Someday the somethingteenth
Fri Feb 13, 2009 23:30 (UTC -5)This semester, I’ve got a lot of homework. It’s kind of odd. In previous semesters, I haven’t had much homework that I had to sit down and write out on paper and turn in a few days or a week later. Now I have regular homework assignments in three of my four classes, and they’re keeping me busy during most of the week.
I was up late last night working on a MIPS assembly programming assignment for my Computer Organization and Design class. For those of you who don’t know, programming in assembly language is the digital equivalent of going about your normal day without your right arm and your left leg. It takes a conscious effort and a lot of work not to fall over (or just give up on life).
One assignment was to ask the user for an arbitrary number of integers and then calculate how many of them were divisible by 4. This took me a couple or three hours. I tried using the “div” operator, but it wasn’t working the way I expected it to, so I had to find the divisibility of a number by 4 using other MIPS operators. I have discovered a truly marvelous way to do this, which this blog post is not boring enough to contain.
Something else: recently, someone on Slashdot asked, “How Will Recent Financial Downturns Affect IT Jobs?” The consensus, if you read the comments, is clear: do stuff. Grades don’t matter, experience does. Help out with an open source project, they say. I wish I had the time and knowhow to do that. (And, let’s face it, the inclination. Maybe there’s some program I would be interested in developing, but I don’t know what it would be.) Are any of you readers involved with that sort of stuff? Could you provide any tips for an Ubuntu user who doesn’t know how to compile from source?
A video from my friend TJ: Ninja Poetry. Could this be the next big viral video? He really did write the poem.
In 2001, C. Brian Smith had just graduated from college and was living in a new town when his only friend there invited him over for dinner at her family’s new house. Smith writes about his visits to the White House and what it was like to hang out with George W. Bush.
A look from the other side: Interview with an Adware Author. The guy actually started out with good intentions, but it became a slippery slope from there. (Via waxy.org)
Filed under Computers, Friends, Internet, Linux, Musings and Observations, Programming, Stuff, Weird
5 comments
#1 by Keith: Sun Feb 15, 2009 17:59 (UTC -5)
Well, if you want to develop, you need to decide what it might be. You’re using WordPress. Maybe you can think of a neat plugin or fix something in the core that bugs you. Make a list of things about software you use that bug you and fix them should be the first step. Personally, I’ve made two plugins for WordPress (well, technically three now), one of which I was paid to do (perhaps oddly enough, that’s the only one of the three that sucks; I honestly was constantly in fear of getting fired with every report I sent, but it was my fault for writing a proposal that was beyond my coding abilities).
My first actual programming was for FPC-Lazarus (an Object Pascal RAD, clone of Delphi). I did the Windows backend (there was already one, but it wouldn’t compile; basically the only thing I was able to keep was the function that converted constants into strings, but had to rewrite the rest from scratch). The last time I checked (a couple months ago), my name is still on the contributor’s list.
My next move was a reader of RSS 3.0, which I thought was cool. Sure, the author of the spec wrote it as a joke, but I was dying to make something (and I later extended it to support other feed formats: RSS 0.9/2.0, RSS 1.0, Atom, and ESF). I wrote it in PHP (with the PHP binding of GTK+), but it was too limited, so I’ve rewritten it in Object Pascal. The rewrite is pretty much on parity with the old one, except I haven’t written a GUI (it’s loosely coupled, so you can add one easily if you write the code, but personally I hate writing them and am content with using a console-based UI).
Recently, I moved from WordPress to b2evolution (after the mistreatment I’ve been getting from Matt Mullenweg for the last few years) and have written two plugins for it. One is closed source (but I’m not opposed to opening it, as I’ve noted on my blog). The other is open-source and includes a WordPress plugin (like 75% of the code is generic, so all I had to do was set up hooks that called the generic functions at the right time).
Compiling from source is easy. You get the source and extract it (from the .tar.gz or whatever), then you enter the directory it was extracted to in a console (gnome-terminal, konsole, xterm, whatever) and type:
./configure
make
sudo make install
You might have to type sudo ldconfig afterwards, if the configure script didn’t make the Makefile correctly. Well, anyway, that’ll work most of the time. The source should come with a file called INSTALL or INSTALLATION or have instructions in the README file, but computer people don’t read directions, as one of my professors said.
#2 by Jordon Kalilich: Sun Feb 15, 2009 19:12 (UTC -5)
That’s a good idea, making a list of things that bug you. I never thought about it that way, but that’s really what developers address most (all?) of the time.
As for compiling from source, there was a specific incident recently when I was following the directions as specified by the author of the program, which included the regular make install stuff, and I got a message saying that a package was missing. So I installed it and tried again and I got a bunch of crap on the screen. I was just frustrated that I didn’t know what was wrong. I might have more packages missing because they probably don’t come with Ubuntu by default.
#3 by TJ: Sun Feb 15, 2009 19:47 (UTC -5)
mmm.. ninja poetry…
#4 by Keith: Thu Feb 19, 2009 11:30 (UTC -5)
Hmm, it should catch that kind of stuff at the configure stage. I’d say, file a bug. BTW, you can also use checkinstall to install it, and then use the normal dpkg -r to remove it.
#5 by Jordon Kalilich: Thu Feb 19, 2009 20:35 (UTC -5)
It’s nothing I can file a bug for; it’s this. But I found an old Ubuntu package that worked fine.