I Hunger...
Yikes, once again, my LJ has lost momentum. To think I'd planned a while back to update weekly... I'm not even making posts monthly!
Well, starting with most recent events, my parents are out of town on their annual camping trip. Thankfully, they took my little sister with them, so that's good, but unfortunately, they left my older and younger brother.
While the house's cleanliness has naturally quickly degraded, the more pressing issue is food. Given that all 3 of us are here, living off of a shared food supply, we all tried to eat as much of the frozen and canned food as quickly as possible before our other siblings did. of course, as a result, most of the existing food supply is depleted. My two brothers work at the local Boston Pizza so they're both able to aquire cheap/free food from there, but in the meantime, my job doesn't exactly get me free food (except on Fridays, of course, but more on that later). So I've been scavenging around the house fruitlessly (if you'll excuse the pun) for something sustainable to eat.
Yesterday, I came across a large (like 5kg) bag of rice, and have been making that, but dang, I need to learn how to cook it properly; my first batch came out "crunchy". :P :P :P :P
On a different note, against my better judgment, I didn't give up on "Go" yet. Part of the reason is because I found this guy at work that also plays and is very close to my skill level too. We've been having a game every day at lunch, and sometimes even more (usually if I beat him badly, he immediately demands a re-match ;) ). He also let me borrow two Go books of his, and I've finished one, and am about a quarter the way through the second one. I just can't explain it, but something about the game is just so darn addictive. Unlike chess, every game of Go is completely different, and while there are a set of "standard" opening moves, etc, you can actually successfully create pretty much any opening pattern you want so long as you remain consistent, and have a solid plan. The game encourages a large amount of creativity and improvisation.
Finally, about work....
The summer's winding down so naturally, there's a big crunch involved in trying to get as much done as possible. While I really liked this job, I'm glad that it's ending. I will miss the environment, the people I worked with, and the free pizza Fridays, (well, free if you attend the seminar) but I won't miss Orts. The program itself could best be described as a marvel of programming, but an atrocity of software engineering. While on the exterior, it does amazing things and is remarkably efficient, internally, it's a nightmare. There are entire source-code files without a single comment. Most other documentation is old and inaccurate. Methods and variables have cryptic and non-intuitive names like "cnv" and "tt1". While loops and For loops are replaced with macros such as FORALL, and FORS... Entire methods exist that are never called, and some variables and arrays are never used. It feels like the entire program was rushed to get as much done as fast as possible, and time was never taken to go back and fix things. While it's fine so long as the original developer is working on it, if someone else tries to work on it, they'll be hopelessly lost. If new people try to do something as advanced as ripping out the old graphics engine and putting in a new one without breaking any of the other code the task becomes border-line impossible.
It's getting there, and I'd say that the graphics engine is about half-converted. If the original developer of the program was present (he's at BioWare now) and I had more time (there's a week left) and my partner was a 4th-year (he's a 2nd-year). Then I think it would've been possible to completely convert the graphics engine over. But, alas, the stars were not it alignment, and my job will end with the engine incomplete. I was hoping to use the prof as a reference for later job applications, but now I'm starting to think that might not be such a good idea anymore... Oh well, it could have been worse: I could've been working at Super Store ;)
Well, starting with most recent events, my parents are out of town on their annual camping trip. Thankfully, they took my little sister with them, so that's good, but unfortunately, they left my older and younger brother.
While the house's cleanliness has naturally quickly degraded, the more pressing issue is food. Given that all 3 of us are here, living off of a shared food supply, we all tried to eat as much of the frozen and canned food as quickly as possible before our other siblings did. of course, as a result, most of the existing food supply is depleted. My two brothers work at the local Boston Pizza so they're both able to aquire cheap/free food from there, but in the meantime, my job doesn't exactly get me free food (except on Fridays, of course, but more on that later). So I've been scavenging around the house fruitlessly (if you'll excuse the pun) for something sustainable to eat.
Yesterday, I came across a large (like 5kg) bag of rice, and have been making that, but dang, I need to learn how to cook it properly; my first batch came out "crunchy". :P :P :P :P
On a different note, against my better judgment, I didn't give up on "Go" yet. Part of the reason is because I found this guy at work that also plays and is very close to my skill level too. We've been having a game every day at lunch, and sometimes even more (usually if I beat him badly, he immediately demands a re-match ;) ). He also let me borrow two Go books of his, and I've finished one, and am about a quarter the way through the second one. I just can't explain it, but something about the game is just so darn addictive. Unlike chess, every game of Go is completely different, and while there are a set of "standard" opening moves, etc, you can actually successfully create pretty much any opening pattern you want so long as you remain consistent, and have a solid plan. The game encourages a large amount of creativity and improvisation.
Finally, about work....
The summer's winding down so naturally, there's a big crunch involved in trying to get as much done as possible. While I really liked this job, I'm glad that it's ending. I will miss the environment, the people I worked with, and the free pizza Fridays, (well, free if you attend the seminar) but I won't miss Orts. The program itself could best be described as a marvel of programming, but an atrocity of software engineering. While on the exterior, it does amazing things and is remarkably efficient, internally, it's a nightmare. There are entire source-code files without a single comment. Most other documentation is old and inaccurate. Methods and variables have cryptic and non-intuitive names like "cnv" and "tt1". While loops and For loops are replaced with macros such as FORALL, and FORS... Entire methods exist that are never called, and some variables and arrays are never used. It feels like the entire program was rushed to get as much done as fast as possible, and time was never taken to go back and fix things. While it's fine so long as the original developer is working on it, if someone else tries to work on it, they'll be hopelessly lost. If new people try to do something as advanced as ripping out the old graphics engine and putting in a new one without breaking any of the other code the task becomes border-line impossible.
It's getting there, and I'd say that the graphics engine is about half-converted. If the original developer of the program was present (he's at BioWare now) and I had more time (there's a week left) and my partner was a 4th-year (he's a 2nd-year). Then I think it would've been possible to completely convert the graphics engine over. But, alas, the stars were not it alignment, and my job will end with the engine incomplete. I was hoping to use the prof as a reference for later job applications, but now I'm starting to think that might not be such a good idea anymore... Oh well, it could have been worse: I could've been working at Super Store ;)