April 2007 – Page 2 – Miriam Parkinson

A Break

April 20, 2007MiriamLeave a comment

For the past week uni has been one late night frantically finishing an assignment after another. Fortunately (for a couple of weeks anyway) the worst of it is over. So I may actually be able to fit some blogging into my demanding schedule.

I’ve been trying to work out what the purpose of my blog is. At the moment its pretty much a series of opinion pieces strung together with a whole lot of minor updates to my life and lets be frank, my life isn’t particularly interesting to anyone outside my immediate family and friendship group and I tend to live in the hope that no one in my family will google me.

I just can’t think of anything specific I have to offer to the universe at the moment. I can think of stuff I might have to offer in the future but not right now. So I guess I will go on with using blogging as an outlet for my otherwise totally unutilised writing skills and hope that some pearls of wisdom emerge to help someone out.

The joy of bug killing

April 11, 2007MiriamLeave a comment

I am very happy to inform everyone that I have finally killed a really particularly annoying bug that was killing my programming assignment.

It was one of those bugs that turns up and bothers you just when you’re starting to feel really pleased with yourself, and the stellar job you’ve done on the program so far. This particular bug decided to jump out at me and ruin my day just as I added the finishing touch to the assignment. The problem was the deceptively simple requirement that the program should have a nice little ‘Would you like to enter another route (Y/N)’ at the end. Yes ladies and gentlemen, all this particular part of the program had to do was ask for an input and start over if you indicated Y.

The problem lay in the fact that whilst the program ran through fine the first time it would skip the first input the second time around if you selected ‘Y’ (it exited fine if ‘N’). I was, of course, programming in C++ and I fixed the problem by replacing cin.getline(restart, 2) with cin.getline(restart, 2, ‘n’) which (correct me if I’m wrong) is strictly speaking THE SAME THING!!! Anyway, problem solved, no suddenly empty inputs, program no longer chucking a skitz and crashing. Hooray!

To those who don’t program I can’t express to you how annoying it is to get to the end of a project and then have something really stupidly simple screw you up. Its sort of like winning a marathon only to be disqualified because you forgot how to walk when it came to the receiving your accolades bit. So having proven that walking is the same as running only slower I have fixed my problem and vastly improved my mood.

More importantly I have discovered that ‘Mark Leung’s Crazy Computer Bug’ makes a surprisingly accurate reenactment of those bugs that sneak up on you when you least expect it… Only its never made me want to throw my computer out the window or cry.

What I (used to) do

April 5, 2007Miriam5 Comments

As a special treat to everyone, and because I’m feeling nostalgic about my singing days, here is a recording of me singing the aria ‘Ah Belinda, I am pressed’ from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.
Its a bit of a dodgy recording but its the best I have. Its taken off the DVD of a school production where I played Dido. I hope you like it 🙂