Make me waste 45 minutes to do 10 minutes of work when I’m trying to get everything sorted *promptly*, in order to minimise the number of things that can go wrong tomorrow.
That and generating a splitting headache in the process.
An orange in an apple orchard
Make me waste 45 minutes to do 10 minutes of work when I’m trying to get everything sorted *promptly*, in order to minimise the number of things that can go wrong tomorrow.
That and generating a splitting headache in the process.
I’m thinking about writing a short/moderate length survival guide for Left 4 Dead 2. Haven’t been playing much of anything lately, but after like 60 hours into the game, I’ve become extremely competent at it. When I do play, I’m still a lethally proficent team member.
Unlike some people, I also have a rather strong aversion to leaving fallen teammates behind, except for bots, hehe. That means I can drop more than my fair share of zombies in a hurry!
Stopped off at the library to return last weeks book (one of Shakespeare’s comedies), and checked out two more: one on sewing and one on fishing. The latter, obviously because I haven’t gone fishing in years and years! The former, both because I’ve always been interested in how things are sewn by hand, and because I’ve had an interesting idea.
Since I’m now ‘issued’ my mothers cell phone whenever I’m out without her (if I wanted a chaperone in the car, I would go courting, not driving around), it would be easier to carry if my jeans had leg pockets instead of the usual waist pockets. Some what like a pair of military trousers have, well American ones anyway. Possessing both a frugal mind and an engineers heart, of course rather than buy new pants meeting that criteria, my first query is to figure out whether it’s practical to use some old jeans for raw materials and graft such pockets onto the pairs I use, lol. I know I can figure out enough to do such a thing eventually, the question is how to do it properly by hand with the material involved. Having to answer my mothers “Where the **** are you?” call today while I was sitting in traffic at a red light, is a prime example of why such a modification is worth scouting out. I would likely be cussed at if I don’t answer, even if it’s not easily fished out of a waste pocket when you’re behind a wheel, let along that I refuse to chatter on a cell phone while actively driving. Period. Whenever my mother’s involved, you can bet it is a lose, lose situation for me o/.
My main interest for the day however was checking out a certain fishing spot. I found 4 points of interest. One is within 15km of here, another (but very costly) one is about 65km away. Been there before, years ago. The other two are Georgia state parks, on the other flank (approx 20~30km SE of) Atlanta that it would never get past HRP. I purposely avoid locations near Atlanta because of her paranoia. The other is almost a good 100km to the south of here.
Today I wanted to check out the nearest one, since it’s located between the city limits and a neighbouring town. Someday I would like to check out that park to the south and go exploring, as well as see how it is on the fishing pier. Being in the opposite direction from Atlanta is a plus for getting permission to use the car, the downside is it’s far enough that I’ll need to buy gas to replace what’s used on such a trip—I’m not the kind to leave her with next to nil gas. I am the reasonable one here…
Since just getting use of the car for the afternoon was an argument of it’s own! I was so preoccupied over whether it would be a driving or a walking mission, that I didn’t have time to plan the trip properly; so I ended up getting lost instead of finding my destination. To make it worse the gas station didn’t have any Twinkies! For some reason watching Tallahassee’s quest for the snacks throughout Zombieland has got twinkies on my brain for the first time in years :-/. Since it was my fault for not mapping it out, I replaced the petrol wasted and filled the tank while I was at it. Never mind that I would’ve planned correctly if I would not have to push just to get that far.
Personally I hate highway travel. The higher speeds burn gas much faster than local travel speeds (it’s an old ford) and the windows need to be shut or fuel efficiency suffers even more; ma also has a standing (near 20 year long) order that the A/C is not to be used. Never mind that at GA highway speeds, it’s actually the most budget friendly way not to drive in a ’93 oven and arrive feeling like a drenched goat.
Spent some time exploring the local sporting goods store: despite what some have said, it actually has very good prices. My main interests being to grep the huntin’ fishing sector, and conclude some other ‘research’ on the way out. I expect what tackle I have stored will do, and my rod/wheel seems to be viable despite it’s lack of use; but it is always best to be prepared just in case. Some how all that trip through the tackle only served to make me hungry, as odd as that sounds. Maybe I’m part fish? lol.
