Off By One

I forgot I even had this site.

Heh

Char’s been at me again, so here’s the updated skinny: We’re swimming, which is good. That’s really about it.

I’ve got some nifty projects on my plate at work, which is great. On the home-project front, Aaron got it into his head to rewrite CRON-O-Meter from the ground up, which means, well, I get a break

Heh

Nothing new in the world, folks. Politics as usual, business the same.

How are all of you?

I’m not dead, after all.

Yes, yes… I’m lazy. It seems that I start a lot of posts with apologies for the silence.

So…

Well, there’s not a lot to bring up, really. My company just held its annual kick-off meeting, which amounted to a half-day of meetings followed by a problem at a client’s site that required all but one developer to skip the rest of it. Myself included. It was a satisfying day, though — the lunch served was delicious.

Other than that, I was almost tapped for some business travel, but the trouble I would have been shooting up and expired on its own. I hope that I’ll see some travel over the course of the internship, and Steve has suggested that he’ll put me on the shortlist for travel.

I finally put a dent in the CRONOMETER work that I was dawdling on.

In other news: Not news, really, but a link to another friend of mine is going in the sidebar. Warning. He’s geekier than the rest put togeth… okay, no. He fits right in: M. Edwards

As usual…

Seems to be a slow week in the weblogging world, though — Simon is still the most prolific of us, and even he’s slowed down some. Char is posting at her usual rate, which sits somewhere in between glacial, and molasses on same. All told, well, we’re busy and boring

In general, though, there hasn’t been a lot to report. I’m busy at work, doing lots of hacking on the deployment tools we use to set our product up for end users. Of course, that last is a bit misleading — our “end users” are, in fact, banks and secondary service providers who resell the use of our software to yet a third tier of customers. It’s a very different software model from the ones that I’m used to. Technically, the ‘users’ of our application are, themselves, programmers. It’s a bit of a relief, in fact.

At home, I’ve decided that I want to acquire some skill in another scripting language, so I’m going to write an AI sudoku solver. This shouldn’t be too hard — we’re talking pretty basic stuff, in my view. Hopefully, the process of writing the solver will make me better at the game itself. Thankfully, Gnome on Ubuntu comes with a good Sudoku game.

That’s it, really. I’m reading the last chronicles of Thomas Covenant, too, although I’ll have to be patient, as book two isn’t on the shelves yet, but other than that I’ve just worked, and read slashdot. Oh, and I saw Serenity. Which kicked my ass four ways from sunday. It was great, great, great!

Oooo.

Aren’t you all glad I broke my silence, now?

I had a basic-model weekend. I even slept in, yesterday, which doesn’t really happen too often.

“Aaron”:http://www.spaz.ca/ and I plugged away at “CRON-O-METER”:http://cronometer.sourceforge.net/ (Don’t expect too much there — we haven’t done a site yet) in a few geeky ways. We’re getting close to the point where we can deliver something that actually works, which will be nice to have.

Die Nasty ends tonight, for the season at least, which is likely to result in shenanigans.

Not a lot else, really. Life is slack, but good.

Hello again, after long absence.

I apologize for the ridiculously long silence — I do feel that I was justified, but there you go — and as such I return with a rundown on my life so far.

I’m prepping for exams, which in this case actually means studying, a more or less new thing to me. Not flat-out new, but new-ish. This involves mainly targeted study, going over old exams and making sure they’re clear to me.

My projects and assignments are done, which is good. They were… okay. The one big one went well, and the other went as well as a two-person project done by me alone could have been expected to go. The assignments, well, let’s not speak of those.

Lifewise, Char and I did our first Open House drive-about. We checked out two places, one of which was a nice house in a shitty location, the other of which was a nice house in a nice location, with a nice yard, but about twice as large as even we could want. We’re talking fricken huge, here.

Hm.

I’m working on some new programming projects as well, now, and reading up on the technologies that I’ll be working with when I start with $NEWCOMPANY in the next little while.

That’s about all. What are all of you, my dedicated readers, up to?

I noticed yesterday (as Char finally got around to posting on her blog) that I have been remarkably lax in updating here.

Bad Chris!

Well, in order to fix that, here’s an update.

First things first: Congratulations to the pair of people who know exactly whom I’m congratulating and why. No more details, of course, but there it is.

(note, the above sentence is intended to make little sense. Don’t worry if you don’t get it. If you don’t, odds are you weren’t meant to. If you spend too much time analyzing it, before tossing off an e-mail to me asking what the hell it meant, well, that increases the odds that you’re the one it’s aimed at )

I see looking at my last post that it was just after the hardest exam of my university career… Or more to the point the one that I expected to be hardest. My final mark is back in that course, though, and my concerns were… unjustified. I have now received four of my five course marks back, and I anticipate the last arriving sometime in the next week. I’ll post a mark roundup then, but the news is (generally) good. CLIT 342 is the one exception, but I knew it would be.

I have, in the last week, spent a lot of time with the family up at Mir’s house. This was a nice way to spend the holidays, as they good-naturedly tolerated my solitary habits when I got away from them, and I had a great time when I was sociable. It was, all told, an excellent Christmas holiday.

