Older blog entries for johnnyb (starting at number 17)

Just finished moving my site to the eskimo.com server. Take a look at it at http://www.eskimo.com/~johnnyb/

Working a little on an Object Transaction Service for ORBit. I'm supposed to be documenting bonobo[ui], but I can't find a Linux shell server that supports the GNOME 2 libraries. I tried installing them on eskimo.com, but I ran into too many problems, like old perl, old autoconf, etc. A recent Linux shell server would be nice. Oh, well. The Transaction Service is just a clone of the one with Jacorb (it's pretty much a straight cut->paste with a Java-to-C translation in the middle). I love glib. If glib had been written sooner, I have a feeling C++ may never have been written at all (and I would like that very much :-] ).

Wooohooo! I actually found a job. Going to be working at EDS's Enterprise Command Center, where I will be monitoring and fixing UNIX applications across the U.S. Starting November 1st, should be fun. I got the second shift, from 3:30 to Midnight. I'll enjoy that - it will give me more time during the day to play with my wife and son. Anyway, I'm excited!

Well, I'm actually in Tulsa now. I've been teaching at Tulsa Community College as an adjunct. It's been pretty good - I have really bright students. However, what I don't understand is WHY ARE WE TEACHING C WITH A C++ BOOK? Yes, you heard me right. They are making me teach the C language using a C++ book! I've had at least one person drop due to the confusion it creates. On the other hand, my C++ class kicks butt! I only have two students because, well, they were the only ones with the prerequisites. But they are soooooo smart. It's reallly fun. We actually got through the whole book in two three-hour class periods. We'll have to go back over pieces, I'm sure, but it was really cool. We are now exploring other books, too. For C++ people wanting stuff that's more hard core, I recommend the book:

Modern C++ Design by Andrei Alexandrescu

IT ROCKS!!!! It made my head hurt the whole time I was reading it. I will have to read it at least three times to fully grasp the contents of it. I haven't had a computer book take more than a few hours to read in a really long time, nor have I read one containing so much innovative information. I'm not sure how practical or useful all of it is (some of it is definitely practical), but it is all definitely interesting.

Anyway, I'm still looking for a full-time job here in Tulsa.

I just noticed that my account was pointing to my old Lonestar account. If anyone has emailed me there, I haven't read it. Please email me at johnnyb@wolfram.com. I dropped the lonestar account a long time ago after they lost everyone's files. Yes, I know its a free service, but not doing backups? Anyway, so if you've mailed me, let me know.

Anyway, I've actually moved to Tulsa, and am looking for a job. My current company said I could telecommute until I found a suitable job here. Anyway, I'm looking at a really cool company that is getting ready to hop big-time into Linux, and hopefully they will have enough in their budget to hire me. However, I'm open to other things if anyone is looking!

I'm also preparing notes for some classes I'll be teaching at Tulsa Community College - one on C, and one on C++. I'm excited about that.

I haven't had time to add to my book lately, so sorry :(

Just installed Mandrake 8 on my computer - very cool, and reasonable speed with Nautilus turned off. 8.1 should be much better.

Made several updates to my guide to biblical interpretation. I'm teaching it at my current Bible study, and it seems to be going pretty well. Basically, I'm covering all of the main points from a Biblical Hermeneutics class I took.

Also, I've found a part-time job in Tulsa teaching programming. I just need a full-time job. Unfortunately, I'll probably have to use Visual C++ for the class. Blech.

Need more free time...

Posted a new version of my Biblical Interpretation study. It includes a longer outline and several handouts. Tried it out at my Bible study, and it seemed to go over pretty well. You can see it at http://members.wri.com/johnnyb/religpapers/bib-int/ .

Working on OpenGL stuff at home. It's making me wish I had taken a linear algebra course in college. What I'd like to do is eventually make a 3D Asteroids game. Currently I can move through space and fire bullets. However, I can't seem to get the bullets to be the right rotation. They fire in the right direction, but they are rotated wierd. Trying to move everything from eye coordinates to world coordinates, and translating polar to cartesian coordinates is making my head spin.

Posted an outline of a course on Biblical Interpretation that I'm going to teach at my Church if I don't move first :) If you're interested, you can find it at my Papers on Christianity page. In the next month I'll be developing it into an actual course. Unfortunately, I'm much better at writing prose than couse material :( Anyway, I'll have to figure out how to write stuff that (1) looks nice, (2) is easy to follow in a classroom setting, and (3) is informative and useful past the life of the class.

Just finished another 13 pages of the book, mostly on binary, octal, and hexadecimal numbers. I still need to do the programs to go along with that chapter, but I really hate numbering systems. I think Donald Knuth was right, computers should be treated mostly like decimal systems (I don't know if he actually said that, but it's kind of implied by the way he developed the MIX assembly language). Anyway, I didn't quite realize how much of a pain-in-the-butt masks, flags, and binary/hex/octal numbers are until I had to explain them in writing. Definitely not my idea of a good time. I'm just starting writing about C. I haven't decided what languages I'm going to cover, but it will probably be C and C++, and maybe scheme. I'd like to do at least one language that didn't quite have the same assumptions as the others.

I also have to take the time and see how DocBook does tables. Currently, I'm just doing ASCII tables, but the stylesheets I'm using aren't setting programlisting tags in fixed-width fonts, so even that isn't working. Grumble, grumble, grumble. I also need to go through and replace all my literal and emphasis tags with more meaningful tags, probably using architectural forms to switch them back. If you don't already know, architectural forms are a standard way of mapping customized versions of tagsets to their originals. Anyway, right now I'm just too lazy.

You can see the current version of the book (currently at 85 pages) at http://members.wri.com/johnnyb/. Email me with any comments, questions, flames, etc. you have on the book. I haven't yet gotten any good feedback on it. So, if there is anything you find confusing, misworded, or just plain wrong, let me know! I'd really like to do stuff like this for a living (custom training materials, courses, etc). The new Zope module "Online Course" should help that even further.

Anyway, I'm also trying to learn OpenGL. It's a very cool API, even though I can't stand having state stored globally (I wish you had to pass some sort of context variable to each function, but that would probably slow it down). Anyway, other than that, it's cool. I'd like to learn enough to do a 3D asteroids game, maybe even a 3D multiplayer asteroids game. That would be cool!