unhandledexception.net

Today we went to the ETS as a class outing to use Logiscope as an assignment, as we don’t have that software installed at Concordia, because it involves money, and money requires bureaucracy. I think this was a great initiative from our teacher. Although today its use in the industry is limited, because few companies actually use a software development process, let alone establish a software measurement program, but as we graduate I am sure the industry will be maturing into more controlled software development.

Our assignment consisted of, after a short tutorial on Logiscope by our TA, to select two pieces of code, analyse them with the software and comment on the results. I seleted my complier I did for COMP442 (see the school archive section), mainly because it is one of the biggest things I have done and I have done it before learning about software design, i.e. ad-hoc development. It fared pretty well actually, even though I was sure the program would scream “bad design” everywhere, because in compiler design, the parser and the code generation are very tightly coupled together, and also the fact that some parts were total hacks, just to get the thing working for the deadline! I guess I would have to congradulate myself for being a good hacker The main weak point it came up with was understandability, i.e. too few comments and too much variable reuse, though I am pretty sure I did put quite a few comments in my code, but then again it wasn’t a priority. I don’t know about the variable reuse though, I’d have to look into it to see whether it is a constraint of compiler design or something I could improve on.

I liked Logiscope a lot, and aside for being an essential component for measuring code, it is definately a great educational tool. There is an on-line reference tool that defines each measure the software takes and presents very significant graphs while still specifically pinpointing what could be improved. It feels like having a tutor telling you what you are doing great and what you should work on, which I am sure will end up helping improve one’s coding style.

I swear in the beginning of the semester I did not think much of software measurement, thinking I’d do the minimum required to pass it. But now this class is seriously getting more exciting and enriching by the minute! This is what I base myself to say that yes, this is a great professor! The same goes for UI. In the middle of the semester I met the assistant prof. getting out of the metro before the class, and she asked me for my impressions. I told her that all this “usability requirement elicitation” was all good, but extremely boring, and that I would like to see some more practical stuff. Next thing I know is that we are studying UI patterns just like the big prestigious American universities!!! Add to this that the professors and TAs worked hard to establish the course and you can notice it in the sense that they are all prepared, and know their stuff damn well! Unfortunately, politics and bureaucracy has it that because a few douchebags that don’t even show up to class complain about getting bad grades, these teachers are constantly under fire, so they end up losing their teaching contracts. Kick the douches out of the program, not the good profs!

Following that I skipped my architecture class and went to eat with a friend I met at the CCSS soccer game a year back when I was ACM president (poor guy, he got his ass kicked bad). Recently he was flashing around an sweet mp3 player he got on eBay, and he had some good music in there! Ian Van Dahl rules. Really, I wish I could work with him (on large projects) because he is really motivated and competent.

Comming back I heard that the prof really gave a hard time to a team during their presentation, asking them questions and all. Really, I don’t know, and I would reallly like to find out what the heck is going on between one of the girls in that team, the prof. and the TA. She is kinda different from the rest, more on the wild side shall I say, but she is nice (and hot). The thing with our class is that we kind of stick together rather than compete, except for a few stories here and there, and apart from 2-3 people that never show up to class and parasite on others for teamwork, we could alll consider ourselves some of the best software developers around. Heck, many of us have had the tought of all working together on one same project, and that’s what I think should be attempted for our capstone project. Our profs act as managers, helping us through it and evaluating us at the same time. Put us on different teams that work on manageable parts of a larger system. That would be, what I would consider, real education for the real world!

It was another gorgeous day in Montreal today, about 14 degrees Celcius, sunny. Great spring day for Montreal! I went for ice cream with a friend Apparently many people had the same idea, hence the lineup at Ben & Jerry’s and the unavailability of my favorite flavors. I bugged him a lot about 490, in order to find out what are his project ideas, mainly because I want to work with a team that does a project that I will like a lot, which will make working on it a lot of fun.

