CRAP!!!
I had this blog post that had something like 12 links in it all typed up and everything, and i do all my blog posting in raw html through phpMyAdmin which is onerous, but i just havent gotten around to building a frontend that i want to use and securing it.
Anyway, what prompted this whole process was an unfortunate call of make clean, whcih for thsoe of you not in the know remove all the previously compiled files from a project. (Compiling is the process of taking raw ’source’ code and changing it into that lovely string of ones and zeros that are a computers bread and butter). When i was a child wandering the carpet covered halls of Trimble Navigation where my mother worked as an electrical engineer/software developer, i remember loving the various Dilbert comics that were pinned up all over the place. One sticks out in my mind: Dilbert was caught playing Solitaire and explained that he was only doing it while his code compiled. And i didn’t get the joke, but i thought it was funny to see the PHB back at his desk looking at his computer with a thought bubble “I wonder if my software ever compiles”. I continued to not get really get it through my first three years as a CS student, because every project you write in those years is never larger than say 10,000 lines of code spread across a dozen different files, so compilation is like a 5 second process on a halfway decent computer. When i installed the source based Gentoo Linux i learned what a long compile was, but still i just wrote it off as installation time. But after this particular make clean that i mentioned back at the top of the paragraph, i noticed that my developer machine’s copy of the feedback service wasn’t there anymore. This sucker takes at least 45 minutes to compile on my 3.6 GHz Pentium 4 with 2 GB of high quality ram and SATA hard drives (not RAIDed but still good). So now i have time to blog.
While writing that pargraph i kinda wanted to write a combination of markup, javascript and CSS that would allow somebody viewing this site to choose their technical level so that my friends who know the difference between polymorphism and multiple inheritance can choose to not have the explanation of what a compile is, and my friends who think that the man command sounds pretty sexist don’t have to read about my love affair with my really fast dev desktop.
Fourth of July: Went to Gasworks park with some MSFT interns and Austin, the fireworks were pretty awesome, they were done to music, but the timing wasn’t particualrly great. We were in the third row from the water, but between us and the lake were 2 transvestites and 3 lesbians. Welcome to Seattle.
I might be mildly convinced of the merits of Hungarian Style by this article. Which is pretty interesting since i get feelings that can only be described as homicidal rage when writing lines of code like TotalWorkerPayDecimal = WorkerPayRateDecimal * WorkerNumberOfHoursWorkedInteger in MIS. For comparison, in CS that’s workerPay = wageRate * hours; unless of course it’s being written in Java when it becomes Worker.getPay() to the user of the class and something like
public double getPay(){
return this.wageRate * this.getHoursWorked();
}
and of course getHoursWorked has some arcane implementation elsewhere as well. Bah!
That rant didn’t make it into the post that i accidentally deleted with the reset form button. Anyway, i’m lovin’ the short week and looking forward to the weekend.