unhandledexception.net

The podcasts of the CUSEC conference that have been promised are now trickling in. You can listen in here. First up is Ruby is a Toy, and Rails is Boring, by Chad Fowler.

The audio files are in .m4a format. I don’t know where the heck this format comes from but I suspect a rotten Apple. Anyway, my K-Lite codec pack is able to play this thing, and it will probably need conversion to a more traditionnal, respected, and used format (read, .mp3) for my non-Apple MP3 player. So, let’s go hunting for a free, open-source, non-viral, command line based converter!

A friend gave me a link to this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vtq0JI_oBt0&search=crazy%20german

The video is this lunatic German kid that screams his guts out and beats the living hell out of his keyboard because his Unreal Tournament loads too slow. Yes, I do admit to breaking a few keyboards too, and sharing some very profane conversations with my computer

Spring break is over for me. I spent most of it working with my team on our task manager project. I started out by finishing up some documentation, setting up the project (eclipse, cvs, etc.) and then coded away. I did quite a bt of progress, which I am really happy about, and now I have to set that aside to take a careful look for mistakes in the deliverables, but mostly stuff that should be rephrased, presented outherwise, better-written, etc. Overall they did some good work, considering that English is not their first language, and that software engineers are not always gifted for writing, I am really proud of them, and they are definately an asset to the team.

I have gathered and reviewed pretty much all these documents with the exception of the Software Architecture Document. I spent most of the time on the vision document (a business-oriented document describing the main requirememts of the software). It’s not so much the content, but the layout that I did not like. I think prose belongs to literature, and such documents are better served writing stuff in point-form, being concice, to the point, and short. But in school they teach the opposite: how to baloney your way to 1000 words!

So the implementation is well underway now. I have started by getting the main application interface designed and coded, and all that is left is the functionnality that is imposed on us for the first release. I hope we will have time to do more than the bare minimum required, in order to present something that works pretty well. I am kind of surprised my team is not full-out on coding yet as I would have wished, but I am confident that will come. If they don’t get to coding pretty soon, I will start writing writing function stubs to help them a little. But it seems that everybody is on the same boat, except for one team (that I never see attend class) that got some serious shit up and running. I really don’t know where they found the time to pull all this off, but better competition really pisses me off!

Tomorrow I will review what the other team members have done for the software architecture document and related deliverables. I have to admit that I am not as familiar with it as the requirements documentation, as ABSOLUTELY NOTHING has been taught about this thing in our courses yet. So, I will try my best, using my common sense to parse what they have done.

Today the university is closed, for the traditionnal “rector’s day”. You can put a spin on that all you want, but now it has been changed to president. Well, it doesn’t give me much of a break actually.

• I just got an e-mail that I have to meet my ENGR 492 (Impact on Technology on Society) group tomorrow, having prepared an outline of the group term paper.
• I have to write my short term paper.
• I have to help my SOEN 390 team in developping the Task Manager.

Right now, I don’t feel like writing about Impacts on Technology, but more on how ENGR 492 is a complete waste of my time, and how the teacher is completely incompetent, and behaves like a child. I think this is my last course of the sort, having done ENGR 201 and 202, and would complete my “engineering core”. I still need to take two science courses, perhaps next year, so I am hoping that concordia’s science departments are more serious about teaching.

I’ll save the rant for later, when I am going to be in that class forced to listen to the class arguing with him about his opinions, and resort to baloney-writing right now…

They might say that there is no such thing as too much work, but right now I feel like there definately is.

I am taking a project course, in which we have to develop a task manager application using servlets. That includes the standard RUP documentation: the vision document, the supplementary requirements and specifications, the use case model, and the software architecture documents. Add to that that most people don’t have much experience dealing with tools like CVS, and are barely able to get a servlet working without having Eclipse or Tomcat crash. I definatlely don’t blame them, because Eclipse and Tomcat can be the biggest pain in the arse a programmer will ever see. I consider myself pretty good with it, I played around with CVS and servlets at the beginning of the semester, to gain some experience and knowledge, and it seems to have paid off. Now I am trying my absolute best to teach my group how to use it. It’s so much information for someone who has not done this before, and they are just as exhausted as I am. One thing though is that they are very motivated and eager to learn. This is the winning combination.

Now, the icing of the cake. I found out I need to submit a 10-page essay for ENGR 492, yet another useless course we have to take to learn about the impact of technology on society. Yet I think I can pull it off in 1-2 days, if I put my mind into it. I went to the library today to pick up a stack of about a dozen books for it, so taking the car to school this morning came in handy.

It’s about 20 to 11, and I am still at school. I woke up at 6, so now I am pretty much so tired I cannot code anymore. I am going home!

Finally, the first time in a week, I feel good enough to actually do something more productive than lay down in bed all day. Yep, my cold has gotten much better overnight. This was a real bad one, even worse than the one I had in january. And to top it off, nature threw out its worst on us last friday, leaving us with crappy freezing weather over the weekend. Anyway, now I am coughing out the last bits of excess mucus, and hopefully I will get better pretty soon to catch up on school work.

This afternoon I opened up my laptop, plug it in my home network, and attempt to remote desktop into it. It’s a no-go, winlogon.exe crashes. WTF might be wrong. Turns out it’s the Cisco Aironet Client Utility (ACU) that is responsible for that. I eventually got fed up with my integrated Intel wireless card having connection problems with the school’s network, so I decided to pop in the old wireless card I bought that would allow me to connect through LEAP instead of PEAP like the cool Mac people. Works fine, the problem is that that software is interfeering with pretty much everything! It changes the welcome screen to the Windows 2000 style login (and prevents you from changing it back), and prevents you from remote-desktopping into your laptop! That’s nice…

Now, I am trying to figure out Identity Maps and Lazy Loading, patterns that, respectively, keep track of what is loaded, and prevent the entire database from being loaded. Problem is, Fowler’s Pattens of Entreprise Application Architecture ain’t exactly what I’d call a fine, helpful book, but some random stuff put together. And the prof… well, see the rant. So how do they want us to properly learn software engineering? By trying to “guess” the proper way to do stuff? No, get real. Engineering is a systematic process, not ad-hoc guesswork! It may be a “new-age teaching method”, but the matter of fact is that my patience for these and other stuff dramatically diminuishes as the semester goes on and I am pushed left and right to meed quasi-impossible deadlines.