Oh The Cards

My four day weekend for Christmas went well this year. While most of it was spent running to family/social events, I did spend a lot of quality time sorting cards and making decks. Also bought a whole slew of cards for Bob and I last night. While I already thought of one thing I forgot to put on my list, this purchase will lead to yet more decks, which is happy.

My cards are almost entirely sorted at this point. I think I have about 400 more creatures to go through, which I will finish tonight. It already feels nice to be able to look in an exact spot to see if I have a card. I can still go through them by hand for ideas, but all of my deck building is done by computer searches anyway, so being able to locate cards quickly is really handy.

Tomorrow is another pay day, and this is the one devoted to clearing out the balance on my Chase card before the 0% interest period ends, so not much excitement to be had. I did get to revise my monthly savings goals upwards though, due to the increased saving I can do with my 0% until 2009 Citi card.

Of course, I might have to revise them back down again if I do splurge on that video card and monitor. I am thinking right now that I'll hold off for a bit until they come down in price. It's not like I am dying for a second monitor at home, since I have two at work, where I spend more of my time. I think I would like to achieve that eventually though. Maybe after I get down to Texas this summer.

ruby ftw

So today I got paid (at my Java job) to write Ruby. It was quite productive. Made massive improvements to my code generating stuff with Allan today. Solved numerous issues it was having and we nailed down several other bugs in the Java portion of the app dealing with date handling.

I probably should have written this thing in Java, since this place is supposedly a Java shop, and whoever gets the file after me might not know Ruby enough to be able to change it. Then again, Ruby is downright easy to understand and I kept the idioms simple. Actually, thats a lie now that I think about it. I do some things like using here documents, C style inline conditionals, parallel assignments, block passing, and map function abuse, but it's almost hard to write in Ruby without taking advantage of such sugar.

At least I resisted the desire to write a macro for this one thing that kept repeating. Figured no reason to get too crazy.

Tonight is dedicated to Lisping, as Tyler is coming over tomorrow to work on stuff. Hopefully tomorrow will be a likewise productive day.

The Best Programmer in the World

Read this rather insightful post from the ancient past (circa 2004) amusingly titled Why I'm The Best Programmer In The World by Jeff Atwood. It really spoke volumes about something I have been trying to put my finger on about my profession... and really his whole blog is really really insightful.

Not sure why I really post it here, as the 1.5 to 2 readers I have probably don't give a crap about programming, but I promise there is no code in that link, just good insight into the people that do it.

Today was a burn out day. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

Java's Worst Enemy

Just read this awesome post by Steve Yegge about code bloat. Be warned: his post is really really long. (But worth the time.)

It ends up turning into an anti-Java rant, but I am fine with that. I remember when Tyler and I wrote Satupoly in Java during EECS 448 and at the time it just seemed like the best programming language ever. It had a ton of libraries to do what we wanted, and was really well documented. The tools for it were all free.

I can't argue with the plethora of libraries, but looking back now, I am kind of ashamed to have liked it so much. I think the reason it worked so well for us is because we hadn't tasted the dynamic language syntactically-sugared kool-aid yet... and because we didn't bother to follow any design patterns (other than good old MVC).

It could also be that Java has just changed a lot over the years. This was 2003 after all. I look at the code in front of me at work, and just see miles of bloat. I have been spoiled by Ruby's method_missing, thanks to which I haven't had to write out a billion getters and setters in a long time. I'm really spoiled by dynamic typing, which just seems so much more flexible and less whiny to me than static typing is. Add to that my love of passing around anonymous functions as data (thanks a lot Scheme and Javascript!) and closures, and Java is really becoming tiresome.

It's just strange now, to view with such derision something I loved so much back then. It's not just the code for this project either. I have tried to refactor it and DRY it up, but it's just really hard to get much out of it. You have to have getters and setters. You have to have big constructors. You have to have silly Hibernate xml files and implement all the CRUD in a frenzy of copy and pasted methods. Just trying to push standardized CRUD down into an abstract base class was a nightmare. Where is my macro to build these methods and add them to the object on the fly? All this explicit casting is going to break my brain. Why do I have to use objects just to hold enumerable options to pass to yet other objects? It doesn't feel like coding anymore, it feels like trying to make a movie by assembling a puzzle for each frame on the reel.

