The Fail Blog consists of pictures of things gone wrong and the word FAIL added. Some are set up, some are likely fake (as above), but most are real situations that just ooze failure of one sort of another.

Tags: Photography, Fun, Failure, Accidents, Bone-Headedness, Captions, Novices

Scott Stevenson has encountered what I call the Knowledgeable Novices Syndrome. One of his very helpful and beautifully illustrated tutorials on Quartz garnered a very revealing comment that exquisitely expresses the challenge (and the frustration) of this kind of learner:

Why is it impossible to find a tutorial on how to write a jpg or bmp etc file from an nsview? surely this is basic bread and butter programming. I have finally got through the IB barrier, I can delegate, i can use a timer, i can draw paths with mice but i cant get to write a b****@@@@ view to file! I've been googling for 4 days now, i have "programming with quartz" in front ofg me as i write, i have "cocoa programming for os x" i have "vermont recipes", i have wall to wall bookmarks to the cocoa drawing guide and yet i still cant find a single example to get me on my way!!!!!!
And everyone is telling me how wonderfully simple it all is.

AAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's not as if I havn't programmed most of my life!!
I write c, perl, pascal, prolog, cobaol, algol, fortran name ive programmed it. why can't i jkjlskadjlsajdljsdlsadflkahjsjdkalj

I replied thus in the answer to this conundrum:

I have a name for this: it's the knowledgeable novices syndrome.

Ignorant novices feed fine by nibbling on the tasty morsels of code that Scott and other serve up. Ignorant experts need help with the unfamiliar utensils and spices, but are otherwise great code cooks. Knowledgeable experts make entire code meals table-side from raw reference materials in real time.

Knowledgeable novices are a challenge. They just want to make and eat a sandwich, but are having the darndest time doing it. Their knowledge is actually an encumberance, since they must unlearn what they think they know about sandwiches in order to make one the Cocoa way. There is no cutting of bread and spreading of peanut butter as they are sure there must be; just lamination, repitition, and bounding polygons applied to a couple of raw materials.

I'm one of these knowledgeable novices -- not as frustrated as the quoted poster -- but still encountering the same kind of issues.

Tags: Ignorance, Knowledge, Novices, Experts, Cocoa, Learning