My research there was more aimed at biking than fishing. Where as most of yesterday was spent on the fish and work situations: last night I took some time to check through the stores online portal. The local shop prices own their online listings. Seems the best choice in this berg too. More specificly my poi was in cycle, helmet, hydration, plus a few associated odds and ends. Can’t know what the operating range is, but biking should be sufficient for my needs. Heck if I can walk like 30 klicks by foot and not get a heart attack, it shouldn’t be hard to do a few miles worth of peddlin’ a bicycle. An occasional snack bar and some water is cheaper than petrol anyway.
It would obviously be some what of a problem that I never learned to ride a bike growing up, kinda the apartment dwellers curse (no bikes, boards, skates, or anything else fun allowed). For the cost of human fuel and getting some much needed cardio-exercise, I’m not above breaking my neck in the figuring-it-out-the-hard-way, as there isn’t any ‘ideal’ places to pactice. Economy matters. For what the future holds, I would consider the massive price gaps between bicycle, motorcycle, and automobile, strongly in favour of building muscle. You need a driver’s license to get around in this freaking country, but you do not necessarily need a car to get around in. It’s a wonder people don’t drink bath water more often; it’s become that stupid in America. I’m fully open to alternatives to driving, even if it’s likely to generate a few bruises.
That however is quite a fair ways off, it will take some measure of saving to afford that kind of kit anyway plans are sliced. It’ll probably be one of the first things on my private list to fall, once I’ve got a steady income to work with that is. How far way reaching that point in time will be, however is largely at the bitch on wheels’ mercy: because I’m not willing to work (locally or anywhere else in Georgia) unless it is proven, that I will have sufficient freedom with the car to be able to hold down a job without being screwed. It’s the principal of the matter. You don’t want to argue principals with a programmer, not even a totalitarian can win that debate. With a track record that can only breed my distrust, and the difference between road (35-55mph) travel speeds and foot (~3mph) travel speeds, even within comfortable walking distance: whether it’s pissing distance or long distance to get to work or anywhere else, I am not willing to be constrained—especially not by my mothers pathological paranoias: and the only way to ensure that (she) doesn’t come back to bite, is of course not having to rely on access to my mothers otherwise stationary vehicle. Reducing her costs would be one of the points of having a job anyway, including getting my own means of transport in the long haul. Which is obviously necessary for my long term plans.
Before heading home, I hit Walrus Country to search the sporting goods section in like wise fashion, and pick up a fishing license on my way out. Also had to pick something up that ma wanted. She almost owes me more money now than I have saved in my chequeing account lol. Fishing licenses are only needed off private property, but it’s worth having! Stopped off on the way home at another gas station in hopes of finding a Twinkie but had to settle for a LD mini coffee cake and strawberry roll :-(.
Seriously, someone must have gotten to people about cholesterol or something. What kind of world are we living in when gas stations stop selling twinkies!!!!
Somehow I find it highly offensive, that I can’t even go for a walk without being driven nuts; yet my mother is perfectly willing to enlist me to check on racket outside, instead of moving herself 8=).
What next, a lock and key?
To tired to focus on code at the moment, yet much to awake to sleep o/. Been tinkering with an old project: tpsh. Mostly I’ve been polishing the codebase and doing a bit of refactoring; there’s no a debug mode, which reduces some of the cruft that’s crept in from testing. Sometime I also need to import the test scripts lol.
One of the changes, is adding support for running off the Strawberry Perl distribution rather than ActiveStates Perl distrio for Windows. The downside is, most of tpsh biggest problems have to do with Perls portability, namely Windows quirks. Gotta love’em.
Since the merge of the “Code generator”, tpsh has supported a very limited subset of sh script. Not very usefully however, since the shell doesn’t have a real concept of $? yet. Likewise there needs to be some changes in the handling of environment variables. Most ideal IMHO, is a tied hash wrapping $ENV (a magicly tied hash of environment variables) with the ability to hook reads and writes, etc. Preferably in a user-exposabe way that can be extended by shell functions, rather than being limited to the scripts own Perl code.
It’s the more general case however, of having to build up the language rather than use its building blocks. The problemo isn’t in maintainability, but in portability and development time.
