ibbie's Xanga

Random nerdy food for thought.

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 01:19:45 GMT

I've been thinking - a lot - lately about how few programmers actually take the time to learn how their language of choice works. I mean, it's understandable for those using languages (*cough* Visual Basic *cough*) that don't have their own source code available.

But really, those are rare. C? Crap, there are a billion implementations available, for free. Easily downloaded and perused. Same with C++. Python, Perl, PHP, Java, or Ruby? They're open source, too.

This probably makes me sound like an elitist bastard. That's ok - I am one. But I honestly wonder how someone can claim, "Hey, I know how to code in *blah*" without having actually read the source of it, to see how and what's happening.

Documentation is great. It's grand. But it's often only telling half of the story, if that much.

Attention Knoxville area: Battle of the Bands @ Catalyst

Sat, 16 May 2009 03:24:54 GMT

Battle of the bands finals are this Saturday at 2pm at the Catalyst in Knoxville. Our own Mercury Griffin will be there with the rest of HateSickLive. They sound pretty wicked - and hell, the drinks are pretty cheap, so they'll sound even better - so come on and show some support.

This is a hate inspired rant that you might want to skip if you're the sensitive type.

Sun, 10 May 2009 07:03:16 GMT

It's pretty hilarious, when you look at it the right way. I've been going from one gigantic leap to another, and not surprisingly, each time things have deteriorated to the point where I can't stand it anymore. It always starts out wonderful; it always takes some time to see what sort of putrefied, infectious piece of shit the situation really is.

Suffice it to say that there are a specific group of people that I would be extraordinarily happy if they were to be drowned in a viscous mixture of their own blood, piss, shit, and vomit, only to be saved at the last moment, allowed to recover some semblance of awareness and sanity, be shown a video of the event in question, and then be dunked right the fuck back in to finish the job. Then, well, holy fuck it'll have to go on youtube, at least until it's taken down.

But hey, I'm not the vindictive sort. Nah. Not at all. Not even when someone takes something that I love and adore - say, a set of commonly recognized, intelligent ideas - and mutilates it beyond all recognition. Nope, not me. Not vindictive. Not at all.

Here's to you, Rollins. You were right. The iron never fucking lies. Two hundred pounds, why yes, it's two hundred pounds. If only people could be so god damned correct. They're simple, alright, but damn, they're so not correct.

End rant.

"The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best — and therefore never scrutinize or question." — Stephen Jay Gould

uh oh

Sat, 09 May 2009 02:27:25 GMT

Our ab and back machine suffered from a meltdown. Specifically, one of the welds broke, and the metal was torn pretty badly. We'd been using the hell out of it, so unfortunately that's not surprising. Bear managed to fix and reinforce it, as she used her powers of unbelievable awesomeness on it - plus a couple of blood sacrifices - so we're good to go for now. I won't be able to use it on maximum resistance, but hey, I'm not complaining. I'll just have to do a hundred more reps to get the proper burn.

I'm using the weight vest again for push ups. Started back at 20 extra pounds to give my joints a chance to acclimate. I'll be using it at that weight for stances soon enough.

Continuing seeing progress with stretching. I'm almost more flexible (hah) than I was before I got out of shape. My tendons tend to the steel cable variety so that's pretty amazing for me. I still need to work a crapload on back flexibility, but the legs, they're getting better.

I hit 30 mph on 4th resistance, actually a little bit over but I'm only counting whole numbers.

That's about it.

Poco

Thu, 07 May 2009 00:27:04 GMT

Lately I've been thinking that while Python's got its standard bag of goodies, as does Java, PHP, Perl, and C#, C++ has been missing out on a lot of love from the community. Granted, it has the Standard Template Library, and that's great for what it is, but after using the higher level languages so much, it felt like something was missing.

However, thanks to some judicious digging around, I've found that there's a spiffy library (set of libraries, really) out there called Poco. It's basically attempting to be a treasure chest of things any programmer will have to deal with (database access, socket handling, configuration file parsing, et al), and providing a pretty nice interface for it. Whereas Boost provides handy idioms and tools to build the tools you need for an application, this is more along the lines of "inherit, override, compile, and go!".

Kind of like Python or PHP, really. (:

progress? finally

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 04:41:28 GMT

Closing in on 30 mph with level three resistance. I'll be increasing the resistance soon - which of course will drop the numbers for a little while, but damn, it's nice.

