indicating what the purpose of the code in the file is, piss me off.
That is all.
(Seriously, NONE of these files have ANY indication of what they are. They are named OK I guess, but it still is annoying not ever being 100% sure of what some code's purpose in life is...)
I am taking this Programming Competitions Preparations class. The problems are all horribly unrealistic and not represenative of Software Engineering at all, but then again, they are not really meant to be.
Problems are solved in a two hour period in a team, typically of 3-5 students.
Well, my team realized that today's problem could be easily solved if we plotted points on a grid.
Hmm, lets see now. The largest a coordinate can be is 40,000. Ok simple, declare a 40,000 X 40,000 array of booleans.
Oh, too large for the stack, ok, declare it on the heap.
Umm, hey why is this taking so long.
Wait, what is 40k * 40k again? Oh crap.
Just for laughs, open up Task Manager and hit "Run", watch the VM usage go up to 1.90GB. Hey, look, I can see principles from my Operating Systems class in action! Awesome!
Hey, wait, did Windows just swap everything out to disk? Wow, everything is taking awhile to get back in order.
So, who here can quickly implement a sparse matrix?
To be fair, such stupidities only occure because there is a hard time limit. Normally I would never hard code in an array of anything near that size. Indeed, I do not know of any students here who would ever hard code in an array and say "That should be enough".
Every time the debugger jumps in on a break point, focus has changed! Doh!
A simple implementation of tags!
I'd link to it, but it is on a non-routable box, I should have it up on a routable machine tomorrow[1].
Using Ruby this time. I now have a distain for Ruby, mostly because finding resources about it online is almost impossible.
I didn't use, just straight eruby (most often implemented as mod_ruby) with the CGI module used to get form data.
Oh, how Ruby handles file upload in forms is the most immensely stupid thing I have seen in awhile, and a damn good argument AGAINST dynamic typing. The type returned DEPENDS on the size of the data that was uploaded.
Data set is populated from CuteOverload.
[1] I was about to paste in the local host address when the duh factor hit me.
Ever had to find your way around a huge college campus? How about ever been late for a class or meeting on a regular?
AJAX to the rescue!
WWU Route Finder is a proof of concept of an AJAX map using Canvas and Python. Click two buildings, and the Python back end, accessed using XMLHTTPRequest of course, shows you the shortest path between your start and destination.
The biggest advantage is that the Python back end can access a highly optimized Graphing library and potentially support real time processing of hundreds of thousands of nodes, taking advantage of the server hardware and not relying upon the performance of a browser's Javascript engine.
Paypal just took over a week to send a payment.
Mailing a check takes less time.
W-T-F.
Isn't Paypal supposed to be almost instant? Is that not the very PURPOSE of Paypal?
Oh, in other news, I saw the most awesome digital camera on eBay (Not what I used Paypal for though
3 megapixel (plastic lens, probably resolves to 1.2 if your lucky
512k of memory built in.
DDD,
in fact,
does not suck.
Oh well, it DOES suck, just not in the way I previously thought. The UI was beat with the ugly stick, but the darn thing is FLEXIBLE.
Bleh. Why should I expect flexibility from MS anyway?
Of course a 3 element array, in debug, gets displayed as follows by VS:
{Dimensions:[3]}
1
3
5
*Goes off looking for whatever idiot implemented this*
Real debuggers let me customize how my data is displayed damnit! I wouldn't have used a small array of test values if I wasn't expecting for, you know, A GOOD LOOKING OUTPUT.
Is this really the only debug window in VS? I have never needed to analyze anything more complicated than simple arrays in VS before....
DDD, I grok you now, come back!
edit: Oh crap, the VS debugger does not even highlight in red the array element that has been changed when the array is expanded out.
w-t-f.
I want to show the array row by row in debug.
Does MS's debugger support this for the nifty arrays? NO
Does
mat[0,]
work?
NO.
Why not?
Someone forgot to implement it.
This, naturally enough, is the problem with syntactic sugar. It has to be sweet all the way through, or else you reach a sour center. Non-orthogonality may seem nice at the outset, but it almost always bites ya in the butt later on.
C# again. Being able to go b[i,j], while being horrible for readability, sure is nice.
As an side, I *KNOW* for sure that my code is never-ever-ever going to be touched again, so I am using mathematicians notation, which involves all one letter variable names, which normally hate. ^_^
For all you whiners and complainers, this is a how to of how to SHUTUP and start fixing things.
Problems:
Solutions:
Amongst the Circle, a good number of us have mod points at any one point in time. If we uniformly post links to idiots who are wrong, we can spread the word: Stupidity is NOT rewarded.
In closing, I would like to say that
Yesterday, I saw a user who's signature line was "Be a patriot, shoot a republican."
That line would get a user banned from ANY other form on the web. I have been banned from forums for saying far less incendiary things than that! On
Don't leave, fix it. You see stupidity, slap it around a bit. Noobs always come, don't let them overrun the place, just slap them around a bit until they get the idea of how to behave.
It sucks.
Desk jobs suck.
I hate studying because studying involves sitting down. Study sessions that involve getting up and moving are a lot more fun.
Beanbags make life better because at least I can pretend I am not sitting down...
Apparently companies pay large sums of money to purchase (or use the services of) resume submission systems that all SUCK.
IBM's[1] strips out ALL newlines, even from plain text. Even resumes generated through their own resume builder look horrible.
PDF, Word, ok, maybe I can understand not supporting. But not even supporting plain text is a huge WTF...
I spend hours making my resume look perfect, and these resume submission sites do their best to mess it up!
[1] Not IBM's fault per say, just Taleo or PeopleClick or whoever it is that they use.
Dear Western Washington University:
Thank you for the wonderful education. Your focus on professors who love to teach works wonderfully.
What the hell is up with your career fairs? THEY SUCK. THEY COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY SUCK.
You do not even HAVE a high tech career fair. Redfin does not come. Expedia came ONCE last year and apparently decided that we suck so much not to bother coming again[1]. MS comes, thankfully. Boeing is actually doing technical recruiting this year up here (thanks in part to the 3 WWU engineering and CS[2] students who where interns down there last summer, woohoo!), but NOBODY ELSE IS COMING.
UW has an ENTIRE science and technology career fair. We have 3 companies. W-T-F. The incompetence is amazing.
This would be slightly understandable, except that EVERY company who I have discussed our curriculum with has loved it. Why? Well here is a brief overview:
Oh and I have not yet even mentioned Java RMI, Java Beans, SQL, PHP, Perl, C#, C, and C++.
For kicks, we also do 3 quarters in Ada95. So yah, we can write stuff under B&D scenarios as well.
[1]Granted this is because the recruitor was a fool who only interviewed people who had "SQL" on their resume, we are CS, we can learn SQL in 10 seconds, and whatever we learn in school is only worth 10 seconds of book reading anyway!. He ended up interviewing all the departments really nice students, but NONE of our top students. Bleck!
[2] The CS dude would be me.
This is weird.
I see a screw next to where my laptop is sitting. Pick it up, flush Phillips screw, looks like it goes to something digital.
A worry nags me.
Flip laptop over, sure enough, there is a screw missing. I replace it. Go with a screw driver and tighten the other screws, only to notice, almost half of the screws on the bottom of my laptop are gone!
This is utterly bizarre.
It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.
