Older blog entries for Lolindrath (starting at number 12)

Work

Work is killing my coding performance at home. After I code all day I have no desire to code all night. It was better when I was bored out of my mind doing online training classes and then I'd have to go home and play with Java or something to keep myself from going crazy.

Other

Ordering a new computer tonight. My parent's is beyond hope. I've ruled out everything, the only thing left is that the CPU is dead. Therefore I'll get a new computer and my parents can have mine. My parent's was giving me all kinds of wierd windows protection errors and about every blue screen it could generate. When it did work for five minutes explorer would crash with a a different DLL causing everytime.

Last week I helped my old boss out, he had a 133mhz laptop he was fixing up for a lady he knows and he couldn't get it to recognize the CD -ROM drive, it was a PCMCIA external drive. I remembered working on them before. It was just a matter of putting the right drivers in autoexec.bat and config.sys.

Also last week my friend thought his hard drive crapped out so he got a new one. When he put it in it didn't work either. I stopped over and one of the two plugs for IDE drives as working so I figured he could get a new IDE controller that would plug into an expansion slot. He got that and I went over Saturday and put it in. I then went into the BIOS to disable the IDE controller on the mother board and the primary IDE plug was already disabled. I thought this was rather wierd so I plugged it back into the motherboard and let it go and it worked perfectly. Seems wierd that something could change at random like that.

Not a good week for computers I'd say.

Work

I have nothing to do until I meet with the users this afternoon to get them to clarify exactly what it is they want. Until then I'm polishing my VB program up a little. I ran a quick unscientific benchmark. I let my VB program run against a Microsoft Access 2000 database and a MySQL Server for 60 seconds each. Access managed to handle 14,491 inserts in the minute it had averaging 241.52 inserts per second. MySQL blew Access out of the water(big surprise) doing 29,483 inserts in a minute and averaging a whopping 491.38 inserts per second.

Work

Works going ok, I'm still working on creating the data extract files on the mainframe. I can't get clear specs out of the users therefore I can't move on. Pretty much just tweeking code right now.

Suroden

I have a meeting tonight with my Lore team. They're my two good friends Alajondro and Scrullenplast. There doing everything creative, I'm just hacking at some code. I'm almost done with Stage 1, I'm going to hopefully finish it tonight. I have to add the Command class and then loading the commands at startup into a map and then test the heck out of it. Stage 2 will be even more fun. The world will be read in using XML and player files will be read and written in XML. I have to add in more commands like navigation between rooms too. Also in Stage 2 will come passwords for MUDders and creating a new character. I need to find an open source encryption package to use. I'd use the standard crypt() command but it's not as portable as I'd like it to be. Then comes some basic security for players so people can't waltz in and type shutdown whenever they want.

Life

All is well, self confidence is up 20%, productivity up by at least 40%. Last Sunday I did 17 miles on my bike, Monday was 18 miles with a 7mph head wind. Last night I helped out my old boss install Windows on an ancient laptop. He was having trouble getting the cdrom(PCMCIA external) to work under DOS. I also got lots of tips on investment from him, he's a cool guy.

I discovered Robocode for the first time, I gotta play with that tonight. It's hard not to try it at work but I need to stay on task...

Work

Well, my program is coming along. I'm designing the requirements for the data that'll be passed into it. It's basically just saying that you can't have semi-colons because the program uses semi-colons and no single quotes because the sql insert statement uses those. Also some stuff with dates too, like on the mainframe it doesn't care about a date that's 00/00/0000, that's perfectly valid but Microsoft Access wants at least 01/01/1900. I crashed my hard drive in my work computer today also. I was editing a 104mb extract file from the mainframe that I had to feed into my program and it started clicking like the read head just kept banging against something, then a blue screen. When I restarted it said No fixed IDE devices found so I called good ol' tech support. It's been almost four hours now. Good thing my friend had his laptop I could use.

Life

I'm trying to keep myself busy. I got new speakers last night so I was playing with those. Tonight I'll probably work on some smaller side projects. Suroden is getting leglected as usual. It's the project that won't die because it's too fun to work on every once and a while.

