Three till Seven

C# and Visual Studio

Sarah — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 15:25:17 +0000

Yarr, so work at HP has been good; I’m enjoying my time there. I’ve worked from home a few times, which has been nice: there’s nothing quite like coding in your pajamas and getting paid for it. I’ve mainly been writing PL/SQL queries and programming in C#. I was apprehensive about the job to begin with because I knew I’d be working in Windows, and that’s unpleasant for me. It still is unpleasant, and I get pissed off at Windows at least a couple times a day. I get most annoyed when I want to do something simple, like right-click on a file or switch tabs in Firefox, and it sluuuuuuuugs along, sometimes even freezing the screen such that mouse cursor movements aren’t even shown. My response is always “really? it’s that hard to show me the right-click menu and be responsive about it?”. It’s a decently fast computer, and I know the thing would be snappy in Ubuntu.

Anyway, I digress; C# is actually a fun language. I got thrown into it because I needed to implement new features on an existing C# web service. I was reading about the lambda operator and predicates yesterday. It’s not as pretty, syntactically, as Ruby, but it’s still cool.

CSharp

List numbers = new List {1, 2, 3, 4, 5};

IEnumerable even = numbers.Where(curNum => curNum % 2 == 0);

Whereas in Ruby:

Ruby

numbers = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

even = numbers.select { |cur_num| cur_num % 2 == 0 }

I’ve been working in Visual Studio 2008 and overall I like the IDE. Intellisense is very convenient and VS’s debugger is great. However, that hasn’t stopped me from banging my head on simple-seeming problems, such as collapsing all method definitions and then expanding all regions as soon as a file is opened. I’ve posted a question on Stack Overflow about it, if you want to help out.

visits and kung fu

Sarah — Fri, 15 May 2009 22:23:02 +0000

I’m at my parents’ house with Jon, wrapping up the last of our travelling around Kentucky. We visited his family for three days and have been visiting mine for the past two; we’ll head back to Lexington this evening. I’ve taken a lot of photos of the new kittens at my parents’, as well as my mom’s flowers, so I’ll post those when I’m back on my laptop with a fast connection. I’ll also post some photos from graduation, too. Ah, right: I graduated from college!! I got a B.S. in computer science, a minor in mathematics, and I graduated with honors and cum laude. Now for a summer of work followed by more school to get that tricky Master’s degree…

I watched the movie Hero today with Jon because my dad told us, although apparently sarcastically, that we had to see it. He and my mom just hated it because of the flying around and lack of realism when they expected a historical drama. I liked it pretty well, though I would have preferred the version with sub-titles instead of overdubbing since the voice acting was a bit hokey. It was a gorgeous movie, and it makes me want to rewatch Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, which I don’t remember much of at this point.

grad party, friend code, KDE 4

Sarah — Thu, 07 May 2009 21:45:28 +0000

Oy, what a week! I’ve worked at Lexmark every day since Monday, getting things finalized there and today was my last day. My manager took me out to lunch with about twelve coworkers, which was very pleasant, getting to sit around and have a real lunch with these folks, instead of just grabbing a chicken sandwich and working while I eat. Then I rushed over to campus for an exit interview with the CS department, since I’m graduating. And speaking of, that’s this Saturday–eeee! Kathy’s having a graduation party that I’ll be attending, along with Jon and apparently a crap-ton of other people. We’re going to have tasty Thai food and a chocolate cake, plus drinking afterward I think. Then come Sunday, Jon and I are going to visit his extended family for a few days, which is exciting and a bit nervous for me since I haven’t met his grandparents or brother yet. After that, we’re driving down to my parents’ place and I’m selling my brother a TV and stand that I don’t want hanging around my place, plus giving my mom a cabinet which she’ll probably use for plants because she uses everything for plants.

Also! I got high speed internet yesterday and now I can connect Animal Crossing City Folk to the intarwebz, so all y’all with a friend code can add me to your friend register. Here’s my info:

My name: Sarah
City: Daplo
Code: 3051-4270-0430

I start at Hewlett Packard on May 18, so I’ll have a nice week off between graduation and working. That’s the week I’ll be visiting families, but also I hope to hang around the apartment and play Wii games, haha. Tonight I’ll be going over to Kathy’s to mow her yard in exchange for doing a couple loads of laundry (the new place has no on-site laundry, bleh).