Came back home after that… getting off the bus, I never realized that one of my chinese neighbors was so hot, she had the entire package man…. Okay, enough gutter for tonight…

Edit: Tomorrow’s weather: 19 Celcius, sunny. I love global warming!

The end of semester is here. There are only 2-3 weeks left and classes, projects and assignments will be over. It’s a very stressful time for students, who have to struggle to meet impossible deadlines. It’s also the time I get irritated very easily. With every few words that come out of my mouth, there’s a swear. My conversations mainly consist of pointing out how my profs are f***ing idiots, and how we’re being screwed. It’s a mood I like to qualify as “f*** the f***ing world!” It’s really annoying, I say things to people that I will obviously regret, and I am sure other people are totally sick of hearing my constant bitching.

Today was a busy day. Software metrics quiz in the morning, which I think went well, oral presentation in the afternoon that I don’t think went all that well, and now I am sitting home waiting for last minute slackers to send me their PowerPoint slides for tomorrow’s ENGR 492 presentation that is obviously going to suck. Oral presentations towards the end of the semester are quite the bad idea for me. I am in this state where I really couldn’t care less about anything else than my “important’ courses, so it is kind of hard for me to focus on researching and say something intereseting, so bare with me. You can bring in your laptop and earphones in class and give me a taste of my own medicine if you want. I know the presentation will suck, the slides will suck, the subject will be boring. I made it. It’s pure bullshit to fill out 70 or so sheets of paper, perhaps the best way to waste a projector’s lamp, and your time. Poor trees!

Today’s presentation was about our Task Manager project, from the sofrware architecture document perspective. I was kept out of the loop, because I didn’t have time to do this, my team did not appreciate me holding center stage at the project demo (even though we got A+) and I was told about it this morning waking up. That’s the rudest awakening I have had in a long time! I don’t know, but it seems that all the other teams did better than us, though my friends are telling me we did OK. Yeah. I hope they mean it, and are not just saying that to be nice. Really, if it sucked, tell me, as I will appreciate your candidness and take no offense. Also, please receive my apologies for anything I might have said today.

Immediately after that I put on my earbuds and headed home. I did noy want anybody else getting sh*t they don’t deserve. I just noticed it was a beautiful day here in Montreal, to the point where I will wear my sunglassed tomorrow! So that calmed me down a bit. So, I arrived home, mailed back my defective Maxtor, and took the winter crud off the cars with the pressure washer, delivered back my cutomer’s PC, and am now preparing my oral presentation for tomorrow.

Those who read here, my prof wants us to dress nicely for the presentation. So please don’t make any comments about me looking good, because I feel like sh*t in anything that is not jeans, sweatpants and a t-shirt. Thursday should be a much better day, as we have a class outing to ETS to try out their Logiscope. We have to bring two samples of code to be analyzed by the program. I’ll bring my compiler I did last year, see how that fares The other one I have not decided yet, but it might just be a stable version of the task manager. I don’t know if I will have to get these samples to work, but in any case, I have plenty of code on my laptop.

Ah well enough for tonight. I am still waiting for people’s slides. I don’t know, but 9 PM has passed long time ago. Does this give me carte blance to put Goatse in their sections and say “well, this is what the guy sent me by e-mail for his slides yesterday night, I am not too sure about what he wants to convey with that but anyway let’s hear from him”. No, I am not that evil.

