You look at the clock. It’s 2245: Another 15 minutes coding before calling it a night.

You’re currently reading some notes on an obscure language called Lisp/Haskell/Erlang/Prolog (delete as appropriate).  Many times you’ve heard colleagues spurn these languages as being ‘too obtuse’ or ‘impractical’ – in short, they just don’t have any application in the real world

What do they know, right?

As you dig deeper into the language you see things that make sense- More elegant syntax, trivial parallelism, dynamic typing, functional programming.  If only this language were given a chance it could be great.  Each lesson learned leads to a new branch of experimentation fueled by a mixture of Pepsi and Doritos.

You look at the clock…

It’s 0100.

The shameless “I use twitter now.” post.

Well, it’s true. You can find me at: http://www.twitter.com/stuhacking

The thing that attracts me is the idea of a simple, free update service.  I use twitteriffic on OS X which pops up an unintrusive growl notification when people post- I’m sure similar programs exist for other platforms.

I submitted my dissertation and software reports today. As usual on a deadline, I had the work mostly complete when I arrived in the morning, so I was able to get them out of the way and avoid the rush for printers and binding machines.

That’s two projects down (the other was a fairly tedious business module).  I have a presentation to give on Friday which should hopefully finish off the research. Following this, I have just the one exam on 21st May – plenty of time to brush up on the subject.

I have applied for two PhD positions; hopefully I will continue to call myself a student come September.

“Beware the IDEs of March” — Julius Caesar

My software engineering professor enjoys a joke at my expense when it comes to opinions about development. We frequently end up in informal discussions about Software Engineering practice and a subject that crops up a lot is whether or not to use an IDE (integrated Development Environment) such as Eclipse or Netbeans. Using an IDE does provide some merit, especially if it offers levels of collaboration, code management and updating that would be beneficial in a team scenario. However, the drawback I see from most IDEs is the amount of fluff I don’t need which insists on being there anyway. Sometimes I struggle to find my code behind all that UI.

Our conversation jumps back and forth between features such as code sense and inline documentation and he will make the case for refactoring tools ensuring that code is clean and he will readily admit that IDEs are fairly bulky but in the long run, text editors and command lines just don’t cut it for large projects. I don’t disagree (the aforementioned tools are very useful), but he has yet to convince me that a minimal environment cannot provide the features of an IDE. The other plus of a minimal environment is that resource use will be much lower- nothing will be running by default, it will respond to the programmers requests to do things.

My point is, while access to versioning systems, debugging, inline documentation, re-factoring and code sense are all very attractive features, I don’t need them all the time. IDEs rarely provide the ability to turn off those less frequently used features.

To make a case against IDEs I wish to propose a reasonably scalable command line based process (based on and extending the way I have been working on my own individual projects). In order to make an effective counter argument I need to address some of those ‘essential features’ of an IDE.

Pros for using an IDE (in no particular order):

1. Debugging
2. Source file navigation
3. compiles, links and runs at a keypress
4. auto-completion (codesense)
5. inline documentation
6. coding standards enforced
7. re-factoring facilities
8. trivial code generation (get/set)
9. Source control

In a series of posts I will outline (and refine) the way I work ensuring that I can effectively and elegantly satisfy the features given above. I intend to introduce the tools I use for editing code and testing and probably a few scripts to automate the tedious tasks. I work on OS X but expect this system will easily port to Linux or another UNIX based system running bash. I won’t explicitly guarantee success in using this on Windows but if you grab a copy of some UNIX command line tools I don’t see a serious problem.

Initially Expected Topics (which I’ll order according to complexity/work required to implement):

1. Setup and program execution
2. Source Editor
3. Debugger
4. Extracting Documentation
5. Source Control
6. Trivial Code Generation & Standards
7. Auto-Completion
8. Re-factoring

I’ve started getting into Nethack much more recently. It turns out that with a little patience overcoming the initial hurdle of graphics and controls, it is a very rewarding game for fans of RPGs. Unfortunately, it requires a fair bit of practice to become good at the game and I’m still fairly new as evidenced by my latest YASD: Killed by a small dog while helpless.

I finally did something I should have done a long time ago and bought a macBook. It’s wonderful – like Linux only hardware works; like Windows only it doesn’t look like crap…and hardware works.A lot of thing on Windows I had started to take for granted: “If I want to do this, I must first do that” or “This works when that is already running” but OSX seems to take care of a lot of this stuff under the bonnet, so to speak.

The Mac came with a plethora of software for it’s internal peripherals and features – web browsing, photo software, iTunes, quicktime – pretty much what you’d expect. Further to this the apple development tools is a free package adding a good gigabyte of extra tools, SDKs, documentation and utilities. Add to that Mactex and Emacs and you’ve pretty much got a complete development station.Package management is dead easy – in most cases simply dragging the application into the ‘applications’ directory.

The User Interface is very smooth without being obnoxious. I for one am very fond of seeing windows slide off the screen and back in… my brain seems to comprehend window management when bits and pieces move around for it.If I have but one complaint, it’s that I seem to require almost an entire installation of Gnome just to get Gimp up and running: It may be time to explore the image editing market again.

[edit] It turns out there is now a rather nice Gimp package for OS X.

Most people will agree that threads are an important part of most useful software systems. They allow the computer to go off and work on something while the user continues to enjoy interaction with the rest of the system – In fact most GUI applications are a prime example of threading – The interface is running separate from the core of the application to ensure that if the application dies behind the scenes it doesn’t necessarily take the rest of the computer with it. (However some win32 applications would have us believe otherwise)

The problem with constructing threads, however, is usually the housekeeping that needs to go into the background. We need to think about the data interactions and decide what data needs to be encapsulated in mutual exclusive surroundings for safety. Then we need to design the thread(s) that will modify this data.

