf: . Just as you are about to give up, a random thought comes to you,to which by some miracle is the unified solution to your problem. You get this rush and suddenly you scream out "Aha!" Have you ever had that moment? Please share your aha! moment.
I remember this well because it gave me a really dark feeling. I faced it when a program just gave weird wrong calculations. To be specific : (9.7-5.7) >= 4 returns false I couldn't believe it at first, but at the end it was an 'Aha!': http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/nd6forum.nsf/55c38d716d632d9b8525689b005ba1c0/ee60e29d22ac75e1852577c4004f8328?OpenDocument[^]
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you have been stuck for hours and hours trying to solve something or fix something , whether be it an assignment, work or a home project. You feel you have checked every single tutorial Google had to offer and none of them helped :wtf: . Just as you are about to give up, a random thought comes to you,to which by some miracle is the unified solution to your problem. You get this rush and suddenly you scream out "Aha!" Have you ever had that moment? Please share your aha! moment.
I had three really really major ones in University; The first real moment for me was grasping the concept of recursion, the second was the concept of object orientation, the third was dynamic/iterative programming. I'm still waiting for the one on the topic of functional programming... On a side note, I had minor "A-Ha!" moments about once a minute during the CS lab assignments - although they were more of the "Oh, so that's why it won't work! :doh: " variety. Also, I didn't use the term specified, instead opting for the slightly more sarcastic "Bingo!" everytime I detected a flaw in my algorithms. It came to the point where my lab partner would beat me to it: I slammed the palm into the table and he'd shout "Bingo!" just ahead of me. It felt good to know that I had an influence on his education... :)
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Yeah, often. I have done this alot with all sorts of problems. Even dreamed of solutions.
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Me too, wake up in the middle of the night ..."Aha!!... or Got it!!!", after this, I need to write the solution, or in the worst case, start to work at that time... yeap, happens from time to time, and is priceless!!!
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Me too, wake up in the middle of the night ..."Aha!!... or Got it!!!", after this, I need to write the solution, or in the worst case, start to work at that time... yeap, happens from time to time, and is priceless!!!