Today I'm doing a long-overdue overhaul of my operating environment. I've been running Visual C# Express Edition until now, which barely has more coding-specific features in its text editor than Notepad. Additionally, after the end of a 30-day free period, the program refuses to run until registration. Registration is free, but Microsoft either declined to support multiple registration or the idea of reinstalling, or neglected to think of it: I registered the copy on my desktop, and can't get another registration code for my laptop.
Additionally, my laptop has been running a pre-release evaluation copy of Win7. That expired at the start of March, and is in feature degradation mode; in addition to rebooting every 2 hours without warning, random things are starting to not work.
So, today's "good things" that I am doing have so far included installing the proper version of Visual Studio 2008 on my desktop (yay Dreamspark!) and Windows 7 and VS2008 on my laptop.
One more little thing as a bonus: I had my laptop set up to dual boot with Ubuntu, since CS357 this semester and 442/491 last semester required (or strongly recommended) a Linux environment for programming. I had 100 gb for Windows, 100 gb for Linux, and 100 gb for shared space. I quickly decided this sucks, partly Linux is clumsy when it comes to handling NTFS volumes, but mostly because Linux just kind of sucks on my laptop and I never use it for anything but those classes. So this time around, Ubuntu is getting installed in a VM in Windows. If this offends any diehard Linux zealots, then quite honestly I will just find it a little bit more amusing.
Monday, April 12, 2010
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Exams and studying
So my classmates are "studying" for the midterm exam for this class. This verbage annoys me. What they are doing is not studying. Studying is what I did in Japan, working on learning characters and vocabulary 8 to 12 hours every single day in addition to school time. Studying is systematically learning something as a lifestyle, in a way that precludes other activities. I'd be very surprised if anybody in this class has actually studied. Cramming for a few hours is not studying. It's not even reading up. Reading up is reading lots of stuff. Books and whatnot. I checked Wikipedia to make sure I know the normal forms of databases properly--that wasn't "reading up" on database normal forms, it was looking it up, quick and sloppy.
I like hyperbole more than most people, but I just get annoyed when people don't realize they're using it.
I like hyperbole more than most people, but I just get annoyed when people don't realize they're using it.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
A late start
Ok, I've finally stopped stalling on the creation of this blog for CS460. I'm still not quite sure exactly what I should be putting here, so I guess I'll just do brain spew for anything class-related.
To start off with, I'll give my thoughts on the book, Extreme Programming Installed, which I finished reading during the first few days of the semester. Having dipped into Extreme Programming in Dave Ackley's CS259 class, I was familiar with a fair amount of what was presented in this book. The only aspect that was really new to me was the interactions between the programming team and the customer. All of that seems pretty reasonable to me, but I can't really give a personal take on that, as so far I haven't done any work for customers, just assignments and personal projects.
I have to say, I greatly prefer the agile/XP approach to just about everything over the BDUF approach. Even in school projects I've noticed a big difference in speed and stress levels. Whenever I've tried to design everything (on paper or in my head) before doing any coding, I've invariably gotten to about 95%, then while tying the loose ends together, found out that some of the ends just plain won't tie up. 95% turns into 50%, the design has to be revised, sleep gets lost, maybe things become late, maybe they get turned in buggy.
I'm probably just terrible at actually doing the BDUF. But, every time I've mostly ignored the idea of design, just started coding one feature at a time, and been aggressive with my refactoring, everything's come together pretty quickly and pretty easily.
To start off with, I'll give my thoughts on the book, Extreme Programming Installed, which I finished reading during the first few days of the semester. Having dipped into Extreme Programming in Dave Ackley's CS259 class, I was familiar with a fair amount of what was presented in this book. The only aspect that was really new to me was the interactions between the programming team and the customer. All of that seems pretty reasonable to me, but I can't really give a personal take on that, as so far I haven't done any work for customers, just assignments and personal projects.
I have to say, I greatly prefer the agile/XP approach to just about everything over the BDUF approach. Even in school projects I've noticed a big difference in speed and stress levels. Whenever I've tried to design everything (on paper or in my head) before doing any coding, I've invariably gotten to about 95%, then while tying the loose ends together, found out that some of the ends just plain won't tie up. 95% turns into 50%, the design has to be revised, sleep gets lost, maybe things become late, maybe they get turned in buggy.
I'm probably just terrible at actually doing the BDUF. But, every time I've mostly ignored the idea of design, just started coding one feature at a time, and been aggressive with my refactoring, everything's come together pretty quickly and pretty easily.
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