EOT

End of term! Almost.

The end of my term is going well compared to the beginning/middle. I’m improving on most of my important assignments. The courses that aren’t as imperative are probably suffering a bit more though. Most important is definitely CS240 and CS246, though. CS245 is even more of a mindfuck now, and MATH239 is getting weirder. I’m sure if I spent some time reading over notes a million times with those two, I’d understand eventually.

I just really can’t wait for the holidays… I haven’t actually had a solid week off doing anything I wanted since last Christmas. Last Christmas. I need to catch up on sleep and do nothing for a while.

I managed to sign myself up for more volunteer work today. I already have the profQUOTES database thing I haven’t finished yet (since the profQUOTES books were printed so finishing the script wasn’t very important anymore… the books were awesome though!) and this very website is also suffering. Anyways, the orientation committee is starting to plan Fall 2010 orientation already, and Maria is a FOC so I felt the need to get involved. I offered to do the website and some other back-end stuff that involves collecting information from the students who want to be leaders/organizers. The previous orientation used Google spreadsheets and email. You perhaps understand how that could get disorganized quickly. Spreadsheets had no error checking, no authentication, and no way to guard against duplicates. Emails were great for announcements though. What I proposed was a more centralized location for all these forms we need to fill out. A database would store the information, and the FOC/organizers could just select their data/filters.

A small hurdle to get over: The guy I’m working with hates PHP and uses Perl. He told me today that it was because he’s seen some horrible PHP code. It’s true, it’s very possible to write horrible code and have it work. As with any language this is possible. However, PHP is a bit different as you can embed HTML/CSS/whatever in it. So this can turn into a clusterfuck of language in one file. It’s good to separate out into classes/functional files, and simply call your functions within your ‘pure’ HTML files.

A new-ish concept for school so far: working in partners for a project. I know this is coming for OS next term, but it just makes the end of this term a bit hectic. There wasn’t anyone I knew in the class who didn’t have a partner already, so I asked the girl who I usually sit next to (but don’t talk to) to work with me. This should be interesting :) I think it’s better I’m working with someone I don’t know. OS will be with someone I know (hopefully?).

I’ve been using Windows 7 so long (because it’s awesome!) that I really miss my linux. Using linux is also more ‘natural’ and easier for me to do constructive things like programming. Things like git/compiling/http-servers feel… closer to me I guess? There’s too much stuff in windows I need to do to get at a working setup for development (for me anyways). I should probably start using an IDE at some point.. but I find them just too clunky. I downloaded NetBeans about an hour ago, but I dislike it already. Just a text editor is good enough for me (but clearly there are times in the future where this won’t be sufficient…)

Final note: Congratulations Jem on her new baby girl :)

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