Poked.net

I've not blogged much recently. I'm in the middle of a hectic and confusing part of my life as it might be considered. Its my final semester, and I'm dealing with all sorts of little things including:

• Finishing Thesis
• Trying to get 3 papers published by my graduation
• Trying to figure out where I will be working come July
• Trying to figure out what that means for my girlfriend
• Trying to figure out what that means for my company
• Laundry.

None of these items are really that big in the grand scheme of things unless I don't deal with them. Nevertheless, they seem looming and exciting in a big way. More on the exciting side. Only time will tell exactly where I'll end up, but time is flowing faster than I can keep up with it it feels.

I'm going back through teh old tag-board.com code and cleaning it up alot. I can tell that I've definitely gone a long way in my programming ability since then. The biggest difference is what I call copy/paste coding. If you ever write software and have to copy paste any significant part of code from one part of your software to another, there is something wrong. For example, one script I just did had 7 variables that represented a color. I needed to check that each of them was indeed a color using a regular expression and then output a slightly varied error message for each if it was not a color. Previously, there were some 50ish lines of code with the same handful of lines copy/pasted a dozen times. Now there is a function and a loop. It doesn't change the output of the programming, but it makes maintenance alot easier.

Yeah, so I wrote a client and a server for file transfer, using udp - managing my own datagram size, handling all possible error states, and writing the code very cleanly (classic class based layered architecture). The entire code (both client and server executables combined) are 68 lines of normal code (aka: each line is readable as a reasonable line of code). This was my first project ever coded in python. The project is for a class, but I decided to try python for the hell of it. It is pretty sweet.