August 2006 Archives

Writing code in C++ is great fun, but that fun can come to a dead halt if you realize you have no good way to compile it. So, what does one do? Well, my first attempt was to connect to a Sun Solaris system to ask it to compile for me, but for some reason CC was being a bitch and wouldn't read my file and additionally I kept trying to call "cc" instead (cc is for C, not C++). Once getting frustrated in Solaris, I moved to trying to manually call the Visual Studio .NET VC7 compiler... apparently it doesn't work on the systems in the labs. Next, I tried "calling home" to my Suse Linux machine via SSH, that kinda worked, it compiled and stuff, but I still couldn't edit the file on a machine that also had access to the file to compile it, so that was a bust. Finally I gave up on the whole "remote compile" thing and went to a Solaris lab, sat down, compiled and was happy.

Since I compiled my little program I have been playing with the compilers a little more and I can now compile in the labs on Solaris, remotely on Linux and I even managed to get a command line compiler set up on my Windows Server 2003 system.

cc - Unix/Linux C compiler
CC - Unix/Linux C++ Compiler
gcc - not sure, but it doesn't work for me.
g++ - GNU C++ compiler, works on several OSes

If mankind minus one were of one opinion, then mankind is no more justified in silencing the one than the one - if he had the power - would be justified in silencing mankind.
- John Stuart Mill

In past few days I have looked at more of my own old code for GITI (Scheduler, PIM, the Interface, whatever) than I ever have before. The things I am finding in my old code are not pleasant. I left myself almost no code comments, there is no spacing, no indention and everything is basicly one giant lump of code. To make things worse, I am discovering that a lot of the identifiers I used for queries previously are not things that will always be unique, therefore there is room to confuse GITI as to what records I am requesting. I did a lot of stupid things in my past before I had any formal CS instruction.

It is difficult being in my old code again, but I am gradually working towards making things sane again, one function and one module at a time. I should have no difficulty getting the education module and its dependancies fully audited, corrected, converted (to v2 standards) and functional before the semester starts.

I don't feel like I've accomplished a lot in the past few weeks, hence no blog posts. I have gotten to this point and I feel like I should speak to my audience a little before things go on.

After much self-doubt and wondering about my future I have finally registered for Fall classes. Starting on August 22, 2006 I will have class every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. I have 2 courses in my major (Software Information Systems), 1 course in my minor (Philosophy), 1 course that relates to my major (in the computer engineering department) and 1 course that has nothing to do with my official courses of study, yet (Ceramics). After having a very rough spring semester I am happy to be registered and I am looking forward to an eventful semester. One thing I am considering for fall is an addition of a minor. After a lot of debating with myself, my friends, family and my hair stylist, I am considering an addition of a Studio Art minor in the field of Ceramics to my overall degree program. I am discovering that it takes a lot of things for me to be a complete person.

On the topic of me being a "complete person", I have been working on my personal website a bit and trying to organize all of my personal webspaces. I have now learned that I am a little too complicated when it comes to my web presence to be able to have a unified web space, but I am going to try it anyway. I have always had individual websites for each of my interests and parts of self, but now I am seeking to make things a little more unified. I don't think I will ever have just a single website (at least not without a lot of explaining to some people about my darker side ;-). My current goal is to condense (or at least cross link) as much of my web presence as possible. One of the ideas I have had is for a modular system that would let me intergrate the relavant pieces of content into each of my webspaces, but that seems a bit redundant.

The current state of my hobbies hasn't changed much. For ceramics I mostly throw, fire, glaze, fire and then show off my work. I have been working on making my own glazes some, ive come up with a few interesting colors, but the work on glazes is very challenging. I'm looking forward to spending time in the glaze studio at UNCC this semester to have more time and resources to experiment with. Other hobbies have taken a back seat to ceramics. This is a bit concerning to me, and as a result I have started listing all of my hobbies and am preparing to reactivate a few of my favorites.

In other news, I am now sleeping at night and am being awake during the day. This change should make getting up and going to class each day a lot easier.

My work on GITI has recently been resumed and I am planning to have the education module fully audited and overhauled by the start of the semester.

If anyone can think of anything I missed, send me an email, and I will post an ammendment.