10.22.05

Unfortunate Downtime

Posted in General at 12:00 am by Nick

I have been informed this site (along with everything xidus.net) will be down starting Monday 10am Central. Above.net (the backbone provider for xidus, which goes through PogoLinux) lost its lease (or so I understand) on its Seattle Datacenter, which is where both of the xidus servers are currently located.

They say it may be done in one week maximum, though they hope to make the switch in less.

I believe its worth noting that this is the longest downtime I will have ever experienced with Xidus for all the years I’ve used it as a host. We can’t do anything about things beyond our control either. Xidus has been an extremely good host.

So, I’ll carry through the weekend, but beyond that, its back to Xanga for a week.

10.20.05

Posted

Posted in Programming at 3:00 pm by Nick

I uploaded v1.3 of the X-Log Library to source forge. I also posted the readme for all three versions as their release notes.

Check it out: http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/xlib

No project web page as of yet (still). Sorry about that.

10.19.05

X-Log Library v1.3

Posted in Programming, ALPHA at 10:47 pm by Nick

Time: 1 hour
Total: 56 hours
————————–

So, I ignored my math homework and decided to expand this a little bit. The expansions were not that hard, and most of the time was spent testing, shrinking the library, and updating the README file. I will post this on SF sometime tomorrow if I have the time.

This expansion doesnt really contain much. You can see all of the items I did to it are listed on my todo list, and are now crossed out. They consisted of:

1) fflush() the end tags so they write in the event of a crash
2) make the library includable in C++ projects (yay!)
3) Add the ability to specify the file you want to log to. Glog was changed to log_it
4) Created glog() macro for compatibility
5) Added file checking. No more failed logging attempts because your log directory didn’t exist and you didn’t call init_log().

Code, readme, GPL license, and example XLogs can be found at: http://ew.xidus.net/download/xlib/

Whee!

Posted in Programming at 9:45 pm by Nick

I’ve been messing around with the stuff at epaperpress.com. They have some exciting comp. sci. stuff there. They also offter a few insights on other things, like photography.

Better yet, I’ve managed to compile their C++ version of the operator precedence code into a static library, and I hope to do the same with the C implementation.

While compling these, I thought back to XLib and how I want to use it for KaladeaMUD (more on that another time). I’ve figured out a way or two to expand it upon the two listed in the todo page (these two are going up now!).

Anyways, I think I’m done for the night. I’ve got math homework to do. ::sigh::

Operator Precedence Parsing

Posted in Programming, ALPHA, Computer Science at 6:58 pm by Nick

Time: .5 hours
Total: 55 hours
————————–

O’kane sent me a link to a PDF which contained a whole slew of information on coding a mathematical expression parser. Yay. I’m glad there is a better way to do things then the way I was planning, though the similariies between the techniques (the one in the PDF and the one I was about to use) are quite similar.

I consider this a half hour of research. Deciphering this beast was quite entertaining and meaningful, especially when all I could really do was read. I have an excellent idea on how this will all work, and I plan to employ it in just about every project I work on that need’s some sort of expresion parsing.

The PDF: http://epaperpress.com/oper/download/oper.pdf

10.18.05

Hospital

Posted in General at 11:34 pm by Nick

So, when my mom got home around 5ish she was really sick. Like, constantly vomiting sick. Yes, this is bad. She just got out of the hospital, and back she goes. My dad and I have been dealing with this since 5, which was a great many hours ago. Thankfully I was able to come home and Dan will take my place for a short time.

I’m here to say I may not be around much (like, even at class). Last time my mom was sick we had CJ home from college, and he was able to be with her and my dad most of the day. With school, that simply isn’t an option. I think at this point Dan and I may either a) be missing school for a few days (damn it), b) switching off days, or going part of the day. I’m not sure, but leaving the parents alone really isn’t much of an option. Who knows, maybe this crap will clearup by tomorrow and my mom will be home. (yeah, we can hope)

I’m so tired, I’m really not sure if I want to get up and go to Wendy’s for dinner. With an increasingly large stack of math homework, a quiz tomorrow in DS, and a DS assignment staring me in the face, sleep is tempting but not really an option. I do think I will e-mail my professors and tell them I won’t be at class tomorrow. ::sniff::

Restart!

Posted in Programming, ALPHA, Computer Science at 12:41 pm by Nick

Time: 3.5 hours
Total: 54.5 hours
—————————

So, I totally restarted my lab project for CS I. This all happened yesterday, though I forgot to actually document it on here before booting in safe mode for a second attempt at virus removal. It failed, but thats not the point of all of this.

Anyways, O’kane made a little program that does most of the lab for us. Its written to be simple, without having to do your own data allocation/unallocation. However, it is extremely wasteful. So, I borrowed a few concepts (for instance, reading in the program rather than keeping the file open the whole time. Why I didn’t do that initially is still a mystery) and restarted with my own.

It uses STL lists and two data structs to make it more efficient. It doesnt waste space, unlike O’kane’s (which was limited to 100 lines). In his, you could not have a program greater than 100 lines. However, if it were only say, 10 lines, you are wasting 90 allocated strings. Mine can be as large or as small as you want.

