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!

I feel crappy that I haven’t been updating, but I’ve got 12 hour work days. There’s that twinge of guilt about unattended blogs, but I’ll be in the back of a class supervising a lecture (like I am now, actually) and just think: “now’s not the time!”

But yes, I’m still around, and I haven’t forgotten my meag… erm, “highly exclusive” readership. So, how’s my week been?

Ok. Been working on fixing my damned pointers. I have one that keeps faulting when I delete it and I don’t know why. So, as angry as computers make me, I was glad this morning.

Why? I did a project euler problem (#15) without a lick of programming. The question was in a 20×20 grid, how many combinations of paths are there from one corner to the other. Welllllll permutations tell us it’s the factorial of 2 times of the size of your grid, all over the factorial of the number of possible choices multiplied by factorial of the the number of columns. In easier terms, that’s

(2n)! / ¹n! * ²n!

And since our grid is 20×20… well. You figure it out.

Hope to be back soon enough!

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.

oh MAN! Have I ever been busy! Don’t worry, I’m still around, and with all kinds of new news to share. I’m just a tad busy. I’ve moved into a new house (which I’m currently working on wiring the whole place with Cat5E) and I’m switching jobs to a teaching assistant position at Washtenaw Community College. So, once I have the internet functioning throughout the house (and then of course, moving the server, etc) I’ll be back more often.

So no, world, I haven’t forgotten about you. Now, can you hold this cable while I go pull the other end through my wall?

It’s amusing. I’ve been gearing up to do this job writing Drupal modules, and I was talking with my prospective employer when he said “ok, well go ahead and email me your resume”.

“Resume? I have a resume?”

So, last night I actually spent time sitting down and writing down what the heck I’ve been up to the past years. All in all, it’s doesn’t even look that bad. It’s just weird. I haven’t had someone ask for a resume in ages! Most of the time it’s just like: “Oh, you can do this? Well do it, and we’ll pay you”

Maybe I’m returning to the regular boring working world? No more an outlaw.

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!

I wish I had a lot to write about today, but life’s been slow. I mean, it hasn’t, but it’s nothing worth telling the world about. School is busy. Work is, steady. Haven’t had time to do any cool technology stuff. None of the tech news has caught my eye as a jaw dropper recently. So, I guess this is just an update to assure you all I’m still here!

Well, spring break (or whatever you call the last week of February) is finally over. Of course, I still cleverly have Mondays off (isn’t that everyone’s dream?), so I got to enjoy my day worry free! Until about 9:30 AM. At that point, I called Nerine back thinking her leaving 3 missed calls on my cell phone must be important. Turns out, her car died. Or was dying. Actually, by all appearances it runs fine, but I guess it was having problems. Still, I digress.

So, I quickly got all my stuff together and was going to head to her work to pick it up, and then to the dealership (leaving my car with her) to take it in. Well, turns out I didn’t have to do that as early as thought (which led to a fantastic row between us over the phone). So I went back and decided I finally should get cracking on some code I started writing back in January for a friend.

I spent that fantastic 2 hours writing maybe 3 lines of python. See, the Securities and Exchange Commission provides access to all of their information on filings in a searchable database. That’s fine and dandy if you want to see one filing at a time. But if you want to analyze trends, you need ALL the data. And to subscribe to their live feed of data… a mere $31,000 per year. They do provide an ftp site that allegedly makes all of this information available, but I haven’t figured out how to dig through all of the data yet. First… I need to get the sample data I want organized how I want it, then I’ll worry about getting all of it.

After I got the car to the dealer, I luckily had Nerine’s laptop (thankfully, running Ubuntu, so it’s already got python and ruby on it) with me, and they had free wifi. I was able to get a little more done there sitting in their waiting room. Of course, that’s before George called.

Apparently, the computers at work are again going willy-nilly, but this time it’s on the server. Never good news. And of course, George has the folks from the company who make the barcode reader dialed in — via PCAnywhere. Ahh, hell of hells. These are the situations that make IT people shriek: (because…)

1. PCAnywhere is SO terribly insecure in the first place.
2. What the hell are you having the guy who makes the barcode reader dial in for? This man doesn’t manage the data flow in a production environment. He sells a product that just sends and receives our data for us! Without specific knowledge of our deployment of his device, he can’t do anything but perhaps break it more!
3. The system he’s dialed in to has the master customer accounts. While it’s unlikely he’s untrustworthy or stupid enough to steal this information, that doesn’t mean he can’t break it disastrously if something goes wrong.
4. PCAnywhere is really insecure.
5. I’m the one who did the configuration (and in the end, provided the 2-minute fix)… had I been called first, none of the system’s integrity would be compromised in the first place!

So, that was the end of my working in python for the day.

I’ve also managed to complete my test for my Business on the Internet class. Good news. I think I survived Then again, I’m hoping my grade is inversely proportional to the amount of bullshit involved in that class. That would make my GPA something like a 4.1.

Well, after an enjoyable 3 days off, I’m back at work.

Turns out, we didn’t go up to Greenbush. I called Miriam Sunday night to make sure everything was cool, and it seems she hadn’t even left Ann Arbor yet, as she was recovering from an impromptu surgery. Oh dear.

So, come Monday,  we still traveled up to Owosso, MI, to visit someone there, prior to driving all the way back in the afternoon. The rest of Monday through Wednesday I got to spend catching up with folks I haven’t really had any chance to hang out with since school’s been so busy. So that was good.

I wish I could say I did more to study, or get myself more familiar with computer technology or something… but hey, it’s spring break… cut me some slack!