Suppose, however, that you just want to despatch very simple threads that will run a single function. Why bother doing that tedious work? Well, after a quick look at how standard python handles threading I thought of a neat way that one might create a generic thread handler to request functions to be done neatly in the background. This code was written with a vanilla installation of Python 2.4 on Windows XP. I don’t know enough about Python to write ‘OS specific’ code so it should work on most machines.
ALSO: Since python is a live interpreter all this code can simply be typed into the python shell.

The first step is to import the python threading library

import threading

Now Here’s a simple function:

def factorial( n ):
if n == 0:
return 1
else:
return n * factorial(n-1)

Very simply takes a number and returns the factorial. I realise that it’s not the most practical way to implement factorial but it’ll do for a demo. What I’m going to do now is write a thread class making use of pythons groovy function pointers:

class AsyncFunc(threading.Thread):
def __init__(self, func, n):
threading.Thread.__init__(self)
self.function, self.arg = func, n
def run(self):
self.result = self.function(self.arg)
print “result: “, self.result

Pay attention to the parameters in the class header – the class extends threading.Thread. This means that we want to call the constructor of the supserclass and this is done in the first line of __init__. (__init__ is just python’s fun way of implementing constructors). We create an instance of AsyncFunc giving it a function and an argument (I have only shown a demo for single argument functions – things like square, factorial, fibbonacci.) and these are stored as members in the class.

The run method is the sequence of execution that will happen when the process scheduler tells this class it can start working.In this case all we want to do is run our function with the argument given. This is a really, really, truly cool feature of python that I love – the self.function member is actually a link to the factorial function which we passed in as a parameter – you can’t do this in Java!!

At the end of run I’ve just told it to print the result to let us know it’s finished – in a real world scenario we may also pass a buffer address to the function so that we can get access to the result from our main process.

We are now ready to start using our threaded system and it’s as simple as this. first declare an instance of an AsyncFunc:

bgFactorial = AsyncFunc(factorial, 5)

and then pass it to the process scheduler:

bgFactorial.start()

In no time at all the result will be returned – but rest assured it happened in another thread. You can redefine your AsyncFunc with larger values and see that it takes longer but doesn’t disrupt your work.

Just for a laugh I added the following loop scenario – a word of caution though, you may either spawn more threads than the python system can comfortably handle, or you may exceed the maximum recursion depth (because the factorial definition is not great)

for i in range(1000):
temp = AsyncFunc(factorial, i)
temp.start()

I managed to grind my python session to a halt, but it’s all a bit of fun anyway.

Hopefully this has been a little insightful or interesting. I was trying to capture something similar to the Microthreading that can be used in Stackless python

As of Monday 26th March Ulsterbus raised their prices yet again. However, I figured from experience that this information would not yet be apparent on Translink’s website. I was surprised to find that indeed they have already updated their site with the new ticket consessions – however they are still advertising the student return ticket at the old prices.

Seeing an opportunity I decided that I would only pay £4, no matter how far I had to fight it!

The bus driver was the first obstacle. I handed him the £4 and said “Student return to Belfast, please.” He punched it in – £4.10 came up. Undaunted I told him that the translink website was advertising the student return at £4. He replied “Well, this machine says £4.10.” A slight argument ensued and his finishing move was to tell me that either I pay £4.10 or I stay in Ballyclare. The offer to take it up with an inspector at the depot was presented.

On arriving at the depot I tell the driver that I will only be a minute. I approached the office and stated my case. The inspector responds that maybe the website just hasn’t been update yet and asks when I checked it. Calmly, I inform him that it was only about 20 minutes ago; that the ticket prices had been updated on the website, and finally that the student return was still being advertised at £4. He spent that next 10 minutes on the phone to customer services.

I was next told that since the Ballyclare depot has no internet access my claim cannot be backed up, a rather lame counterpoint I thought and the inspector made no false inpression that he was in any way impressed by my quest for a 10p refund on my ticket.

This is the situation at the moment: If I can produce a printout of their website showing this falsely presented information then Ulsterbus will gladly write me a cheque for 10 pence.

I just want to say at this point that I’m not doing this for the money, but more for the reason that Ulsterbus will gladly defend their right to present inaccurate information and expect the consumers to put up with it.

Andres’ thoughts – Top ten things ten years of professional software development has taught me

This article really rings true, especially if you end up working at a large company. I know when I worked at Microsoft being able to talk to the other developers and managers was much more important than knowing every last thing about C# or C++.

Wow… It’s been what? 3 months since the last CG Film was released. Some of us may have been hoping that the novelty had finally wore off – That stories could once again be told through the most suitable medium rather than being wrapped into that template applied to animation.

Fear not however as some unknown company (that’s right.. apparently no-one is owning up to this as of yet) has created just the movie to capture our imaginations and transport us into a childhood land of fantasy.

The movie? Well – it’s The Reef released on the 9th March in the UK.

The story explores the unfamiliar waters of a child who is separated from his parents and makes a new life on a reef – it’s almost an original plot already. Some of the characters you may not have recognised before – There’s a Pelican, at least one turtle, and a nasty shark who appears to be sneaking up on our heroes with a friendly smile on his face… Wait a minute. I’m sure I’ve seen that smile before…

Of course I have, because Pixar already released this movie 4 years ago. How could I forget.

“Hey… unknown company! Didn’t you realise we moved onto vehicles this year? Hurry up and give us more cars!”

Come to think of it, Dreamworks have not yet released their own movie about vehicles. It seems odd for a company who’s current practice seems to be closely imitating Pixar but with more celebrity voiceovers.

(After a little more scouting I have discovered that the company responsible for this is ‘Digiart,’ however I intend to leave the post as is because ‘unknown company’ has better rhythm)