Braindead Ramblings from a Tired Mind
And here I stand, yawning into the abyss of extreme tiredness.
Yeah, I pulled an all-nighter for some reason. For the last few days I’ve been in a bit of a brain slump, just unable to concentrate properly and generally being a bit slow when it comes to general problem solving abilities. For programming, this does not bode well.
Last night though, I suddenly came out of it and was on a coding roll, so I didn’t want to stop to sleep and risk losing it for this damn coding malaise I was going through so instead, code, code, code and more code.
It’s particularly good that I powered through because the code related to paypal – all the developers in the from emit a groan – yes, horrible, horrible paypal with it’s ugly, badly documented APIs, stupid bugs and lacking feature set. Not fun, I can assure you, though tonight I didn’t mind.
I also had fun helping out a friend reverse engineer a formula from a set of outputs for a series of known inputs. A surprisingly fun challenge that led me to use graphs to compare curves in the input and outputs, to see if there were any correlations, patterns, etc. It’s reminded me a lot of harmonics from my electronics studies actually, even though the subject matter was entirely unrelated. Also, had some fun messing about with simultaneous equations as a way to attack the problem but those were mostly a dead end really, since we had no idea what operands there were in place for the inputs. Worked it out eventually though after a set of joint hacking in a google doc spreadsheet. Surprisingly fun.
Speaking of coding, I’d like to say my super not-really-secret-I-just-don’t-talk-about-it project is coming along smoothly but it isn’t really. I keep finding unimportant things to work on with it, like adding multiple locale support with a proper range of tests but keep hitting walls trying to test setting the locale using rack middleware. Bloody annoying, I can tell you. I’ve decided I rather like pivotal tracker, an agile project management webapp that is free to use and so I’m using it for tracking progress on this project of mine and logging all the feature ideas that pop into my head. I’ve been playing with some integrations with it’s API, such as automatically setting up and syncing cucumber features with pivotal stories. Yes, for anyone who has no idea what I’m talking about, I’m not going on about the vegetables, but rather a nice testing system in ruby.
I’m writing this feeling very tired about now, so I have very little idea as to whether anything will come out making and sense at all. I’m probably going to blather on wildly with no real goal in mind, mostly because it this stage of my tired, keeping any thoughts in my mind is pretty hard, they’re like slippery eels covered in grease, except less gross.
I wish jQuery-mobile was out, I want to play with it for the mobile support in my project but alas it looks like I have to wait. Lots of cool features I’m playing with in this project of mine, though unfortunately it severely limits my hosting options as most people don’t provide MongoDB databases. However, this project is also serving as an excuse to flex my muscles with Rails 3 so I can’t just use ActiveRecord and miss out in playing with the new multi-orm support and flexibility features, though perhaps I should have tried a different SQL ORM rather than something completely alien like Mongo.
I need to sit down and fix my laptop. Trying to replace the Windows partition on there has constantly met with failure. Linux and OSX (I think) are all fine it seems, I just can’t get Windows to boot. It’s determined that the filesystem it is booting from is unmountable or some such nonsense – quite how it can get to the stage it is at without being able access the drive it’s loading from is beyond me.
Well, for now I think it is time for bed. I’m abso-bloody-lutely knackered. I’m having trouble typing accurately now, though oddly if I tilt my head at an angle and look slightly away from the keyboard it okay again. Which reminds me, I really need to spend the time to get good at touch typing. My words per minutes is awful, being something like 30wpm at the moment. I’m not sure what would be a good typing speed for coding but I’m guessing it a bit more than that paltry number.
So here were are, past the 750 words barrier once again for another day! Nighty night, all. See you in the morning.