swamped
Boy, oh boy! I have just been swamped recently between work, school, and actually trying to get to the gym once in a while. Glad I could make it in to post before the month since my last post rolled over. I already feel like a jackass not updating.
Work is going well. The students have their finals this week, which means the next two weeks I basically get to do nothing. For the next 4 or 5 days though, it will be sheer madness. Students seem to want to wait until the last minute when they’re desparately behind to ask for help, by which point they’ve frustrated themselves so thoroughly, they expect me to step in an just do it for them (to which I respond by giving them a big ol’ ticket for a free trip on the FAILboat). I’m also amazed sometimes by how much people want to (yes WANT) to not catch on, and continue to make excuses as to why they can’t do something instead of just learning to do it. It makes me wonder if in the past (or even currently) I have done the same things. I’d like to think not.
School, while intriguing and challenging, has been eating up a good hunk of time. I’m OK with that. In my programming classes over the past few weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of re-implementing the unix tools “cat” and “grep” in c/c++ and the FreeBSD passwd diff’ing security check in bash. It’s kind of neat to dissect and re-implement the tools I’ve been using for so long. While they seem like trivial exercises, it teaches alot about why software engineers design software they way they do. Who would have thought there were so many ways to put the contents of a file to STDOUT? Now the question is, whose way is faster, better, and more concise, and why is that? I know when I’m doing work for production, a lot of times these questions don’t receive alot of attention. “Oh, it compiles? Ship it!” It’s nice to see some time spent discussing the science behind our science. ;)
Fun stuff.
Since the recent laconica updates, lopost is indeed broken. I have not had the time to fix it. Sad but true. I’ll probably rework it over the semester break. Chances are I’ll have to take a look at the way gwibber does it, as my code was based on the original python at the laconi.ca trac, which no longer works.
I’ve also been asked to help out with the SQL security libraries for Photon CRM, although all of that is still in the planning stages. I’ve started writing some documentation (as in anything that doesn’t exist yet, document first, implement second), but we’ll see how much time I end up having for actually writing the code.
Tags: c++, freebsd, gwibber, laconica, photon, python, school, SQL, trac, unix, work