I don't think any language is really objectively better than another, let alone that one of them is the best. I do, however, think that, subjectively, Java is really excruciating... for me.

Oh, and I failed last night on doing something not-behind-the-scenes. I did however hack together a really neat HAML plugin that I hope to show off once I add some more features. It literally made my night when it worked.

Endless Coding

Yeah, I program a lot.

Today I had some fun in Javascript, generated Java with Ruby, and refactored Java code itself. I must say, I have always enjoyed programming in general, but this daily mishmash of several languages is the greatest mental workout in the world. It's not necessarily hard so much... it's just very mentally stimulating.

Tonight I get to go home and work more with Ruby and Javascript. Not entirely sure which feature I will choose to tackle on my list, but I'd like it to be something that isn't entirely behind-the-scenes for once. Last night's feature of choice was a Firefox search plugin, which is only semi-behind-the-scenes.

I have been moderately annoyed by haml too. It's really hard to write a decent block of javascript inside a haml template because it keeps wanting to interpret it (or the indentation). I have an idea though, which I am going to try tonight. I'll have to get back to you on whether it works. I really hope it does, as it would massively clean up my code. (Very massively. Yes, very.)

Anyway, it's about time to get out of here.

Limitless Potential

I must say, the fan remixes (called Limitless Potential) of Year Zero might be even better than Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D (the official remixes). I'm particularly in love with Capital G (Streetlab Mix).

Tomorrow is payday, and this payday is even better than most, because it all goes into savings. That means I am now only $9000 short of my goal. Unfortunately, this is the last time I'll get to save anything for about a month, as the next paycheck is dedicated to rent and my Chase card. Oh well, I should just barely make my end of the year goal.

Speaking of paychecks, I did a dangerous thing the other day. While I definitely plan on having a summer vacation this year, I figured up that if I had a least a token job next fall (couple days a week at Borders ftw), I could stretch my underemployed-become-the-best-programmer-ever period for well over a year and a half. At that point, I hope to either have hit a home run with one of my projects, or be back in grad school charging into that PhD mire. Either way, that means this might be my last cubicle job for a long time.

I could definitely live with that.

Ice Storm

So the supposedly world-ending ice storm didn't really pan out. It basically got just icy enough to make the trees look cool and the sidewalk slippery. I'm kind of disappointed. Who doesn't like a couple days of simulated apocalypse?

Man I miss my coke. On the other hand, Ceylon Tea is the win.

So I have been utterly worthless these last three days or so. Haven't really done anything, productive or not. Last night I came home and fell asleep at 8. The night before I wasted on a few games of dota and who knows what else. Sunday I just didn't feel like doing anything. Thankfully I woke up at 2pm that day, so there wasn't too much time to waste doing nothing. In my defense, the reason I woke up at 2 was because I stayed up until 9am working on Lorebroker.

Hopefully tonight I'll feel a little more useful.

Quote

For some reason this quote really struck me. Maybe it won't have the same effect for you out of context, but I think it's insightful.

"[A]ll human systems are gamed, for reasons rooted deeply in psychology, and great skill is displayed in the gaming because game theory has so much potential. That's what's wrong with the workman's comp system in California. Gaming has been raised to an art form. In the course of gaming the system, people learn to be crooked. Is this good for civilization? Is it good for economic performance? Hell no. The people who design easily–gameable systems belong in the lowest circle of hell." - Charlie Munger

Wonder how he feels about politicians?

Nieve!

(That means 'Snow!')

So I knew that we would have some crappy weather this weekend, but I definitely didn't expect Mother Nature to lead off with snow. While I generally hate all cold weather (anything below 80 is cold), I couldn't help but enjoy the snow while walking to lunch. But I think that was mostly because the whole visual experience meshed really well with disc 2 of And All That Could Have Been.

I tried to get to sleep at a decent time last night, because I was supposed to have a meeting this morning at 9am and I wanted to actually get here on time. Unfortunately I couldn't actually sleep and ended up working on Lorebroker again until 1am. I didn't accomplish anything in the way of new features, but I got the three Urza sets loaded into the database. The apostrophe in their names had led to failure in the past, only I had never noticed.

