Older blog entries for Lolindrath (starting at number 9)

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...

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.

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.

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......

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.

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.

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.

Work

So I'm at work right now waiting for my text2access vb program to finish. I wrote all the queries in sql so it'll port nicely if they decide to centralize it or use databases larger than 2gigs. I don't think that'll happen, right now it's crunching on 70,000 records from the mainframe, the database only ends up being 21 megs. But of course access doesn't clean up after itself(memory leak?) when it deletes a table so I have to call compact every time. On my test database I was up to 147 megs because of all the table creating and dropping. It's nice to work with vb again but I would rather have made this program in Java but my boss said he wanted it in something he knew.

Suroden

The power was out for a couple hours last night so nothing got done. Tonight I have a social event for my internship so no work will get done tonight. Tomorrow I'm going to a baseball game with some friends(box seats, gotta love knowing people who know people), friday I help pack my sister up and Saturday we move her 6 hours away. I'm sure my parents will be too tired to drive back that night so saturday will be completely shot, hopefully I'll get some work in Sunday. They friends going with me to the baseball game are my lore/building development team for Suroden so I'm sure we'll be discussing that therefore not all is lost.

Whelp, I figured out my problem, for some reason my pointer I declared global within main.cpp is appearing as null in player.cpp(using extern to get to it). So now I just have to figure out how to fix it. The power was out for most of the night therefore not work got done.

tcurtis: I feel you pain, I had to start stretching my wrists out before I type for a long and I got an ergonomic keyboard(wireless, it's pretty sweet, gotta love excuses to get new toys) and I break up my typing with lots of coffee breaks.

So I'm trying really hard to use iterators when I'm using STL containers. That way if I need to switch to a hash for speed or something it should be alot easier but I'm getting some wierd behavior out of it. There's an object Mud that iterates through all the current connections and polls them to see if there yaking at it. If they are it's appended to there buffer and then the interpret command is called on that object so it can handle the command all by it's lonesome. Well, I put in a really simple command system for now, just split off the first word and run it through an if/else structure. The only command for now is chat(just for testing, they'll be a Command class later) well, I try calling sendAllPlayers(Player *personWhoIsTryingToChat, std::string whatTheyreTryingToSay); which iterates through all the player objects in the list inside the Mud object and appends the text to the connections buffer so next time the Mud decides it can send them data it'll get sent out. I keep getting a seg fault when I call playerList->begin(). playerList is well within the scope of sendAllPlayers() and I've used assert to check that the list does exist and is valid. I'm going to attempt to make a smaller example to illustrate exactly what it's doing. Hopefully the seg fault persists in the example.

Java Terminal Emulator

I'm doing an internship at an insurance company this summer that uses an IBM mainframe and TN3270 emulators on the pc's to connect to it. Well, there's a movement away from dialing in from home into the mainframe modem bank and onto VPN. The problem is that they haven't given the beta testers liscenses for the current terminal emulators we use here. I found one that Sun came out with written very well in java but it's only free until September 2002 for me now. I'm attempting to write my own Java Bean that'll the same emulation that Sun's bean does. I'll try to match their API pretty closly. I've been working on this in my spare time at work but I've only made progress on the application it will eventually plug into. Anyone have any technical documents on TN3270 emulation? I've worked with telnet a little bit but this is quite a different system.