University

The Story So Far…

Miriam1 Comment

I’m in a good mood with myself. As predicted, I all but finished my programming assignment tonight. All I have left is final commenting, UML diagram and cleanup etc. I also finished my cam design assignment which I find amusing even if no one else does. Particularly the bit where we have to constrain the jerk… actually that bit had the entire lecture in hysterics.

Lecturer: (and you have to imagine this with a really thick Indian accent)”…and then we have infinite jerking and that is unacceptable” puzzled look as everyone in the lecture theatre snorts their red-bull out their nose
Smartarse: “when is jerking a problem”
Lecturer: “on the next page”
Class: erupts in hysterics again. Eventually recovers until…
Lecturer: “what is so funny?”


On a completely different note I think my caffeine addiction has come to an ugly head. The other day I actually woke up with a caffeine withdrawal headache… at 7am… is that bad?

…And Everything Went Click

MiriamLeave a comment

On Sunday night I was in a fairly bad mood. I’d just spent the entire weekend thinking about my programming assignment, reading the textbook and desperately trying to figure out what to do and I still didn’t have a clue. But then on Monday, everything went click and suddenly it all made a whole lot of sense. So, last night I worked through all the hairy stuff and now all I need to do is finalize the user interface and it should all be more or less done by the time I go to bed. Isn’t life great when you know what’s going on?

Anyway the semester is drawing to a close. By this time next week I’ll have finished my first exam and things are looking pretty good at the moment. I feel more prepared for exams than I’ve ever been and I’m hoping to clean up with straight distinctions. Can’t guarantee it but it’s certainly looking like a possibility. Still no word from IBL but Peter got a message last night which he needs to chase up. Hopefully I’ll hear something this week. Otherwise I’ll start to get worried.

The joy of bug killing

MiriamLeave 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.