On an slightly tangential note to that, I’ve noticed that Christmas is becoming a dirty word nowadays. Has anyone else? (stupid question, of course) Anyway, it occurred to me, though, that there’s two sides to this. On the one hand, I hate that the annual holiday of the Christian religions has been subsumed into a cultural celebration of rampant consumerism that goes so far as to arrogantly strip its name from it. If this were to happen to Channukah, or Ramadan, do you think there would be so little comment? No, it’s only acceptable to do this to the Christian holiday. Faugh. Even as an atheist, I find this offensive and disrespectful. I’ve read in a few places here and there that it may be policy at some large retailers now not to say “Merry Christmas” anymore, to avoid offending non-christians. Who the hell cares?!

On the other hand, the effect of this dissociation has been to make it much more comfortable for those of us who are not christian to exist at this time of year, as well. I am no longer left with a feeling of obligation to wish people a merry Christmas at the till or whenever I greet them. The net effect of all of the removal of meaning has been to make it acceptable for me to simply say my usual “Have an excellent day,” or some other such greeting. It’s nice, and it’s lower stress for me. I only wish that the price was not so … crude.

Hrm. Other things of note, in the past week or so.

Well, I got bored and frustrated with the lack of instructions for writing Azureus plugins, so I wrote my own tutorial for Azureus plugins for those who come after me. I’m fairly proud of it, since this is not something I ordinarily do, but as far as I can see nobody is looking at it yet

Char and I are getting packed. Moving sucks.

Not much else. I’m working through learning SWT and Java network programming just because I can and I want to. Geekiness is of the good.

Anyway, if I missed something ciritical, I’ll trust Char to know about it and chew me out Take care, all, and have a Happy New Year!

I had the last of my final exams today, or more to the point the last two.

I also have received tentative marks for the other three courses — which is just amazingly fast, in my opinion. I really didn’t expect to get them back so soon, although at this point I’m not sure whether they translate into an A or a B in their respective courses. The curve, frankly, sucks.

However, in terms of good news, the exam this afternoon, the last of year three, semester one, was the one I was most concerned about, and the one that I felt woefully underprepared for up until I sat down and took the exam. As I read it over, I realized that yes, I do understand this stuff! It was a great feeling. I’m pretty confident that I did well enough on the exam to rate a high mark for it, and by extension the course.

In other news: Not much, really. I was going to link to a plugin that I wrote for my bittorrent client, Azureus, but the wiki that I linked to it from is gone now, along with the description… However, something vaguely like the description can be found here, and the plugin itself can be gotten here, if it interests you. It was quick, dirty, and it does work, but it’s not perfect. I’m working on v1.0 as we speak

I’ve spent the better part of my day hacking away trying to figure out an efficient way of representing a Mahjongg hand in Java. There’s more than a few complications that I’ve no doubt introduced more as a result of being inexperienced than from the complications inherent in the process. That being said, I think I’ve made some real progress.

That being said, the complications I’ve introduced are related to planning ahead to be able to score the game. As it sits, there’s not a lot that I can think of to make it simpler and still keep the critical element — that of having multiple objects that are distinct from the program’s point of view that are nonetheless treated as one and the same for scoring purposes — intact.

It’s nifty, though, and when I get this put together, I’ll have to draft some people to play a game or three (That’s gonna be the hard part) and test it out.

… and its polar opposite, of course. Because, if I were inspired at the moment, I’d be out creating something, as opposed to sitting here polishing up my mail server and posting this.

I’m looking at at least three programming projects that actively interest me right now. And yet, I can’t bring myself to work on any of them. Nothing seems to make sense with any of them, they’re just lines on a screen these days. I know that there’s more there, but every single little snag seems insurmountable in this mood, and programming is all about overcoming the little snags, one at a time.

And nothing else is any better. As a sample of my attention span right now, I’m reading The Neverending Story (sporadically), The Diamond Age (almost done), the Chanur series, the Dark is Rising series, Applied Cryptography, and A New Kind of Science. And I’m playing both Neverwinter Nights and Doom 3. I don’t have the mental tenacity of a peanut right now, and it’s getting me down.

Oddly enough, I’ve found that having eight days off over the last two weeks is too much.

Oh, I’ll admit, if I had known that they would be free in advance, it would be a whole different story — I could have planned some, made some progress on projects, etc. But, since it’s a completely day-to-day issue, I find myself more or less at loose ends for the duration.

So, right now, I’m hoping that the skies stay clear for a good long stretch, so that I can return to work tomorrow, no doubt to get filthy and hot lugging a pump and 4-inch hose around clearing out low spots on the jobsite. Still, it’s getting paid, and that’s a good thing. And it’s activity, also a good thing.

Anyway, though, today at least will be spent trying to make a fractal draw on my screen. SWT is proving to be a bit of a different beast when it comes to outputting images, so I have a little bit of a hassle to work through. Not least because I don’t really ‘get’ graphics programming, which leaves me with a bit of a struggle to get things together. I can grok string work, but for some reason the way that nearly every java app and framework handles images just leaves me cold. It’s essentially impossible to just create a simple image and show it.

Faugh.