Last night a LiVEJOURNAL saved my life...
Amazing, but true - this LiVEJOURNAL, MY livejournal saved my academic career from almost certain ruin.
So how did this all happen?
Well, it goes a little like this:
As you all know from my last two posts, I've been having a lot of trouble on a certain assignment.
Yesterday, late in the day, I went and asked for some help on the finer points of the program from my Lecturer. We sat in his office for quite some time, and figured quite a few things out. These would have been great if he had actually answered my original question and helped me out with the Constructors and Destructors. It took another hour to communicate this problem to him, and then almost another again to figure out that we BOTH had no idea. He told me to email my code to him, and let him have a look at it - and he'd get back to me.
So, with that, I pulled up a keyboard and went about emailing him the files.
Of course I thought I'd be a smart arse and use the 'mail' command and show off my knowledge of the system - so away I type. I didn't know what I did wrong at that moment, but the command didn't work. Rather than bugger around further, I went to the system's email program and sent him a copy that way.
That done, we decided that he's have a look and see what was wrong - and I'd go back to the computer labs and work a bit more on the program. So, trundling by the vending machines to add another 50g of snacks and another 600 ml of coke to my Assignment Vital Statistics tally - I went and grabbed myself a computer in MCL3 to continue working on the assignment.
I logged in, opened a terminal, changed to my assignment directory, opened the class file, made a few changes, then went to see if it compiled and ran... and it didn't!
The compiler said that there was a problem with my main file. That is for the layman the file that runs everything - and for the LiVEJOURNL reader, the code I put up here as an entry last Friday. This was peculiar - because when I last checked, everything worked with the main file - and I had made no changes.
So, ever curious, I opened the file up to have a look - AND FOUND MY WHOLE PROGRAM GONE!
All that was there was one line of text saying that this was an empty dead.letter file created by the system for my email.
I freaked!
I tried to open it again - still nothing.
I tried to see if it had somehow moved somewhere else - it hadn't.
I went to see if the lecturer had the right copy - he didn't.
I asked the System Administrator about it - his jaw dropped.
I asked him, "Am I fucked?"
He said "Yep."
My eyes went wide. I started to shake as I realised the enormity of how much I needed to reconstruct - FROM SCRATCH! I couldn't take it anymore. I decided to get out and fuck the whole thing - abandon it all and get ZERO for the assignment.
Then I remembered Friday's procrastination - that I had posted my User Interface up on LiVEJOURNAL.
I breathed a sigh of relief - the whole re-construction task wasn't so big any more - I could copy my UI from my journal post.
I was SAVED!
And that was how last night, this LiVEJOURNAL, my LiVEJOURNAL saved my life...
PS: I realised later that the 'mail' command that didn't work may have caused the problem.
PPS: The assignment is still not done, and now a day late.
PPPS: I thought the subject line was catchy too...
PPPPS: Now back to re-construction and implementation...
So how did this all happen?
Well, it goes a little like this:
As you all know from my last two posts, I've been having a lot of trouble on a certain assignment.
Yesterday, late in the day, I went and asked for some help on the finer points of the program from my Lecturer. We sat in his office for quite some time, and figured quite a few things out. These would have been great if he had actually answered my original question and helped me out with the Constructors and Destructors. It took another hour to communicate this problem to him, and then almost another again to figure out that we BOTH had no idea. He told me to email my code to him, and let him have a look at it - and he'd get back to me.
So, with that, I pulled up a keyboard and went about emailing him the files.
Of course I thought I'd be a smart arse and use the 'mail' command and show off my knowledge of the system - so away I type. I didn't know what I did wrong at that moment, but the command didn't work. Rather than bugger around further, I went to the system's email program and sent him a copy that way.
That done, we decided that he's have a look and see what was wrong - and I'd go back to the computer labs and work a bit more on the program. So, trundling by the vending machines to add another 50g of snacks and another 600 ml of coke to my Assignment Vital Statistics tally - I went and grabbed myself a computer in MCL3 to continue working on the assignment.
I logged in, opened a terminal, changed to my assignment directory, opened the class file, made a few changes, then went to see if it compiled and ran... and it didn't!
The compiler said that there was a problem with my main file. That is for the layman the file that runs everything - and for the LiVEJOURNL reader, the code I put up here as an entry last Friday. This was peculiar - because when I last checked, everything worked with the main file - and I had made no changes.
So, ever curious, I opened the file up to have a look - AND FOUND MY WHOLE PROGRAM GONE!
All that was there was one line of text saying that this was an empty dead.letter file created by the system for my email.
I freaked!
I tried to open it again - still nothing.
I tried to see if it had somehow moved somewhere else - it hadn't.
I went to see if the lecturer had the right copy - he didn't.
I asked the System Administrator about it - his jaw dropped.
I asked him, "Am I fucked?"
He said "Yep."
My eyes went wide. I started to shake as I realised the enormity of how much I needed to reconstruct - FROM SCRATCH! I couldn't take it anymore. I decided to get out and fuck the whole thing - abandon it all and get ZERO for the assignment.
Then I remembered Friday's procrastination - that I had posted my User Interface up on LiVEJOURNAL.
I breathed a sigh of relief - the whole re-construction task wasn't so big any more - I could copy my UI from my journal post.
I was SAVED!
And that was how last night, this LiVEJOURNAL, my LiVEJOURNAL saved my life...
PS: I realised later that the 'mail' command that didn't work may have caused the problem.
PPS: The assignment is still not done, and now a day late.
PPPS: I thought the subject line was catchy too...
PPPPS: Now back to re-construction and implementation...