Last night after I got the snazzy ‘net connection, I got my PC install of Jaunty all upgraded and now I’m using KDE 4 instead of stupid old Gnome. I’m quite tickled with it because things work nicely and it’s all pretty and customizable. Here’s a screenshot for you:

Animal Crossing City Folk error

Sarah — Sun, 03 May 2009 16:17:47 +0000

FYI for anyone who has a similar issue: I tried to play Animal Crossing City Folk on the Wii and after opening up my game, it suddenly gave the Wii error message “An error has occurred”, along with telling me to hit Eject, remove the disc, and turn the power off. I was able to eject, but the power button didn’t work, nor did reset. I had to unplug the cable from the back. When I tried the disc again, it wouldn’t load my game, it just showed the schoolbus icon in the corner for ‘loading’. The disc looked fine, and when I tried playing Super Paper Mario, another Wii game, it played fine. (Thank goodness for that: I’ve had my disc drive replaced once already and don’t want to again.) I then noticed that I had an SD card in the slot and remembered I had taken a photo and saved it to the SD card the other day in City Folk. I ejected that, reinserted City Folk, and it loaded my game fine. Resetti came by and gave me the run-down about not hitting reset, blah blah, but everything appears fine now. Maybe a fluke, but maybe starting the game with an SD card in the slot is problematic.

partial move

Sarah — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 13:13:35 +0000

I’m halfway moved into the new apartment because yesterday I took two carloads of boxes, bags, and miscellaneous stuff like my printer. Loading the car is a pain because I currently live on the second story, so I have to go down some stairs and across the yard to reach the car. With the new place, I can park about ten feet away from my back door on the ground floor, so shazam, hauling stuff in is a snap. My big accomplishments yesterday were:

Sweeping and wet-Swiffering all the floors; I got the Febreezeified Swiffer cloths, too, so now my place smells all fruity
Changing the toilet seat from a janky white one with worn spots to a pretty new wooden one
Cleaning the sinks, counters, stove top, and toilet
Cleaning the wooden shelves in the closets

There’s not a lick of carpet in the new place, for which I am glad because I hate dealing with the stuff when it isn’t new. I hate dealing with carpet period, actually, even new carpet, because it invariably collects lots of hair and gets gross, and my vacuum sucks because it doesn’t suck enough so hair always remains in the carpet. There’s some tan tile with tan grout in the bathroom and kitchen, plus that laminate wood snap-together flooring in the bedroom and living room. I got this snazzy shower curtain yesterday at Target, and I think I’ll replace my two-apartment-old bath mat with a black one. My back was so sore yesterday after I finished moving stuff and cleaning the floors. The only piece of sit-down furniture I had in the new place, besides the toilet, was a fold-out camping chair, so I just collapsed in it for a spell.

apartment, HP, grad. classes

Sarah — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 16:37:41 +0000

Pfhew, so let’s see what’s going on in my life, since it’s been some time since I last updated with a real entry. I’m moving this weekend to my new apartment, and it’s going to suck like all moves suck, but this one I’m hoping will be better, at least in some ways, than previous moves because I tried to take a lot of crap that I don’t need home to my parents’ house. They kind of laughed about me basically using my old room as a storage shed. In other ways, this move will suck more because I have more large furniture, including a couch, a 25″ TV, a dresser, and a nightstand that I didn’t have before. I’ve rented a truck and am getting Jon, Tony, Mark, Kathy, and Thom involved because they’re dear sweet people that can lift things. I’m going to take them out for dinner or pie or something afterward as thanks.

I applied for and got accepted at a position at Hewlett Packard, otherwise known as Exstream Software, here in Lexington, so I’ll be working there this summer. I’ll either be continuing there this fall part-time or working as a research assistant at UK; it depends on what one of my professors has in the way of R.A. positions.

I can’t remember having mentioned it before, but my graduate classes this fall will be algorithms, programming languages (Smalltalk, Lisp, and Ada, here I come!), and another class that sounded interesting about applying the scientific method to software development.

I’m currently rereading the Hatrack River series by Orson Scott Card and am on, in particular, Heartfire in the Alvin Wandering collection. Yay for Verily Cooper, if anyone else reads/has read the series.

Thanks for commenting on the new theme, Melissa, Howard, and Lorina. I just checked it in IE 7 myself and it seems all right–hooray! I think I also may have fixed the wonky navigation stuff that I messed up last time, so hopefully all is well now. I think I’ll modify this layout such that I can use it on my portfolio, which is sadly neglected as far as nice layouts are concerned. The cobbler’s children having no shoes and all that.