We have started filling out the course evaluations. There has been lots of word about these going around, because it seems that they do take them seriously for non-tenured profs. Today was Architecture, so I wrote down some of the concerns I had, and had previously expressed here. Interestingly, the TA made a small comment to the fact that the evaluations would be considered when comes time to renew the prof’s contract, and that he depends on this prof. to get his Ph.D. As nice as he is, and I do think he probably deserves higher education and he will do good with it, and that he’d make an extraordinary prof, but I see this evaluation as a means to express my concerns as a student which nobody esle seems to be listening. I am really sorry, I don’t mean to frame the guy, but to suggest areas of improvement. After all, that’s what evaluations are for, no? If he doesn’t want to listen to student concerns, and keeps his “Yes, I understand your concerns but …” demeanor which really means “f*** off”, then I’d be a good riddance! To our big surprise, just before the eval., somebody pops up and starts complimenting the prof. I know him a little, and I think he is ok, but if you thought our complaints are unjustified, you were always welcome to talk to us, or at least talk to *me* about it. That’s why blogs have the “comments” feature! Seriously man, what the hell was up with that but-licking!!! Whatever, bravo for your impression. Your A+ is probably on the way. Oh, and I don’t think Stu would tell our prof about who doesn’t like him; if he’d do that, then chalin would probably have told about my blog long long ago and I’d probably have been so so screwed!

Anyway, there are still two evals left. In my opinion, they are two of the finest profs in the department. They have generated great interest in me on the subject , and I have learnt a lot with them. Assignments resemble to real world problems and class often turns into a think tank about software measurement, or good and bad design principles. They go the extra mile so that students not merely cram for tests, but actually learn useful notions and have fun doing it. You can tell that they have worked very hard outside of the classroom to prepare for these lectures, provide relevant and interesting reading material and are actually listening to students. I think this is how every professor should teach. They key here is working with the student, not against him. I would like to commend these profs, Dr. Rhadakrishnan and Dr. Ormanjieva, and thank them for their dedication and involvement.

Edit: I just did all my TA evaluations! They were all positive, as we did have great TAs this semester. Although, if any of them read here and want to know what I wrote about them, well, they’d have to wait till this summer That includes you, Stuart!

So, it is official, now that I got my tickets last tuesday. I will be going on April 26 (overnight flight) and comming back here on June 7. I have gathered itinerary, tickets, passport and some euro change, and my dad took the suitcases out ready for packing, which are still sitting empty in my messy room. I still need to go get an international driving permit, some euros from the bank, and the dreaded haircut my parents won’t let me leave without (I have kept my hair growing longer than usual nowadays, and since I don’t comb it, my parents don’t quite like it).

I will by flying Swiss, because they came out cheaper. I got window seats, on a standard economy row, as it seems that they don’t give you the option for that. I prefer window seats, to aisle seats, mainly for a couple of reasons: there actually is some extra room between the seat and the fuselage. I can snap pictures, and, I don’t have to get up everytime somebody’s blatter is full (I don’t usually need to use the lavatories). From browsing their site, it seems that they do have individual screens, which means I won’t have to stretch and squint to look at the screens like Air Canada, and have access to the trip stats whenever I want, but the content really seems mediocre, but must certainly be better than Air Canada’s redundant and mediocre CanCon junk. Last year it looked like some random advertising blitz for specialty channels aimed at stay-at-home women. Good lord! Seriously, leave these downright boring, action-less, dumb-storyline, PG-rated films in the closet because nobody really likes them! They DO, however advertise a “euro” radio channel. Home this means euro techno, and not the same old stupid pop. I have to give Air Canada some credit for their techno channel. They had devent music, if you were willing to part with the bass, because there was none! Anyway, I will definalely be loading my 1 GB mp3 player, you can be sure of that! I think I will be keeping my laptop for airport use though, as Swiss doesn’t have internet on their planes yet like Lufthansa does, but even if I did, I have a big lappy, and sardine class doesn’t make it too comfortable to use it.

Unfortunalely we are about a month away from that, and simply put, there’s still a big pile of academic sh** to go through. I have sinished my part of the ENGR paper yesterday, and I now have to work with the group to assemble it and get ready for the oral presentation. And guess what? Attendance will be taken to make us listen to the other groups bull (our presentation is bull too, as that’s what the course is all about). What a royal waste of time, especially towards the end of the semester! It’s times like these that make a purchase of a laptop worthwhile. At least I can get some useful stuff done.