Essentially, once I hit the max resistance, 8 or 10, I forget, it'll be the equivalent of reaching that speed at a 90 degree incline.

Yeah, I'm pushing it again. Really pushing. Though a tad more carefully than before, if that makes sense.

I'm going to be starting my stances in a couple of weeks. I don't know if it'll be with or without added weight, yet, but it's going to hurt, either way.

Prior to starting, and after finishing working out, I've been using that leg stretcher. I'm really seeing results from it. Even when I stretched every day, I couldn't get that much out of it. Maybe it's psychological, like I'm focusing more on it, or maybe it's physical, and it just doesn't let me be a bitch about stretching. I don't know. At any rate, it's helping a crapload.

Bear is being extremely supportive. I know I'm sometimes, well, frankly psychotic when it comes to achieving goals, especially when it comes to working out. She's helped so much, I just honestly don't know how to convey it. Suffice it to say, I couldn't have gotten to the point I have without her.

nifty libraries, miscellaneous findings

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 00:07:18 GMT

Just stumbled across MySQL++, thanks to my iGoogle's "Interesting Items for You" gadget. It's essentially the C++ equivalent of MySQLdb in Python, and it quite frankly rocks. I'm seriously thinking about putting together something like Django for C++, especially since a lot of the work's been done already, in the form of KLone. Since KLone added the kilt url handler, I've been toying with the idea for a while. For example, using kilt, urls.c could look like:


#include 
#include 
#include "myapp.h"

static kilt_url_t myapp_urls[] = {
    { "^/$", myapp_home, NO_PARAMS },
    { "^/simple/$", myapp_simple, NO_PARAMS },
    { "^/brand/([a-z]+)/model/([a-z0-9]+)/$", myapp_simple,
        PARAMS( P("first", "one"), P("second", "two") ) },
};

KILT_URLS(myapp_urls);

Which is so close to Django's urls.py that it made me drool just reading about it. It's just lacking an ORM - something I would definitely not want to write in C, but in C++ it looks like it'd be doable, and not annoyingly so.

Also stumbled across the Portable C++ Types library, which offers some really rather nice socket/networking abstraction.

All in all, I'm more and more impressed by C++ every day. Even if it isn't quite as fast as C, it's so much faster than interpreted and/or byte code based languages that it's insane.

That said, I played a bit with the Pike scripting language, and really, I think it's even better than Awk. Its syntax is really close to C, but without the static type issues, since it's a dynamic language. And, like any good dynamic language, it supports extensions in C.

quick update

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 21:52:51 GMT

Just released the v0.1, extremely alpha parser. It's here. Uses pcre and pcre++ for some nifty, awesome regex support, as frankly, the other regex libraries suck donkey balls. I included static libs for them in both the download file and in the subversion repository. And, hey, if it's good enough for Python and PHP, it's good enough for me.

WTF tsunami at 3 o'clock

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 04:16:19 GMT

Pretty tired. Consumed 410 calories today. Burned off over 600 - introduced bear to Heroes while doing so. She told me I was getting skinny today; I can't quite see my ribs, though I can definitely see my abs again, so I'm not terribly worried. Would like to get some weights, though. Have my vest, but that's just 40 pounds - eventually it'll get light again.

Doing the job hunt thing again, though thankfully still employed while doing so. Have almost finished a C++ library for parsing HL7 messages, to use as a code sample. I'll be releasing it on googlecode under a BSD license, after I get another job.

It sucks about Joe. It really sucks. I haven't and won't go into it in detail on here. Suffice it to say that, after hearing the news, I wanted to set fire to a rain forest or two, smear feces on a justice of the peace, throw an orphan down a well, and kick a nun in the cunt.

Yeah.

That'd be a good warm up session.

Peace, Joe. I have some doubts about anyone ever resting, be it here or where ever the hell you're at now, but for fuck's sake, peace.

miscellaneous ramblings

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 01:18:11 GMT

Latest version of Firefox appears to render pages / process javascript faster than Swiftweasel.

I2P looks quite interesting.

FreshMeat is still one of the coolest sites in the world, and worthy of a feed subscription.

I've found that ffmpeg is absolutely awesome at converting avi's to mpeg2 for consumption by media players (i.e., the PS3). Mediatomb is also rather nifty for serving said files, though it doesn't work so well over a weak wireless connection.

Boost is really rather nice. So is inilib.

That's all, folks.