how things are atm
So, it's been forever and then some (almost) since my last post. Hope y'all haven't been missing yours truly overmuch.... ;-)
Recently I've been having 'fun' writing a few private projects in Ruby at home... I'm putting the 'fun' within quotes, cause that's also involved a ... learning experience or three, and those don't usually tend to be too fun at the time... But, have learned at least one new Ruby 'trick' in the bargain, and have also been able to ask myself some questions I hadn't had occasion to before, so that was good. (If anyone truly cares, it involved how to read command line arguments with 3 different Ruby libraries - doubtless super interesting to a fellow developer, but not so much so to anyone else. Have learned, but also needed to eat some metaphorical crow...)
Have also been wiki-ing for the first time ever. The 'new' Detective Conan wiki opened a short while ago, and I've been adding some stuff from the huge list of story-arc summaries I made a huge project out of a couple of years ago, but stopped about a year ago. There's been some eating-crow involved in that as well, as I realized that some of the summaries were way too oriented towards the things I care about most in D.C. (which is: the meaningful interactions between the main characters and what can be concluded from them), as opposed to the details of each mystery/murder case/ or what-have-you. The extreme expression of which was that I'd "summarized" the six chapter 'Hatamoto family massacre on a liner' story arc in to two sentences (about how Ran had described the boy she liked, how Conan reacted, and how Kogoro reacted to that...) Which isn't *bad*, per se, but it was just too lop-sided towards my personal cares... So I had to add a bit more, and did. It was almost funny, though, the guy that started the wiki had found my expressed interest in contributing to other parts of the wiki than my own planned contributions... a bit limited. Well, I think I'll let how things go speak for itself on my behalf, but it's going to be a loooong time before I'm done even just posting all summaries I have, not to mention the 100+ more chapters which still need summarizing...
As far as work goes, I was permitted to do the 2 day SQL-for-beginners course my company offers last week, and was very glad I'd been able to do so, since my SQL-knowledge badly needed refreshing... Since about halfway thru January I've been working on the 16-bits Solaris port of Usoft Developer, so that's about two months long by now. Though a lot of it hasn't been too fun, since 2 or three weeks ago I've been happy to have been able to build not-immediately-crashing builds of almost all of the programs Usoft consists of. It's been good to see a pretty large amount of invested time result in tangible programs which might not always work correctly yet, but... they're also pretty close to working and the partner I've been pair-programming along with and I have already successfully run some Unicode-containing SQL statements against our 16-bit sqlscript program, as well as some simple Unicode-containing-SQL batchjobs against 16-bit runbatch. We still have some ways to go, though, and debugging on Solaris isn't as good as it would be on Windows (the Solaris debugger doesn't display 16-bits string easily, and it also just sort-of locks up for a minute or so at random, while you're using it, which *really* sucks)... There's a progress report planned for Thursday, hope by then we'll have gotten significantly more bugs sorted out...
Recently I've been having 'fun' writing a few private projects in Ruby at home... I'm putting the 'fun' within quotes, cause that's also involved a ... learning experience or three, and those don't usually tend to be too fun at the time... But, have learned at least one new Ruby 'trick' in the bargain, and have also been able to ask myself some questions I hadn't had occasion to before, so that was good. (If anyone truly cares, it involved how to read command line arguments with 3 different Ruby libraries - doubtless super interesting to a fellow developer, but not so much so to anyone else. Have learned, but also needed to eat some metaphorical crow...)
Have also been wiki-ing for the first time ever. The 'new' Detective Conan wiki opened a short while ago, and I've been adding some stuff from the huge list of story-arc summaries I made a huge project out of a couple of years ago, but stopped about a year ago. There's been some eating-crow involved in that as well, as I realized that some of the summaries were way too oriented towards the things I care about most in D.C. (which is: the meaningful interactions between the main characters and what can be concluded from them), as opposed to the details of each mystery/murder case/ or what-have-you. The extreme expression of which was that I'd "summarized" the six chapter 'Hatamoto family massacre on a liner' story arc in to two sentences (about how Ran had described the boy she liked, how Conan reacted, and how Kogoro reacted to that...) Which isn't *bad*, per se, but it was just too lop-sided towards my personal cares... So I had to add a bit more, and did. It was almost funny, though, the guy that started the wiki had found my expressed interest in contributing to other parts of the wiki than my own planned contributions... a bit limited. Well, I think I'll let how things go speak for itself on my behalf, but it's going to be a loooong time before I'm done even just posting all summaries I have, not to mention the 100+ more chapters which still need summarizing...
As far as work goes, I was permitted to do the 2 day SQL-for-beginners course my company offers last week, and was very glad I'd been able to do so, since my SQL-knowledge badly needed refreshing... Since about halfway thru January I've been working on the 16-bits Solaris port of Usoft Developer, so that's about two months long by now. Though a lot of it hasn't been too fun, since 2 or three weeks ago I've been happy to have been able to build not-immediately-crashing builds of almost all of the programs Usoft consists of. It's been good to see a pretty large amount of invested time result in tangible programs which might not always work correctly yet, but... they're also pretty close to working and the partner I've been pair-programming along with and I have already successfully run some Unicode-containing SQL statements against our 16-bit sqlscript program, as well as some simple Unicode-containing-SQL batchjobs against 16-bit runbatch. We still have some ways to go, though, and debugging on Solaris isn't as good as it would be on Windows (the Solaris debugger doesn't display 16-bits string easily, and it also just sort-of locks up for a minute or so at random, while you're using it, which *really* sucks)... There's a progress report planned for Thursday, hope by then we'll have gotten significantly more bugs sorted out...