My Apprenticeship - Monday, August 2, 2004

This summer I'm revisiting my short apprenticeship at Object Mentor. I'll be posting commentary on all my posts from the summer of 2004 exactly 5 years later to the day.

Monday 8-2-04

Word Press has been successfully installed on the Object Mentor servers and 'ButUncleBob.com' should be available for blogging in a few days. So head on over there sometime soon and pick a fight with Bob Martin about some XP practice or other.

The install, as usual, was a bit of a problem until we realized that since PHP and MySQL were installed separately, we had to run a program to make them talk to each other. Said program was downloaded, installed, and then everything went smoothly. Nice.

Micah has now officially charged me with making a chess program to compete with his creation. Baby steps, Micah. First I gotta get it to let two humans play each other. After some discussion I've given up on my 'special moves class' because it's way more of a maintenance nightmare then the problem it's supposed to solve (letting ChessPieces know about the ChessBoard). I also want to finish my TDD version of Tic Tac Toe. The Land of Linux was fun to visit, but it's good to be back writing some tests and makin' 'em pass.

Yeah, I kinda stayed away from Linux for awhile after that first experience. It's all summed up here in a nice and cute sorta way but there was a few weeks there of coming in every day and feeling like my operating system was out to get me. I literally knew nothing about using 'Nix OS so every problem was hampered by the fact that even the simplest of things (like using ps and grep to find out what was running, or the 'which' command, or where command paths were stored, etc.) was a herculean task in the face of my limited abilities.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What's a Good Flog Score?

I've been using Flog to measure the complexity of my Ruby code and I was wondering how others interpret Flog numbers. I'll go first with my opinions: Score of Means 0-10 Awesome 11-20 Good enough 21-40 Might need refactoring 41-60 Possible to justify 61-100 Danger 100-200 Whoop, whoop, whoop 200 + Someone please think of the children (note: these are scores for an individual method) The 20 - 60 range is interesting to me. Sometimes the complexity of what you're doing will justify the score and other times the method is in desperate need of refactoring. The highest Flog score I've seen in the wild was in the 300's. What's you're personal high and what do you think of my rankings? In other news, I've redesigned the look of my blog so if you only see my post through a reader you might want to stop on by, take a look, and tell me what you think.
Read more

SICP Wasn’t Written for You

The number of software luminaries who sing the praises of “ Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs ” (referred to as SICP) is such a long list that you might think only a crazy person would take issue with it. However, to ignore SICP’s problems and continue to blindly recommend it seems just as crazy. SICP was the textbook for MIT’s introductory programming class and was a bit of a departure from other into to computer science textbooks at the time.  Wikipedia sums it up nicely:  “Before SICP, the introductory courses were almost always filled with learning the details of some programming language, while SICP focuses on finding general patterns from specific problems and building software tools that embody each pattern.”  Which sounds awesome, but does essentially say that abstract principles will be introduced before the nuts and bolts of a language.  If you think about that for a minute, you may see where the problems will be. When I was training to be a teacher I took a b
Read more

Point Inside a Polygon in Ruby

Recently my team needed to find out if a point was inside a given polygon and, as usual, we found some code on the internet that did what we wanted. And, as usual, there wasn't much explanation as to what it was doing. Here's the code (after we converted it to Ruby): 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 def contains_point? (point) c = false i = -1 j = self .size - 1 while (i += 1 ) < self .size if (( self [i].y <= point.y && point.y < self [j].y) || ( self [j].y <= point.y && point.y < self [i].y)) if (point.x < ( self [j].x - self [i].x) * (point.y - self [i].y) / ( self [j].y - self [i].y) + self [i].x) c = !c end end j = i end return c end end So, you know, it works and I'm grateful to somebody for posting it but we had no idea how it works. So we wrapped 2 tests around it (one where the point is not in the polygon and another where it is
Read more