Looks like there’ll be some graduation celebration among my friends, come May. Kathy’s having a party-type thing to which me, Jon, and Mark are invited, plus I’ll be getting together with Jon’s family to celebrate. It’s kind of funny, Jon doesn’t want to walk for graduation at all, but his parents definitely want him to, whereas my parents don’t care for all the pomp and circumstance and aren’t coming, but I want to walk. Kathy was just flabbergasted to hear my parents weren’t going to attend, but she doesn’t get how absolutely hermit-like they are. My mom never went to any of her graduations, nor did either of them attend my brother’s college graduations.

This summer, if I don’t get absolutely sick of programming stuff at work, I’d like to bang around with some Rails stuff on my own for fun. I’ve rediscovered my love of Mahjong, which I used to play all the time as a kid on our old PC, and now play on my iPod since EA made a very pretty version of it. I was thinking it’d be an interesting challenge to implement a Rails version of the game. It would have to handle different layers of tiles in order to know which tiles were movable and which weren’t, plus the design of the tiles would be fun. Instead of the traditional Chinese symbols, there could be Firefox tiles and Tux tiles and Google tiles and Ruby tiles. I asked Jon if he would be interested in working together on it, because he wants more Rails experience and I discovered this semester, through completing a Set game implementation with Tony and Mark, that working together on a Rails project, when everyone involved is enthusiastic and talented, is really fun. He’s game, and I’m thinking we should try a Git repository instead of Subversion because my Git experience is very limited but so many people seem to enjoy it and even prefer it to Subversion, so there’s got to be some merit. I remember liking the idea of being able to make local commits to save your progress and then only making full, remote commits when you have a working change.

wonky nav

Sarah — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 13:02:54 +0000

Arrgh, I looked at 3till7 on a nice big Mac monitor at UK and saw that there was white around the canvas background and the main image in the Watercolor Flowers theme, which made it look wonky. So I tried to fix it here on the Mac at school because it has Photoshop, but darn it if I didn’t mess up the navigation images such that they look a bit off. So I’ll fix it when I get a chance at home.

new theme: Watercolor Flowers

Sarah — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 18:00:52 +0000

Finally a new theme is available! I banged around in Photoshop a couple weeks ago, following this tutorial and using this photo of mine. I also tried to make use of these tips about web typography.

I haven’t tested the layout in IE yet, so I’d appreciate it if someone could do that and tell me what, if anything, looks wonky. I’ve checked it in Firefox 3.0.9 and Safari 4 in OS X.

The currently available themes are Watercolor Flowers (the new default), Burnt Cherry (the previous default), and Round Black.

Also: new essays up from last semester.

code reports Rake task

Sarah — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 16:01:37 +0000

This will run various Ruby Gems for creating code quality reports, store them in public/ in your Rails app, and create public/reports.html with links to each report. You need Saikuro, Flog, Flay, Reek, and Roodi, since this Rake task uses them all.

Save this Rake task in your lib/tasks/ directory in your Rails app, and give it the extension .rake so that you can then run rake metrics:make_all.

Ruby

namespace :metrics do
def get_mtime(path)

    File.mtime(path).strftime("%Y-%m-%d %I:%M %p")
end

  desc 'Generates Reek report'

  task :make_reek do
require 'find'
require 'fileutils'

    reek_dir_name = "reek"

    reek_dir = "#{RAILS_ROOT}/public/#{reek_dir_name}"

    index_file = "#{reek_dir}/index.html"

    output_files = {}

unless File.exists?(reek_dir) && File.directory?(reek_dir)

      FileUtils.mkdir(reek_dir)
end

    Find.find(RAILS_ROOT)do |path|
if(
(path =~ /#{RAILS_ROOT}\/app\// || path =~ /#{RAILS_ROOT}\/lib\//) &&

        path =~ /\.rb$/i
)

        output_file = "#{File.basename(path)}.txt"

        cmd = "reek #{path} > #{reek_dir}/#{output_file}"
puts cmd
system(cmd)

        output_files[path] = output_file
end
end

puts"Writing index file to #{index_file}..."