As for the task manager, I am starting to look at the first iteration. Thankfully, the requirements were alleviated, and my teammates were right, it’s not as bad as I thought. I think we can pull it off pretty nicely. So yeah this is what constitutes the end-of-semester pile. This semester, my three finals don’t scare me really much. They really don’t seem too intimidating, as I know my stuff pretty well. But still, time teleportation to April 26, 12:00 AM would definately be a good alternative.

Sunday my neighbor came over to tell me that her sister had a problem with her computer. I guess, although my parents are constantly on my case because I take my sweet time fixing my customers’ computer problems, I *must* be doing somewhat of a decent job to get referrals like that. I don’t really do this for the money, but primairly as a service to friends and family. Often times I feel bad for these people, as they’ve got absolutely nobody to turn to if they want decent computer service, and as payment I usually ask as much as they feel comfortable paying, although the cost of materials is non-negotiable of course.

Their Gateway machine would not start up. Instead, Windows spat out an error message, saying that it could not read C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM. They apparently had that issue a year ago, and they told me they went to Microbytes which wiped all their data off and re-installed Windows. Now, I understand there are probably some Microsoft bashers that read here, and you can say whatever you want about Microsoft and Windows, but problems like this just don’t occur out of the blue. They are usually symptoms indicating another, perhaps more serious problem. So, as soon as I see the BIOS reporting a Maxtor hard disk, I load up the Maxtor diagnostic disc and demand a full surface scan. Low and behold, after just a few seconds, the program reports error code de9aec75. Unfortunately (or fortunately) the drive is no longer under warranty.

So now I will give them the news tomorrow. I hope the disk will at least let me recover their data before dying, as they were insisting that they had pictures in there as well as other stuff, and that whatever I did, I should make sure to keep their data safe. Yes, I know, I will give them the lecture about the importance of backing up stuff, saying that they’ve got absolutely NO excuse. They’ve got a CD burner. Blank CDs are cheap, DVD drives are also cheap, as well as blank DVDs, if they need to backup lots of data. That goes for everybody. Computer service people in general have better things to do in their day than to backup your data, they can’t do miracles when your hard disk fails, and data recovery is prohibitively expensive.

A friend of mine dropped in Saturday to do an assignment together. Of course, as is usually the case, we procrastinated and did anything “but” the assignment. In the process, he wanted to try this iTunes music sharing feature, so I downloaded iTunes, after years of refusal, because it did not play well with my older MP3 player, the Creative Nomad II.

With it came a pest called QuickTime. Along with RealPlayer, it ranks at the top when it comes to the most annoying software, excluding spyware, of course. Personally, I think it beats RealPlayer by far in terms of annoyance. Since I discovered QuickTime Alternative, I have been using it ever since. Saves me from the bloat and the crap Apple calls features they put in there. Specifically, my beef with quicktime can be summarized to the following:

Why would I pay for a codec?

A few years ago, Quicktime would harrass the user to upgrade to the pro version of the software, with benefits being mostly unclear. Seriously, what would I get? Better video? Ability to create quicktime content? Boo hoo. I just want to listen to web clips people put in quicktime, and I don’t think I should be paying for that. Anyway, although I have not seen the popup, it’s still there in the control panel applet. Look, I bought a PC “not” to get ripped off, now why, Apple, are you still desperately trying to rip me off?

Video clips open sites in web browser

Taunted as a leap in interactivity by its proponents, most media players have a “feature” that open up the browser to a URL if the content creator so decides. Sure, there can be useful information, but most of the times it’s another way for advertisements to make their way on your screen. So I call that a privacy risk; definately not a feature! Why, does coincidence have it that both Windows Media Player and even RealPlayer have an option to disable such a thing, but not Quicktime?

I really don’t know what to say about Apple, on one hand they do innovate, perhaps more that Microsoft, but on the other, they seriously deserve to get their but kicked.

So needless to say, back to Quicktime Alternative!