Mine also employs pre-parseing. That is, after data is read in, it is interpreted, then run, as opposed to just running. This cleans up the code a bit, as execution is much easier since you already know what you have. Also, it makes error checking a bit easier, as you can find problems (eg, missing command or opperand(s)) ahead of time, alert the user, and exit without crashing or messing something else up.

The error handling is still very primitive at this time. For instance, it doesnt check for the end of file (EOF). It merely reads in based on the success of the last read. This is also a problem since the program will not take input from the same file as the program. However, he said the input will be in the same file, and the space between will be delimited by two forward slashes (//).

The pre-parseing also makes some of the commands easier. For example, the GOTO command is simple, as we alread know which lines have line references and what they happen to be, and the line that contains the goto command already has the operand (or rather, the line number we are seeking) pulled out. The parsing also supports string constants denoted with double quotes (”). Thus, unlike the program O’kane wrote, we are not limited to only printing variables.

This program actually employs two lists. One for the lines, which contain all of the above information. The second is for variables. The structs contain the name (which, as of now, are unlimited in possible length), and the integer value the variable actually contains. Thus variable look ups and setting works.

As an after thought I added acutal line references. That is, when each line is read in, the program will remember the -actual- line number that contained the data (as a written line ref could be any number). This is used to make GOTO’s a bit easier, as we can compare actual line ref’s when iterating. Simply put, for those who don’t understand the computer lingo, we find the indicted line ref and then set the iterator to the indicated -actual- line reference.

Uh, thats about it for now. I’ll work on this a bit more to get this all set and dandy before the weekend. However, I must wait to see what O’kane says about mathematical parsing before I undertake the process myself and do it a bit inefficiently.

10.16.05

Reflection

Posted in General at 10:00 pm by Nick

Today was great. Very low stress. Sadly, I’ve done no homework thus far (and Grey’s Anatomy is on, so none for a while yet :P ). An easy day for reflection on recent events, and a little bit of gaming. Yay. I wish I had more days like this.

Yesterday was fun. Though neither the hay ride nor the haunted house were very scary, they were quite amusing. I think a few people (eg Lauren :P ) got scared in the haunted house. Very interesting layout of that place, I must say.0

This upcomming week sounds stressful for the all state people. Good luck with that! For me it seems it may just be another week. Which is good. I can do without any more tests. I should probably work on my math, since I’m not doing well in that class. What am I doing better in propositional calculus (eg Discrete Structures) than Advanced Algebra and Trig? One of life’s great mysteries. Not really. DS is much better than AAT.

So, Novemeber is drawing closer (day by day no less!). I’m quite excited for NaNoWriMo, though I think my thoughts are a bit misplaced. I should be focusing more on Creative Writing.

Yeah, thats about it for the moment.

10.12.05

Lots of Stuff

Posted in General, School, High School, College, ALPHA at 10:43 pm by Nick

So, while it didn’t seem like an especially interesting day, it seems it really was. First I went to the PSAT (more reflection on this later perhaps), and then I got out for lunch at 11 till 12:26! Woot for long lunches.

UNI classes were alright today. We got our first test back in CS I. Sadly, I missed one. However, it was quite amusing to hear the remarks when O’kane said, “Yeah, the high school junior did much better then all of you. He was the highest score.” Yes, it certainly made my day. I would have had 100% had the question I missed not been written obscurely. I’ll live.

In summary of academics, I had two classes today. Yay.

–

My short story seems to be doing alright. I think the second scene lags a little, though I’m not quite sure what it is lacking. I’ll have Wilkinson look it over tomorrow.

–

The final topic of this post goes to my ALPHA project and my lab credit for CS I. While I happen to be about halfway done with my interpreter, I realized a few things today. First, why the hell do I keep the file open? String parsing would be much easier to do for this, as you could keep an ordered array of the lines and get them one by one. This would make GOTO much easier.

Simply put, to be better (as workable just isn’t good enough), it would take a little redsigning. I’m a little too tired to count my two hours of research/work that I did tonight, as I’m not quite sure if I really want to do what I am about to propose.

Yes, many of you know I have desired to build a MUD (Multi-User Dimension) from scratch. Yes, my friends Carl and Hillary shall be embarking upon the quest (Kaladea). So, why not start now? After all of this time, I have an ALPHA project of coding, and I could dump some serious time into this. I could also probably get O’Kane to give me the lab credit for it.

I really have two options. As my socket handling skills are sketchy, I think it would be best to start from one of two very skimpy code bases. One is SocketMud++, which is a very very basic telnet server that does nothing besides keep, track, and update sockets. Very nice if you don’t want to mess with that stuff. Also well laid out.

However, I am currently in favor of TinyMUD v2.2. It is some 1800 lines long, and takes care of a great deal for you. It has a base framework of many things, such as saving players/rooms, loading system data, and providing a command structure to work off of. I spent an hour tonight tinkering with it and fixing it up to run on cygwin, and thus from my machine (and hopefully from a future host with little effort).

The downside to TM2.2 is that the code is very hard to read at first. While its fairly easy to tell what a command does, some things are done in obscure ways. I will elaborate more tomorrow.

http://www.gammon.com.au/forum/bbshowpost.php?bbsubject_id=4496&page=999999

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