    paths = output_files.keys.sort

    File.open(index_file, 'w')do |file|

      file.write('')

      file.write('')

      file.write("Reek Results for #{RAILS_ROOT}")

      file.write('')

      file.write('')

      file.write("Reek Results for #{RAILS_ROOT}")

      file.write('')
      paths.each do |path|

        name = output_files[path]

        file.write('
')

        link_name = File.basename(name, '.rb.txt')

        file.write('"' + name + '">' + link_name + '')

        file.write(' from ' + path)

        file.write("
\n")
end
      file.write('
')

      file.write('')

      file.write('')
end
end
  desc 'Generates public/reports.html'

  task :make_index do

    require 'find'

    require 'fileutils'

    puts "\nGenerating index of reports..."

    reports = []

    index_file = "#{RAILS_ROOT}/public/reports.html"

    Find.find(RAILS_ROOT + '/public') do |path|

      if (

        path =~ /flay_report\.txt$/ ||

        path =~ /flog_report\.txt$/ ||

        path =~ /roodi_report\.txt$/

      )

        reports << File.basename(path)

      end

    end

    File.open(index_file, 'w') do |file|

      file.write('')

      file.write('')

      file.write("Reports for #{RAILS_ROOT}")

      file.write('')

      file.write('')

      file.write("
Reports for #{RAILS_ROOT}")

      file.write('')
      reek_file = "#{RAILS_ROOT}/public/reek/index.html"

      if File.exists?(reek_file)

        file.write('
"reek/index.html">Reek')

        file.write(", last updated #{get_mtime(reek_file)}
")
end
      token_file = "#{RAILS_ROOT}/public/saikuro/index_token.html"

      if File.exists?(token_file)

        file.write('
"saikuro/index_token.html">Tokens')

        file.write(", last updated #{get_mtime(token_file)}
")
end
      cyclo_file = "#{RAILS_ROOT}/public/saikuro/index_cyclo.html"

      if File.exists?(cyclo_file)

        file.write('
"saikuro/index_cyclo.html">Cyclomatic complexity')

        file.write(", last updated #{get_mtime(cyclo_file)}
")
end
      reports.each do |name|

        file.write('
')

        file.write('"' + name + '">' + name + '')

        file.write(", last updated #{get_mtime(RAILS_ROOT + '/public/' + name)}")

        file.write('
')
end
      file.write('
')

      file.write('')

      file.write('')
end
end
  desc 'Generates Roodi report'

  task :make_roodi do 

    puts "\nGenerating Roodi report..."

    cmd = "roodi \"#{RAILS_ROOT}/**/*.rb\" > #{RAILS_ROOT}/public/roodi_report.txt"

    puts cmd

    system(cmd)

  end
  desc 'Generates Flay report'

  task :make_flay do

    puts "\nGenerating Flay report..."

    cmd = "flay #{RAILS_ROOT}/app/ > #{RAILS_ROOT}/public/flay_report.txt"

    puts cmd

    system(cmd)

  end
  desc 'Generates Saikuro report'

  task :make_saikuro do

    saikuro_dir = "#{RAILS_ROOT}/public/saikuro/"

    unless File.exists?(saikuro_dir) && File.directory?(saikuro_dir)

      FileUtils.mkdir(saikuro_dir)

    end

    puts "\nGenerating Saikuro report..."

    cmd = "saikuro -c -t -i #{RAILS_ROOT}/app/ -y 0 -w 11 -e 16 -o #{saikuro_dir}"

    puts cmd

    system(cmd)

  end
  desc 'Generates Flog report'

  task :make_flog do

    puts "\nGenerating Flog report..."

    cmd = "flog #{RAILS_ROOT}/app/ > #{RAILS_ROOT}/public/flog_report.txt"

    puts cmd

    system(cmd)

  end
  desc 'Generates all reports.'

  task :make_all do

    system('rake metrics:make_reek')

    system('rake metrics:make_roodi')

    system('rake metrics:make_flay')

    system('rake metrics:make_saikuro')

    system('rake metrics:make_flog')

    system('rake metrics:make_index')

  end

end

Cross-posted to my DZone Snippets page.

sortable arrays of symbols in Ruby

Sarah — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 15:58:58 +0000

I got this error in my Rails app because I was trying to sort an array of symbols: undefined method `<=>' for :my_symbol:Symbol. I defined the spaceship method for the Symbol class and included the Comparable module in order to have other comparison methods available for symbols.

Ruby

class Symbol
include Comparable
  def <=>(other)

    self.to_s <=> other.to_s

  end

end

This lets me do things like the following:

irb(main):007:0> [:c, :a, :d, :b, :e].sort
=> [:a, :b, :c, :d, :e]

Cross-posted to my DZone Snippets page.