Having reactored a chunk of the shells initialization code, I know that I’ll have to retackle the readline stuff. To say that I hate Term::ReadLine would be an understatement. I’ve no love for the GNU Readline API either (I would use linenoise), but the GRL C API isn’t as nasty in practice as the plugable Term::ReadLine system Perl uses. The only good thing I can say is that there is a semi-useless stub version included. Licensing issues of just having a GRL backend aside >_>. In my experience, mileage varies quite a lot between Perl readline pacakges, even within the scope of the fscking manual. It’s just a load of crap.
Actually if there’s a way of accessing the API functions needed for unix termios / windows console, I would be tempted to throw out the fucking thing and just write a Term::ReadLine::SANE module based on linenoise (A C library). I’m more familiar with the unix parts of that.
There is just something so cool about employing fire and manoeuvre techniques against a horde of zombies, and on the fly to boot.
How do you survive? Team up, nut up, and shoot’em up!
Some how I could swear, the closer proximity I have to family, the worse my existence is.
Having thought of tasks and storage formats, it’s now time to figure out an implementation language, i.e. what programming langauge am I going to write the task manager in.
O.K. based on what we’ve got so far, it is easy to infer the following is worth having:
I’m not very interested in compiling SQLite in C/C++ on Windows, or the CLI binding everywhere. So this effectively makes the choice Perl, Python, or Ruby. Out of those three, none is perfect either: perl doesn’t come with the required database code, it just has the definitive interface for databases everybody mimics. Python and Ruby on the other hand, come with SQLite bindings—which many distributions separate out into separate packages. It’s just a lose, lose situation when you think about dependencies, but it does beat writing your own everything for every program. Sometimes. Setup with these three dynamic languages would be easy though, in so far as we’ve gotten with the above.
Time handling is another issue. Perl has fairly minimalist handling of time built in, but on the upside, if you need it, it’s probably three abreast on CPAN. Time::Format and the core Time::Piece module each come to mind. What isn’t built into Perl, often comes with it or can be added to it. Ruby provides a simple but effective Time class, that makes for more natural code than you may expect. More complex operations will require Googling for a Ruby gem, or hand coding it on demand. Python on the other hand provides a comprehensive datetime module, and supporting time and calendar modules, all out of the box! I would say Python takes the lead here.
Rule one of getting work done: know how to leverage libraries.
In terms of programming languages, Perl, Ruby, and Python are generally equal enough for most tasks, so long as you don’t shoot yourself in the foot. Some subtle differences that personally irk me:
Because of how many lines of code I’ve done in Python over the years, I am more familiar with it’s set of “Irks” than Ruby’s, like wise I know Sh, C, and Perl more intimately than other languages, so I really know their irks. For perl, it’s mostly thin things that get in inconvenient when combing the warnings pragmata with the nature of perl syntax. They spiritually conflict at times. Under Ruby, I mostly find gripes that have a bigger place in programmer culture. My issues with Python generally have to do with trade-offs that I disagree with as a matter of my convenience, even if it usually results in a Good Thing overall. It comes from a C-oriented background meshed with a love for the Perl programming language.
This is a fact: you will always be irked by your programming language, if you use it enough. What can I say, nothing is perfect. Shoot!
For this particular application, there’s some things worth noting also: language portability. If the machine doesn’t run perl, it’s not a real computer. Most systems you’re likely to care about will run Ruby and Python, and there’s probably a crusty old version of Python for those you don’t (nor directly should). In contrast however, Perl is often a lower level of “Cross platform” behaviour than Ruby/Python. You’ll find this highlighted well in the Camel book. One reason I use Python frequently, it always behaves as expected without so many subtle hiccups.
How much this pertains to the current matter, i.e. implementing STAMAN. Perl is the most universally available language, and I’m more prone to need such a feature than most people. A plus over Ruby is no crappy 1.8.x/1.9.x porting issues…! Of course however, I have a camel to ask about minor details, hehe. In my experience the Python 2k/3k thing is less issue than Ruby’s for writing code yourself, more of an issue in leveraging existing code.
So I reckon, that means Perl or Ruby is best called for here. I exclude Python, because I just use the frick’n thing to often.