3 Jul 2002 (updated 3 Jul 2002 at 14:28 UTC) »
Async & Suroden

raph: I just recently made a library to handle async network connections for the MUD I'm building. The interface is nice but the backend is pretty unwieldy. It'd be really simple to handle sync connections with an fstream which I'm considering, then grab the boost(haven't used them ever, look nice though) threading classes to use. With fstream it'd just be a matter of using socket() then connecting it and then using stream.attach() and from there it's all be << and >> operators. But first I have to solve my issues with my pointer I access as extern showing up as null in other files. I've tried using STL string's to do the same exact thing and it worked fine, I'm still baffled by the problem.

Work

Well, the program I'm currently working on is being stupid. The program uses 12 seconds of disk time to access the master file sequentially and 10 minutes to access a random access file(which should be faster). Looks like I'll have to access them both sequentially and read from whoever has the lowest policy number(primary key). I call a program that does all the reading for me, most likely that is wrong.

Suroden

I was working on Suroden last night and had the extern pointer problem fixed when the power went out, it went out around 9:15pm till 11:00pm. So I played iRogue on my Visor by candle light until the power came back on. I had enough time to set my alarm clock again and go to sleep. Soon I'll update the documentation for my INet classes and write the other classes I want to for the library and post a diary entry on the concepts of it.

Computer Science Classics

The Mythical Man-Month rules, so does Programming Pearls and More Programming Pearls by Jon Louis Bentley(orginally published in the CACM). The Practice of Programming by Brian W. Kernighan is good too. This discussion should almost be an article......

Work, Again

We lost another team member to eCommerce. I'm not sure if management understands that the eCommerce initiative is just to put a shiny new web front end on the COBOL legacy systems and they will be doing the real work. I don't think any new features will make it into the next release. Over half of our department has been moved to the eCommerce project already, at this rate I'll be the only person left and me Lead Developer Intern. I believe they've already proved that throwing more man hours at a problem wrong in _The Mythical Man Month_. In my own opinion they should leave the people who know what there doing alone and let them work. Right now I'd imagine there swamped with bringing the new people up to speed and going to a million meetings.

The Strange and the Bizzare

I was bored tonight so I was going through my school email and cleaning up when I came across this email again. I made this program to make the listing of the search words. Apparently you try all these phrases in one of the search engines they've mentioned in the email and it'll point you towards some web site that reveals how the real world is actually the Matrix. I'm more interested in seeing if these people actually have a website out there for laughs. I'm through the first two keywords, I thought I'd share it with everyone for the heck of it.

Work

I'm not at all productive this afternoon, four plates of of food at the chinese buffet will do that. It's ok though, it's Friday and I have no pressing projects to finish. Erie finally has a Starbucks, it's a pretty nice place, good atmosphere. I just hope it doesn't put the other small cafe's around out of business.

Knock Knock

Wow, cool idea. This is the most orginal idea I've heard of in a while. It'll be hard to crack with 60,000 some odd ports and pretty much unlimited time if you wanted. What about network delay? Will that screw up timing or will timing be a range, from 105 to 110ms?

Other

I'm going to program some tonight, hopefully I'll get something done. This weekend will be crazy, moving my sister down Saturday and won't be back by Sunday. That'll kill productivity. It'll take forever to catchup on reading everyone's diaries.

Work

This morning I showed the report I generated from my access database to the guy who's in charge of the project. It's now not just an experiment to see if we can do it it's now go ahead and do it. The next step is to write the COBOL program that generates the data, my program should be general enough that I can throw any file that's semicolon delimited through it. The top line of the file contains the field names, types and whether it's indexed or not. The editing I did to the reinsurance report to make it show lapsed policies brought about another error, some of the policies in the download report(agents sending in info on the polices they sold/updated) are showing up as lapsed when they shouldn't. My changes didn't cause it therefore it's another service request completely, I'm sure I'll end up working on it though. Next was the report to show all the people a mailing went out to, apparently there's some bad data and it's showing up on the mailing list so there just going to use this report to see who's is screwed up and who's isn't. This afternoon I have a class for my internship, it's on "Selling the Product", should be another fun filled afternoon.

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