Blog: Entries Tagged With 'programming'

I'm only about 20 years late to the party, but I finally added support for tags to my blog posts. I've retroactively applied tags to most of my posts, and clicking a tag will bring up all posts matching that tag.

I also fixed the search page, sorta. It's a little more flexible in finding results now and supports multiple keywords. The one limitation is that words smaller than 3 letters are not searchable (and thus ignored) due to how the database is configured.

So... why do I continue insisting on rolling my own code instead of embracing something like WordPress and the many features it offers? After all, I even set up a WordPress for the wife to use for her own blog.

Well, the purpose behind my blog and site has always been about chronicling and creating, and creating for me is just as much about building useful things as it is about writing content. And sometimes... I just build because it's fun. That drive to build things is what drew me to engineering in the first place, and was guiding my life even before I knew what a computer was.

Other than the wife, I don't know if there's anyone who still reads my blog. Life is kind of like that. But I'll keep writing and creating all the same. Not primarily for others (though if you are still here, thank you!), but because I find enjoyment in it.

So with my blog, as with life, there is more to come!

I chuckle when people write blog posts saying that they need to write more, but this is exactly what I'm now doing. Granted, I have more to write about than how infrequently I write, but there's so much stuff going on that doesn't fall under a unified blog post title, and I want the title to be slightly better than "Miscellaneous Stuff That's Been Going On."

I do, really, need to write more. So far this year I've written 5 entries, compared to the 17 last year, which is still less than every preceding year. Nothing's to blame but sheer laziness, or other priorities, if you will. However, in my weak defense, recently my PHP code that handles sessions broke when DreamHost upgraded my PHP version, so I wouldn't have been able to write entries easily (without firing up the MySQL Command-Line Tool, at least) if I wanted to. I've now fixed that issue as well as an anti-spam feature on my tagboard that was bugged. Hopefully I won't get as much spam as I used to, before I implement a better solution.

This weekend I attended Johnson and Emily's wedding in LA, where there were close to 600 people (including pretty much the entire CCAC church body) in attendance. The banquet was at a fancy Chinese restaurant, so I'm sure Johnson and Emily footed quite a bill. That just goes to show how much they love people and have a heart for serving. They're going to go into missions soon, I've heard.

Unrelated, Priscilla and I are taking a one month break to refocus on God as our number one priority, because too often we value each other more than we value God. I myself have some soul searching and apologetics studying to do, as I've been wrestling with doubts regarding my faith for quite some time. I want my faith to be built on a firm foundation of truth, so I think this time will be good to help me grow in my faith and to take it seriously, which will help me be the kind of spiritual leader I need to be.

The next couple weeks I'll also be busy cracking open the old CS books from college in preparation for an interview at Google. A recruiter found me through LinkedIn and wanted to get my resume, and I figured I'd give it a shot since I've always dreamed of working there. I know a few people there who confirmed that I'm a human and that I have a brain that functions sometimes, so the recruiters are skipping the customary phone screening and going straight to an on-site interview.

I listed my personal site on my resume, so Googlers will probably be reading this (hi Google). Maybe I shouldn't have mentioned that I'm lazy. Oops.

I just spent another whole day programming for fun when I was supposed to be studying. I'm sooooo addicted.

I've been programming almost non-stop today and yesterday, but it's been for fun, not for homework. I haven't even started my two homework assignments that are due tomorrow. I didn't even go to class today.

What's wrong with me?

Just about every computer enthusiast seems to have his/her own domain. Not wanting to be left out, I've officially joined the bandwagon.

Once I learn PHP, redesign my blog, and incorporate some other sites I've made, my new site will go up. It's going to look cooler and be better written and maintainable. Now if I could just find the time to do all that...

Since I'm the webmaster for our floor, I'm making a floor site. Today I programmed a tagboard and set it up on Kenny's server. I will be adapting the tagboard's code for use on my blog site, so sit tight!

I just realized that I'm learning 4 computer programming languages at once! Assembly programming in my Computer Science class, PERL in my Internet Publishing class, and ASP.NET and C# for the internship website project. I won't be surprised if I start mixing everything up. Sometimes I wish there was just one language that does everything....

5 friends from Van Nuys High (Anton, Kenny, Michael, Minh, and Raymond) and I had dinner at Island's burger bar, where we had a job interview with a guy named Joe, who is working on a TV show with a guy named Allen. Allen also works as a substitute teacher at Van Nuys, and he is apparently friends with Mr. Altshiller. Allen needed help with the programming the website for the TV show, so Altshiller recommended Michael to him, who in turn recommended all of us.

So very shortly and during the summer, the six of us will be learning a programming language called C# and working on the website database. Joe said the goal is to have fun even if the show goes nowhere (which is very possible in the media world), and this will be a great experience and something worthy to put on future resumes. But if the show is a success, we'll also get paid a little. =)

I spent the whole day just writing and debugging my Comp Sci project. Well, 5% writing and 95% debugging. Sad thing is, that is about normal for a computer programmer. Creating beautiful code only to find that it just refuses to work. Oh, the agony.

After my afternoon math discussion class today, I walked back to my dorm and did some math homework, then took a nap. When I woke up, I reminded myself that I had a computer project that I needed to finish and submit online by 9:00 pm. But I decided to keep working on math, being the kind of person who doesn't like to stop working on something until it's all done.

Around 6 o'clock, I decided that I really needed to get to my computer project. So I got to work on it, but at the end I had a somewhat serious problem I couldn't get rid of, so I jumped on AIM and talked to Kenny and he helped me sort it out. But I still needed to type out the report. By then it was past seven and I still hadn't eaten, so Sophonias and I hustled down to the Hedrick dining hall and swiped our cards to get in.

Only then did we realize that Hedrick was having a Japanese theme dinner, and that the place was consequently packed with three times as many people as there were chairs. The lines to get any sort of food whatsoever were unbearably long, and the 9 o'clock deadline was rapidly encroaching, so I stayed in the shortest line and got a bowl of Udon noodle soup, and then I went to the only thing that had no line, the dessert bar. I grabbed a few cookies and cornbread and found an empty seat and ate my meager dinner. Needless to say, it was a pretty sorry dinner. By then it was 8 o'clock, and I needed to hurry back and finish my project, so I grabbed 8 pieces of fruit (you're only supposed to take one fruit out of the building) and ran back to my room.

Then while my stomach was in agony, I hurriedly typed up the report, which consisted of recorded input and output to my program and some comments about any problems I encountered. At the bottom of the hour, I noticed that my program wasn't displaying significant figures exactly the way it was supposed to, so I frantically looked over my code and put in a few lines. Then the new code didn't work properly, so I had to change it a bit, and some more again after that. It was 8:55 when the code finally worked properly, so I quicky stuck all the project's files into a zip file and submitted it at 8:59, with one minute to spare. The moral of the story: don't procrastinate, and um, Udon soup is pretty unfilling, too.

This afternoon I went to the SEASnet Help Desk in Boelter Hall this afternoon to pick up my username and password for the SEASnet computer network, which allows me to use the computers in the several computer labs interspersed throughout Boelter. I went to another room in Boelter, where I picked up a full 6 CD Microsoft Visual Studio .net Professional pack. Since I'm enrolled in a programming class that uses that compiler, I get it for freeee.

Oh, and I also discovered that I had been spelling Rieber incorrectly as 'Reiber', so I had to fix all my blog entries. Finally.... Arnold won. But we all already knew he would.