Late night

Wowee. It is awfully late (for me) but I am so pumped that I felt obligated to post to declare my triumph. Last week I decided I was going to write a Win32 C program to play wav files for no reason other than I've never done anything like this. I did some simple C stuff in Linux in college with a smidgeon of Visual C++, but I've long forgotten most of that.

It took me a long evening last week to get Visual Studio installed and a simple Hello World program compiled and running with debug symbols. Since Visual Studio Express Edition is free and missing all sorts of functionality, I had to download a freeware resource file editor and a hex editor for examining the file format of wav files . Every single step of getting anything working required me to do an Internet search; basically I had (have?) no clue what I'm doing. Setting up a win32 development environment is obviously a whole lot different than a C environment on Linux (which is nearly always set up by default upon installation) or a Java environment.

As for general Visual Studio observations, maybe it's because I have the free edition or maybe because I'm blind and can't find it, but I am really missing refactoring support like in a current Java IDE. That's my main complaint at the moment.

But to finally get to my massive accomplishment of the night: I was able to finally get a wav file playing. My main problem was exactly this, most like resulting from the fact that I completely forgot about fundamental concepts like the stack and variable scope. That took me a good 3-4 hours to figure out; I've been spoiled by Java's garbage collecting. Now to get something other than an empty frame with random message boxes in my program...

Or maybe I'll just go to bed.

Neat pictures

I don't feel like writing anything meaningful (not that I ever do...), so instead here's the link to the photos of my Colorado trip. Enjoy. I certainly did.

FYI, pictures can't do justice to the view at the top, but they give you a little idea of how mindblowingly awesome it is up there.

Vacation

Let me tell you a tale of men and mice, of victory and defeat, of rain and thirst...let me tell you a tale of my vacation...

Last week was my first vacation since I entered the real world (dang it) last May, my first loooong overdue vacation. The majority of it was spent doing a whole lot of nothing, but the story does not end there.

We (Dad and I) took a little trip to a place called Mt. Massive, Colorado; and there the story begins. To summarize, here are some travel tips for those readers who think they want to go climb a big mountain:

1. Don't use a tent manufactured circa 1975. It is pretty much guaranteed to not be waterproof.
2. Don't try to pitch said tent in the pouring rain, especially when the rain will stop in thirty minutes.
3. Do take enough water so that you don't run out in the middle of your trip and nearly die from dehydration.
4. Definitely do it again next year.

If you haven't figured out the highlights of the trip, I'll summarize:

We used a tent manufactured circa 1975. We pitched it during the pouring rain that stopped about a half hour later. The tent leaked and Dad woke up in a big damp spot in the middle of the night. Ironically, after all this rain, we didn't take enough water for our 9 hour hike and ran out before we got done; allow me to remind everyone that this is pretty much the stupidest thing one can do while on a hiking trip. Always bring plenty of water! Amidst all this fun stuff, we did, in fact, make it to the top of Mt Massive (14,421 grueling feet high) and it was pretty much the coolest experience ever. And by "coolest" I mean "most painful." We will definitely be doing this all over again next year.

My goal for this trip was to endure enough pain and terror (I'm scared of heights) to make me want to go back to work on Monday. Alas, I haven't reached that point, but I got close.

Fashion or function?

Apple products are fashion accessories, which is why I will never buy them. I am a utilitarian when it comes to electronics: whatever works the fastest, the most reliably, and for the best cost is what I want to use. Apple makes products that look pretty slick and have nice user interfaces, but they absolutely gouge customers on price. I think the iPhone costs something like $250 to make, and they sell it for $500. The iMac costs $1500 or so, and you could definitely buy an equivalent desktop for half that. No, the desktop would not be 3 millimeters thick or whatever they are down to now, but I don't give a crap how thin my PC is. My cubicle at work and my desk at home definitely aren't gigantic, but they definitely have ample room for a desktop computer. So if you like to "look cool" while using your electronics, feel free to pay a premium for that experience. As for me, give me Linux and a big water-cooled case.

Palm in da house

So I spent the last couple days trying to set up a development environment for my new (and by "new" I mean "secondhand-approximately-3-years-old") Palm Zire 72. Given that my past experience with programming on anything except a PC is pretty much zilch (except for one brief escapade into J2ME with a Hello World program that ran on the slowest Nokia-something-or-other-handheld-emulator in existence), I have to say I have done pretty well. Yesterday I got a Hello World program compiled and running on the Palm OS simulator and today I finally got debugging to work. Congratulations to me!

You can get everything you need here; you have to register but all the downloads are free. They have a package you can download that includes the whole build toolchain, Eclipse IDE and plugins, and simulators/emulators, but since I hate Eclipse and I wanted to feel like a man, I set everything up manually with Cygwin. Yes, I do in fact derive my manhood from programming and debugging from a terminal; deal with it.

Hopefully I can actually get a useful program (or at least something more useful than a textbox displaying "Hello World" working in the next few days. We'll see what happens.

Yowza

I normally think of theserverside.com as a pretty reputable site with fairly good articles. Then today I saw this article. Wowee. Of all the ridiculous things to say, and it was posted on theserverside? Who's in charge here? I demand accountability!

I'm fairly sure that there's a few problems slightly, just slightly, more significant than the package structure of Java, which took me, and I'm sure 99% of Java programmers about 3 seconds to understand. All would be fine and well if the post was about how the package structure doesn't make sense, but to say that it is the most significant problem in Java? Are you kidding me? Simply mind boggling.

This sort of thing probably convinced Eric to quit blogging.