A few minutes after installing the memory, my mom comes down here because she can’t view her pictures from Greece, which are stored in my computer. Thinking it’s a routine misunderstanding between her and the machine, low and behold, I cannot see the network share. I go back to my PC, to see what’s going on, and I notice that the folder isn’t shared anymore. What could be wrong? I right-click on it, explorer freezes up. I double click, it reports a controller I/O error.

I shut down the machine, play around with the IDE ribbons, no luck. Load up the Maxtor diag program, which recommends a surface scan and then freezes up. So I re-boot the machine, ask for a surface scan, and low and behold, error code dea96a79. This is, I think the 10th Maxtor drive I have seen go down on me. Very, very reliable track record I see.

I believe the thing is still under warranty, as I bought it last year. Now I am debating whether I should buy a new disk of another brand and give it to my brother or suck it up and shove it in the drive bay. Yes, I did lose some data in there, but of not great importance. The family photo album is well backed up on other drives and CDs.

I finally bought my tickets to Greece today from Norko! That means I will be leaving on April 26, and returning June 7. That gives me a nice, well-deserved six-week vacation. I will be flying Swissair, with a transfer in Munich. That set me back 1010 loonies.

I also passed by Microbytes, and picked up 1 GB of RAM. I wanted 2, but 1024MB modules were back ordered, so I settled for 512 modules. Yeah, it’s true, 2G would have been overkill for a 1200 MHz system, but still

And these are the old modules. Basically two 256 MB DDR RAM modules, 266 MHz PC2100. If anybody wants them, they can have them for cheap.

My home PC, that I bought back in 2001 is starting to show signs of aging, and is in need of a serious upgrade. For the record, it’s an AMD Thunderbird 1200 MHz, 512 MB DDR RAM, 660 GB Disk, 32 MB video, something that was pretty high end back in the day. Since I pretty much don’t game at all, I think I could go another few years with it.

I have gotten really sick of this hourglass. Sometimes I just wish that it will shatter into pieces and the arrow will reappear from inside it, as I knock it on the screen’s edge. Other times I have the urge to unplug the stupid IDE cable in a fit of rage during its hard-disking binges, but that would create way more problems than it would solve. So most of the times I just swear it off. And I don’t want to smash my cordless desktop like I did many keyboards resting in peace in the storage room. I simply don’t understand why it has to go on a hard disk binge just to pull up the calculator. Well I actually do do, at 800 MB footprint, it has to swap. Ain’t swapping one of the few inventions that lower a computer’s performance rather than boosting it?

I don’t have any spyware. I don’t have any useless programs. They are all useful. As I am doing a lot of web programming these days, I often need to have several web browsers open all at once, pointing to the application under development, the thousands of API documentations (I need these, because Java seldom makes any sense), my Gmail, and perhaps a blog or two. I need Eclipse, which, we all know how performant that is, and my trusty old winamp playing music, my Gaim for web messenging, SSH and SFTP to upload/test on the development server and access the database, and a few explorer windows. Sometimes I also need a paint program to fix up my widgets.

So, I am thinking of a big expense tomorrow, (in addition to perhaps purchasing my plane tickets to Greece): RAM. Not just another stick, but more replacing my 2 x 256 with 2 x 512 or 2 x 1024. I’ve got 2 slots, and the board supports up to 2G of memory. At 120$ can. a piece for 1024 modules, I’m going to max out my slots and end the suffering. I hope I don’t get any problems, though, because this board killed a few RAM modules in the past. It is an Asus board after all.

It seems that Videotron, my ISP, has found another corner to cut. DNS queries have been consistently taking a few seconds too long to get resolved. I understand, their server might be overloaded, blah blah blah.

However, it seems that the dial-up DNS servers have nothing much to do these days, as even the dumbest of them all has a cable modem around here, so using these might give you a small boost.

So, as stated in their server addresses page, the dialup DNS servers are 205.151.222.250 and 205.151.222.251. I plugged these in my D-Link 714P+ router, in the WAN page under the Home tab.

Yeah, much better now.