Programming up a storm

Note: I just erased the whole thing I typed out, so I have to start this over again. It was much better the first time :(

I've spent a lot of time coding lately. It's probably because I want to procrastinate on my sociology assignment (read a book by final exam) and my philosophy assignment (write a 5-7 page paper on an "outside topic" in philosophy, and use a book as the source). Both of those are due in 2 weeks, so you might understand my want to procrastinate.

On Monday, I slept through my stats class (ya I know.. shame on me..) and decided to work on Fortress Forever. One thing lead to another, and I ended up working on it for about 10 hours writing code in c++ and using the tools and helping another team member get models into the game. One positive thing is I got a lot of stuff done. I guess I should hope so if I spent so much time on it :). The capture the flag rule set is completed and I got the sentry gun code to rotate 360 degrees, which is always a plus.

On Tuesday, I went to all of my classes and got home and chose to work on an addon for WoW for my guild to help distribute the items from bosses that we defeat in a more timely manner. This was my first decent-sized addon I made, so I decided to use the Ace framework to make it a bit simpler. The addon code is written in lua, so it's nice to learn all the intracicies of another programming language. Lua is pretty nice because it treats functions as a base level object so it makes some stuff a little clearer than when doing the same type of things in other languages.

On Wednesday, my alarm woke me up so I made it to my stats class on time and went to my job and mainly worked on a PHP script that imports the phone numbers from a daily report we get emailed to us. I wrote it a long time ago, and apparently it stopped working. In the past, this usually meant that the server that ran it every day forgot to do it, or something like that. In which case, I can just restart the service or turn the scheduled program back on which is simple to do. However, the mail server got upgraded or something (that's my best guess at least) and the format of the emails had changed. My strategy to get the data from the emails in the past had been to just blindly read the entire mail and grab the information I needed. However, the upgrade caused attachments to be encoded, so I actually needed to strip out the attachments from the email and read them properly. It was a pain to do, but I eventually figured out how to do that propery and I ended up making something pretty robust, so I was pretty proud of myself. Later that night when I got home, I did a bit of work on a side job in PHP which I had done some parsing stuff for as well. Tonight I worked on the user interface stuff for it and got a bit done.

Thursday, I actually decided to play some WoW with guild. We had some attendence problems early on, but we filled up a little bit towards the end. We had some good attempts at defeating the boss we were stuck on this week, but eventually we ran out of an item needed to beat him so we called it a night. Afterwards I remembered I had an assignment due for my computer science 139 class (operating systems), so I started that up. I had a lot of it already thought out in my head, so it was a simple matter of writing it out and getting it done... and remembering exactly how to compile shared objects in linux. I won't bore you with the details, but it took me longer to realize I was trying to fix something that wasn't broken, than to do the entire rest of the assignment. With that done, I submitted it via email and read some web pages and went to sleep.

Today was the exception though. I opened the fortress forever code up when I got home and poked around at it a little but didn't really do anything. I also opened up Eclipse and looked at the java code for the game programming class I'm in, but didn't get anything done there either. Afterwards, I signed onto wow and played a while. We were really having membership problems and after a few hours finally defeated a boss that we usually beat on the first or second try. We did it with 30 people, and we usually try to get 40. We were a bit demoralized (and the second boss is really difficult), so we decided to call it a night. I spent the rest of the night looking at web pages and such. I opened up the side job PHP stuff again and did a little bit of work, but not very much. I guess I was burnt out from doing so much coding during the rest of the week. If I had've worked on my game programming assignment, I could say I did significant work on projects in 5 different languages on 5 different days. Alas, I didn't, so I can't. I still did a lot of productive stuff, so I'm happy for that.

In other news, I found out that the next antweight robot event is in January at Andy's place in Marin. I'm looking forward to finishing the new version of my robot and eating the incredibly good food they have at the event. Hopefully I'll even do good in the tournament and not get my robot tore up like at the last event.