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. :-D

[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 :) ), MP3 player, e-book reader, voice recorder, and digital camcorder.

512k of memory built in. :-p fits 2GB SD cards, hmm, for all that stuff, should have dual SD card slots, heh.

W-T-F

Will not fix?

SPACES IN DIRECTORY NAMES IS A WILL NOT FIX?

WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH SUN.

So, I've just been giving mod points, and there are some new categories I'd like to propose:

-1, bad analogy
-1, overly cynical
-1, you think you're funny, but you're not
-1, unnecessarily mean

+1, nuanced
+1, attempting to see things from another person's point of view
+1, acknowledging your own mistake

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:

1. Too many ignorant people who don't know what they are talking about poke into technical discussions on the front page.
2. The circle (jerk) has gotten too calm.

Solutions:

1. Wield the -1 moderations like a clue-by-4. If someone says something that is wrong, DOWN MOD THEM. If you lack moderation points at the time, YELL AT THEM. I remember when I first came on /., I was hardly said damn nearly anything, for fear of getting down modded AND flamed if I was wrong. Bring that attitude back to the .!

   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.

2. Stop being so nice to everyone! If you are going to say something that will piss someone off, so be it!

3. In closing, I would like to say that /. has a level of free speech that does not exist in ANY other online community. This is best exemplified by how hard it is to get banned from /.

   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 /., no one even bats an eye, no one flames him over his sig, and no one posts angry retorts. /. has that feeling. NO ONE ELSE DOES. Even SA has stricter rules than /. does.

   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.

So, a friend of mine is opening her business tomorrow at the upscale swanky Shops at Briargate (other businesses in the "mall" include Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, Eddie Bauer, Coldwater Creek, Sharper Image, etc.) and I just finished uploading her website. No, you may not see it, as it is ... sigh. Let me set the stage.

First, she wants me to use iWeb, which my lappy nor Ben's mini came with, and we go through the whole order-deliver-install thing. I start using it, and want to shoot someone. I tear at my clothing, grit my teeth, and do a passable job using the damned thing, and voila (not wallah, people, really, omg, i'm going to strangle the next person who posts "wallah, my thing that I was knitting is done" ... but I digress) I've got a couple of pages of stuff to post.

I have no descriptions of what things are, but I have some idea of what SOME things are because we had them in our house and photographed them. I have NO clue what the model at her Denver photo shoot is wearing, nor how to describe them, and I got those LAST NIGHT, and the frickin' grand opening is TOMORROW.

So, I asked (sometime last week) for the user/pass to upload the *&(*$@#^&* that iWeb spits out, and got that, yes, LAST NIGHT. But not really. I got some sort of "Account Executive" privilages to the site, but can't figure out for the life of me how to actually PUT DATA to the frickin' thing. She gave me her credentials this morning (which have nothing to do with any sort of user/pass anywhere else), and we'll figure the damned thing out later.

Sigh. So, I put some of her 'model shoot' pix into the site while I tried to figure out what the hell was going on with the "account executive" shit and really, iWeb generates probably the worst code and worst data structure I've seen in a while... but then again, the last WYSIWYG HTML editor I used was FrontPage, EONS ago, so there's my comparison. Actually, I used DreamWeaver once, and remember it being somewhat awful, but this was before Y2k, and I've generally done everything by hand since.

I'm going to be using one of my weekend days rebuilding the site in GoLive, tagging the things that she should be able to change easily (products, featured products, front page photos, etc.), and giving her the "client version". This will let me do things like ... have VARIABLE length/width pages with variable block lengths. It will let me create a BLANK FUCKING PAGE WITHOUT HAVING TO HAVE A TEMPLATE. Even iWeb's "blank" pages have shit on them. It makes me want to scream.

I uploaded all eleventyhundred subdirectories this morning, and the site's up and more or less usable, but with iWeb's directory within a directory structure, its fixed size everythings, and pictures as backgrounds to its fixed-size blocks of text and crap. I understand wanting to have a fixed size whatever due to css concerns, but damnit if I don't want to shoot someone after trying to figure out why the fricking page won't scroll, and my data's being cut off. After finding the Inspector, I was more or less ok with it, but still am relishing being able to dump iWeb into the trash can, and hearing the paper-crinkle of its bits being "recycled".

Stupid iWeb. Stupid Hosting people. Stupid Fetch (which I thought I still had a few days of trial left, but had to buy so I could post). Stupid friend not giving me enough data to actually work with.

I'm going to work out now; my frustrat-o-meter's getting too high. I think an hour of walking nowhere, uphill, both ways, will let me go to work without wanting to kill my co-workers the second I see them.

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:

• Unit testing based grading of assignments. %50-%60 of the assignments grade is based upon unit test results
• Software engineering. Including Extreme Programing, and Agile.
• Software Testing. JUnit, Python testing scripts.
• POSIX, WIN32, and .NET
• Cross platform network code.
• Almost EVERY professor grades on code readability as well as functionality.
• Every single class is fully taught by a Professors for the full amount of credit hours, NOT by TAs.

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.

Who see fit to give homework on Tuesday, a midterm on Thursday, and have the homework due the next Tuesday.

And who don't lecture at all about the homework.

Or give examples on the HW sheet of a worked out problem.

And who think that 2 programming assignments in 4 days (Friday + Saturday + Sunday + Monday) with GUIs is appropriate.

Because, no, it is not.

If things had been gone over in class, sure, maybe.

If the professor ANSWERED his email, maybe. He told us at the beginning of the quarter "Don't bother emailing me, I don' reply".

Oh and he isn't available on Monday to ask questions of. Only on Tuesday, by which it is too late.

WTF..

And for the record: sign errors suck. Right along with coordinate transformations.