The Blog of Lucien Stals

Seems like everyone is starting their blogs like that today. I wonder why?

Blackboard is heating up. I've been watching student posts regarding the assignment for SD2. I love this part of the semester when people are in too much of a hurry to read what already been said on Blackboard.

At risk of repeating the same advice Euan has already posted.. Good luck to everyone with exams and assignments. in a couple of weeks you'll be wondering what all the stress was about. Don't forget to follow the forum for the latest goss on our upcoming movie night and end of year dinner/awards night. Guaranteed to be cheesy fun

What am I up to? Well after the Games Development Teaching Forum last week, I have been pondering how to write a game for Pocket PC. I thought I'd start by getting familiar with the target platform before I attempt an actual game (which between me and anyone reading this, will be my first). So I'm trying to write an app in C# (.NET Compact Framework) that acts as a front-end data entry type thing for reviewing coffee shops. Coffee is a passion of mine, and I'm always sooooooo upset when I get a bad one. (One day I'm planning to post a black list of coffe shops I'm boycotting due to having been served bad coffee.) The other day I sat and waited for 15 inutes after ordering a coffee. While I was waiting I started a spread sheet on my PDA to record their details. Now I want to code the front end for the spread sheet. I just have to work !
out how to load multiple form on the PDA and how to interface with the spread sheet (which is in some goofy Pocket Excel format) programaticly.

Oh, I ended up asking for my money back for the coffee that never arrived.

And while I'm on my high horse, I'm planning to boycott Haddons for serving piss weak coffee. Unfortunatly they have some of the best muffins around. Perhaps I can just boycott the coffee and not the whole shop? Conditional activism?

I just found out (Crimson Editor)it has coloured syntax highlighting for apache conf files built in!

But I still have one more day of the forum to go, and I'm sure I'll have plenty to say about it when it's done.
I
n the meantime, I had some more ideas about blog stuff and have put it on the wiki

Animated gifs are a BAD idea when used as tiled wallpaper on the destop (try it and see. I dare you).

Not only are they extreamly annoying, but they are not good for performance

From the L’Orela web site…

BOSWELOX™ is extracted from the Boswelia plant. When combined with the mineral manganese, this innovative, patented phyto-complex helps smooth expression lines and wrinkles.

BOSWELOX™ achieves this effect by calming, soothing, and improving the micro-circulation of your skin — counterbalancing the natural facial-muscle micro-contractions that happen every time you make an expression, from a smile to a frown or any of the some 5000 expressions in between.

Rather than “freezing” your face BOSWELOX™ empowers you to keep expressing yourself without the side effects.

Wow! I never knew that by expressing myself, I was exposing myself to the risk of side effects. I’ll think twice before I smile again
Actualy this explains some of the news presenters on the commercial channels. (Except Sandra Sully. Speak no ill of Sandra).
But it’s such a cool word. Boswelox. It just rolls of the tounge. Boswelox. We are considering calling our next son Boswelox.

“Hi. My name’s Boswelox. But you can call me Box”

I like it.

One thing I wanted to do was write a self sorting linked list to manage the collection of car objects (just because I've never done one before).

First attempt saw the linked list up and running quite quickly. Then I tried to implement the sorting behaviour. I tried to make the list a doubly linked list but I ended up with code like…

if(this.data.compareTo(next.data)>0)
{
    next = previous;
    previous.next = next;
    next.previous=this;
 
    previous = previous.previous;
    …
}

And it just gets uglier from there.

So then I decided to do it as a singular circular linked list (that kinda rhymes).

But I can't get my head around the updating of the head and tail references. Also, it seems to me that the performance will suck big time. Items will have to keep percolating through the list each time they get added untill they find the right spot for themselves. (Items could only move up the list, not down, so they may have to traverse the entire list and start again at the bottom.)

Now my head hurts and it's only just past 8am on Sunday morning. (Thanks to my son who woke us up at 5am! How I love him.)

Does anyone else think it's funny how there is more “discussion” happening on the blogs than on the forum?

It's one of the things that I felt made .NET harder for me. There are just so many levels of abstraction between you and what's rely going on. ADO.NET in particular was like this. I know the datasets and datareaders are great classes that are supposed to make everything easy for you, but I spent most of my time trying to work out how to execute a simple query without having to use them. The app which I've been gradualy working on to help me with loggin helpdesk queries has frutrated me. I'm doing it in .NET just for the practice, but I swear that if I'd just done it in PHP it would have been up and running a long time ago.

I wanted to make a billy cart and only needed a couple of wheels, a plank and a bit of rope. But everytime I opened up the .NET box, a whole bloody car droped out!

It's now just gone 5pm and I've only now had the chance to hit the “post” button.

I've completely lost the thread of what I was ranting about, so if it ended a little abruptly, you know why.

And I never did get to talk about my identity crisis.

At 12:30 today there was a meeting for all the CSSE people in teh new Faculty. So I had to ask myself “am I a comp sci or Software Engineering person?” And I honestly don't know the answer.

I teach SD1 and SD2 which covers so many different courses. So which one do I belong to?

I just don't know!