habitual pragmatist

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.

… at updating regularly. But hey, I had to squeeze one in before that good old month marker hit. Things have not been bad. I’ve had a good bit of busy work between bash scripting and working on a bunch of boring object-features stuff in C++. Sadly, none of it is really worth posting, it’s all just exactly what it should be — busy work. Working in the labs has been a nice relief. I swear to god, people have the DUMBEST questions every, but I feel good knowing that, by the time they leave my presence they are either cowering in fear or know exactly why that thing they were doing was not as it should be.

Ok really, I don’t make people cower in fear. I feel good knowing that that girl there didn’t know how to copy a file on to her flash drive, but now she both hates me for wasting 30 minutes of her life making her learn how to copy the file instead of doing it for her, as well as knowing how to copy the file itself. Sure, people don’t like to learn. They want things to be done for them. I am not of this mindset. I would like to learn at least the bare minimum of everything I should be involved in, though I make no pretenses about leaving expertise to the experts.

For now, it is likely to be quiet on this page. It has been 5 weeks since my last update, but those are 5 weeks well spent learning and teaching. The only thing I have in the running of interest to the outside world is a revision of some of the packages for Ninjas and Pirates, as I’m trying to get the forum games integrated with the actual forums. I may end up posting about that. Otherwise, Haskell has been sparking my interest, but I don’t see any likelihood of actually having time to learn it anywhere in the near future.

So, until next time, I’m off to give the world some PHP and a piece of my mind!

Boy, is school ever busy!
I really dig my new position as a lab assistant. I get to help people, which I’ve always considered a good thing. In some ways, it’s kind of crappy, becuase in the classes that don’t end up needing a lot of technical assistance, I end up getting sent to make copies or working on stuff for project euler, but I consider it well worth it.
Classes are going good too. I’ll be essentially sleeping through my german class, but it will be an easy 5 credits. Might even get fun too.
I had my first C++ class in almost 10 years last night. THAT was a trip. Back when I started learning, STL had barely come into existence. We had only just got up into the process of implementing classes and whatnot. After that, I ended up doing all python and perl and ruby, and who needed to compile?
I got into this class and after our introduction, one of the first comments was “Well, I’m sure you’re all familiar with things the string classes and whatnot, so let’s move on to memory addressing and pointers”
/me jaw_floor()++;
Good news is, it’ll actually be a nice challenge to catch up.
I haven’t been to my Shell Scripting class yet, but it should be alot of fun. It’s with one of my favorite professors, so I plan on it being a fun time.
More later.

A tip to all of you who are ever in a group project at some point in your experience of immersive didactic situations: do not show up to your final presentation for said group 30 minutes late. If I’m in your group, you’re damned right I’m not hiding the fact that you screwed up.

Well, slowly but surely I’m learning the innards of building drupal modules. I’ve started learning from “the drupal book“, and it’s a big dive in. It also appears I don’t remember as much PHP/MYSQL as a I used to know, so it may be time to go back and re-read O’Reilly’s Learning PHP. Soon enough though, I’m sure I’ll be a drupal ninja.

Class-wise, My Human Relations class wraps up Tuesday with our big final presentation. Should be interesting enough. Three more weeks of physics, and I’ll officially be a full-time drupal developer for a while. Scary!

Guess I had better keep hitting those books.

Well, couple things to talk about. For one, I’ve been busy as hell with class. My Human Relations class wraps up on July 1st, and my Physics class is running up 3 weeks after that. So, it’s time that the exams and presentations are getting pushed pretty heavily.

Also, I’m a little chaffed that they’re not offering a decent number of classes I need to graduate. I hate the idea of waiting around for an extra semester just to get a particular class just to graduate. I’m still taking easily transferable credits to take off to the next university with me, but I’d hate to see those run out before I have all my requirements done. At least I’m learning something.

Also, since it’s summer, I’ve been taking the time to catch up with people. On Monday night I went down to the Necto and caught up with a few of the fellas I used to play shows with. It was a good time, and I’ll be back there next week, as Rob and Teddy are actually going to be playing.

Miriam is packing up tonight, so I’ve got to go help her load her truck so she can be out of her apartment by Saturday. Actually several people are leaving, which means there will likely be a lot of the gotta-go-say-bye-for-now events coming up.

Last but not least, I’ve been offered some contract work hacking on Drupal. This of course means that on top of however busy I already am, I’m going to be re-learning PHP/MySQL. Woot!

So, considering I’ve felt so bad about not updating in a week, I set aside time before I start cracking into my humongous pile of homework just to do an update.

Both of my classes are reaching a head. I have 2 and a half weeks of business class left. I actually have a take-home exam to do tonight. Physics is about halfway through, and I’m not applying myself as well as I should. The good news is, I got confirmation for my grant for Fall ‘08 and Winter ‘09 semesters, so that’s got me happy.

Work is… well, work. As ever. I should really be finding a job where I am a dedicated tech person, rather than the tech person who always mops up poo-water because the electric room flooded and I’m the only one there.

I guess the only other thing that’s up in my life is that the summer has begun, and I probably wouldn’t have such a stack of homework to do if I didn’t try to fit in as much time with my friends. I’ve been doing as much hanging out as possible, since people are leaving town soon (Dan, Miriam, Chuck), and hell — it’s summer. On top of that, Shro and I are becoming the best of buds. We’re practically attached at the hip, despite living 30 miles apart. I really do need to get cracking on these summer courses though. I can enjoy July and August when they get here.

In the Linux world? I’ve been doing jack and squat. No programming of note. No new installs of note. I haven’t even had a good chance to configure Debian Lenny like I’ve wanted. Maybe after I bust out these assignments I’ll get that going tonight. Who knows? Doubt it though!

Ack! I’ve been so bad. No updates in a week!

I’ll give a more in-depth synopsis of life in the next day or two… but to follow up, I’m lovin’ the bitlbee, and I’ve still got a lot of homework.

Sorry if my updates are short and infrequent right now. I’ve not done much computing aside from simply using a computer. Instead it’s been two-dimensional motion, vector mathematics, and the study of human relations (both in school and in daily life). Sadly, by the time I get home and get done with my homework, there’s not much time left for anything else.

I’m glad now that they cancelled my C++ class this semester. Taking that too would have been VICIOUS.

Well, school starts tomorrow. I’m still pretending like I have all the time in the world to get things ready before then. Still haven’t gotten Groovy on Grails running on the FreeBSD box, which was one of the goals. I have however, gotten Arch set up pretty close to how I’d like it. So we’ll see how it carries me through the semester. And of course, since I won’t have too much time to play with my environment for the coming weeks, it’s obligatory screenshot time!