October 24, 2005

Silly hurricanes. 8 in 14 months. Hurricane Wilma, the most intense hurricane ever recorded – in late October? Tropical Storm Alpha? You just gotta be kidding me that we ran out of names and have to start using the Greek alphabet. Those math equations will never be the same for some, I suspect. Back to Hurricane Wilma. Stats: Cat 3, moving about 20 mph, swiping across Florida 100 miles south of Orlando. So not much here except lots of rain and wind. I wake up at like 10:30 AM (hey, got the day off from school, might as well abuse it, right?), and it’s blowing like anything outside. Looking at the weather, I see that we are getting tropical force winds and the temperature outside is 63 degrees. What? Hurricanes and the first cold front of the year in the same day? What wacky weather we Floridian’s must put up with. <Sigh> At least it blew out quickly, by 1 PM the sun came out, the sky was blue, and it was a very cool blustery fall day. And no, I’m not interested in “Beta” testing any hurricane related software or hardware or anything, thank you very much!

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October 9, 2005

It is always interesting to see how the worst hack imaginable can sometimes actually get the job done remarkably well. Last night, in a 4 hour PHP coding stint, I wrote a small script to read in a schedule text file, parse it, and display the items, timeframes, people working on tasks, notes, and percent completed to display it on the robotics website. It’s gotta be the worst PHP you’ve ever seen, but looking at the webpage, you wouldn’t guess that.

Or take my C++ plugins project. In C++, you can’t have a function pointer that takes variable arguments. So unless you resort to assembly language, you have to have one function pointer for each number of parameters. One for a function with no parameters, another for a function with one parameter, and so forth. So if you want to support up to 20 parameters, you have to have 20 different function pointers, the only difference being the number of parameters they take. But to further complicate things, there are different calling conventions. So you have 20 for the C calling convention and then another 20 for the standard calling convention. It’s got to be some of the hackiest C++ code I’ve written, but it’s the only way and it accomplishes the goals so I can’t complain too much.

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