Entries Tagged 'Development' ↓

Anyone who’s been wondering what the hell I’ve been doing at work for the last long while can finally find out. Yep, even though we’ve got some cleaning up to do, we’re finally ready for folks to start using the software.

http://spicednow.com

Feel free to sign up for one of the free accounts and let me know what you think. If you find any problems with it, give me a shout and I’ll get them looked at ASAP.

I finally finished the piece of code that was kicking my ass over the last week or so. As soon as that was finished, I was able to get to sleep again. Don’t laugh, bad code gives me stressful bouts of insomnia.

I’m chalking it all up to a lack of experience with the .Net framework. Not the C# library stuff, that’s actually really well thought out, but the ASP.Net pieces. There’s a completely different mentality of programming going on here. This huge drive to abstract everything away and hide it under the covers. But also to kind of miss half of it. And at this point, a lot of the hiding looks arbitrary.

But that could just be me complaining.

I finished setting up the new machine (named Clarence Fontelroy III) over the weekend. It’s an old PII Compaq desktop that the office across the way was tossing. More than enough power for what I’m planning for it, which is to act like a Samba/CVS/Issue Tracking /Autobuilder. Out with the win95 and in with the Fedora Core 4, and all is ready to go.

I set up and configured VSFTP, SSH, PHP5, Apache, MySQL, and PhpMyAdmin. That’s about the minimum I need to work on the box for deveopment projects. I’ll look into adding Zope, Tomcat, and Rails later, but I really don’t need them right now. I’ve given PEAR a complete update, and I’m pretty much ready to go.

There are still a few things that I’m going to have to figure out. F’rinstance, which F/OSS tools do I want to use for building, CVS, project management, etc. I’d love them to work together pretty seamlessly, but I’m not holding out for that. As long as they’re scriptable I can set up the cron jobs.

I’m not too sure why I didn’t do this before. I like using these tools much more than I like the Windows equivalents. The price is right. It runs flawlessly on old hardware. All in all, exactly what I want.
And now off to rehearsal.

It’s been years since I’ve done an all night code session. I’m drained, my eyes are blurry, and my fingers have that dull ache, but damn it feels good.

The application generator that’s been stewing about in my brain (and in various intermediate versions) is finally finished. It’s not pretty, either in UI or in code, but it works. All the data updates and displays like it should and it should be fairly easy to extend it if needs be. All it needs now is a bit of code cleaning and a large refactor.

Here’s where it stands so far:

• Creates the intial directory structure;
• Reads the table structure from the database;
• Generates the data access layer;
• Generates and populates the view screens;
• Generates and populates the edit screens;
• Generates and populates the update screens;
• Generates and populates the list screens;
• Generates and populates the insert screens;
• Does the Right Thing tm when you hit the buttons;
• Generates and populates a decent menu;

Future versions – some features are much more important that others:

• Automatically populating lookups for table linkages;
• Automatically populating lookup fields for the views;
• A better interface – e.g. allowing e to turn off the display of some columns;
• joined table/miscellaneous query views;
• Addition of list parameters – next 10, prev 10 sort of thing – pretty easy;
• Addition of list sorting – click on the column header to sort – pretty easy;
• Auto data scrubbing – integer fields should only get ints – also easy and important;

All-in-all, not a bad night. I haven’t felt this productive in quite some time.

I’ve given myself a project for the holidays. Nothing large, just a small little application that will teach me both midi and C# as well as give me a good basis for algorithmic composition.

Here are the (admittedly minimal) specs:

• It must have a GUI front end;
• It must be able to generate midi format 0, 1, and 2;
• It must write the output to a file of my choosing;
• It must be able to generate based on multiple algorithms;
• There should be a plugin mechanism for adding more algorithms;

That should be good enough for the first stab.

From here I would like to be able to create a midi stream, but that can wait.