I also wrote a script to normalize the card types into three separate fields (supertype, type, and subtype). While I got that done, I didn't get anything changed to take advantage of them, so didn't bother uploading it. In the process I learned that disabling ferret index updating when doing mass db manipulation like that can cut update time by a factor of 10. (Enough so that it's worth disabling and just doing a complete index rebuild.)

Between work and Lorebroker I am programming about 16 hours a day. Granted, it's not like I am furiously churning out code that whole time (a surprisingly large part of my day is spent staring at a legal pad and thinking out my next move), but I am definitely in a chair the whole time. It's amazing how my legs feel tired after sitting so much. I definitely can't wait till spring semester so I can go work out at the Rec Center after work. Now that the project with Tyler is starting up, I'll be working on three big things and writing in seven different languages (if you count html, css, and sql as 'languages' ... which might be a bit of a stretch).

Oh well. After spending several years being a worthless bum, it's nice to exercise the mind a bit again.

Strange Night

Last night was strange, but generally good.

I got home and sorted my green creatures. (Yeah, I still haven't finished the sorting. All those new cards I bought distracted me.) Then watched a bit of TV. Then started working on some ideas I had for the jQuery UI Dialog library I am using. After submitting two patches to them, it was 12:30 and time for bed.

The strange part was how incredibly awake I was. It took me quite a while to fall asleep (probably 20 mins, versus the normal instant-I-hit-the-pillow), and I woke up probably every 30 mins all night. And not just that quasi-alert-then-back-asleep type of waking... I'm talking full awareness.

Most of it was probably the wind, which was blowing at a steady 35mph and gusting to 50mph all night. Our bedroom is on the northwest corner of the apartment, which is exactly the direction from which the wind was blowing. It was loud and the lid on the bathroom fan exhaust kept clanging. At about 4:30am it got so loud that I went to check the weather, just in case we had some kind of freak unheard-of December tornado.

Of course, being so awake at 4:30am led to me working on Lorebroker a bit more, but I managed to pull away after only 40 mins. The rest of the night (all three hours of it) was equally wakeful.

The really weird part is how rested I feel. I haven't had coffee in two days and I just feel very alert. It's kind of nice.

jQuery is fun

So I spent a deliciously nerdy weekend working with jQuery and the new jRails plugin that transparently inserts it in place of Prototype/Scriptaculous. The framework itself is much smaller (by about half), and it is a dream to write in, since the syntax is downright simple. It actually kind of reminds me of my original love of Scheme. I just have a thing for simple (yet flexible and powerful) syntax. It looks nice, and just Feels Right™.

The UI elements show particular promise, but seem to have a ways to go. For one, the release versions are way behind the latest development versions, and the dev versions are definitely what the demos on the jQuery UI site uses. This is only really a problem because the dev versions aren't packaged for you, so you have to run around grabbing files if you want to use them. There is also enough difference between the release and dev versions that the docs (which are up with dev versions) are often unhelpful if you are trying to use the release code.

Whew. So basically I learned to just go find the bleeding edge stuff, and ignore the 1.0 code.

There also seem to be a lot of IE related issues. When I tried to open Lorebroker using IE7, I got some strange Operation Aborted error, with basically no graceful failure from which I can debug. It literally acts like the website is down or something. Not entirely sure how to tackle that, short of just giving IE the finger and ignoring it for now. Why can't Microsoft make anything work?

In work related news, I was thinking about the overall goal of this project we are working on, and it seems like we'd save an awful lot of time just using Rails for it. They made it pretty clear to me that they are a Java shop though, so not much hope for that. However, today as I was pondering, I remembered our early efforts to make a page builder at my last job. This project would be much simpler to do, and there is no need to get fancy and make a meta-circular editor, so I think I might work on writing a bit of code generation stuff to automate a lot of what I am doing. Any reduction of copy and paste would be swell.

That has been an ongoing process all week (reduction of copy and paste). I have always been against anything that felt kludgy, and copying and pasting code so you can change class names and database columns seems kludgy to the max. I've already abstracted a bunch of the DAO operations and shortened a few other files, but when it comes to the xsl files, they really need to be generated. Thankfully, they are fairly simple, so I have lots of hope for easy success.

I tell you what... I really miss macros right now. Darn Java.