Mizblog

It kind of sucks when your boss calls you and wakes you up in the morning.

I’m getting into conflicts with General Electric through one of their contracts. We’re subcontractors under them, working for LADWP. They let the H1B visa for their key employee expire and he had to go back to India for a couple months. Meanwhile, the guy who replaced him went ahead without knowing about our prior development agreements, and now they say it’s too late to go back and do what they agreed to do to support our work.

Progress is happening on our new arithmetic learning software too. We’ve added word problems to the mix, and it’s going pretty good. The project is finally at the stage of “alpha testing”, which means it runs but it’s easy (trivial) to find the bugs in it. Joel is helping me enumerate and document them, and I’m fixing them.

Fun fun fun.

The code I’ve been struggling with over the last couple weeks has been tidied, bundled, and uploaded. Finally! A moment’s peace while the testers flood me with bug reports.

Come to think of it, this is all I’ve really been doing since I started hosting my own blog! Time for a change of pace, I think…

It happened as I was struggling with an extension to a wordframe. The phone rang. It was the boss. Seems next week’s meetings have been postponed for a month.

*whew*

Now I have time to do a decent programming job on this thing. Give it some polish. Make sure it doesn’t crash. Figure out why it sometimes turns yellow. That sort of thing.

It just gets worse and worse. Everything comes to a head at the same time.

I’ve got a big presentation to support next week. We need a new feature to show off in our product. I’m working like a dog trying to get it to look nice. It’s slowly coming together, but it’s taking a lot out of me.

I’m also supposed to pick up a computer for my friend and god-brother-in-law twice removed (or whatever) so I can write some code for him. Problem is, it’s been delayed so long that I’ve become swamped by other things. It always seems to happen this way for some reason. Struggling with the Indian-made software that doesn’t work and getting no technical support from its authors for weeks! Then it was a struggle to get the working machine from another company, and they delayed and dragged their feet some more. Now it’s my turn, dammit.

It was a good day for my programming. I’ve done all the data loading, initializing, storing, randomizing, maintaining, and accessing for word problems. All I have to do tomorrow is draw them on the screen. :)

My hands still feel sore but I worked all day and they aren’t dead yet. I took lots of breaks. I also removed the shortcuts to my Micro$oft games! Those things are the targets of my reflexive “this is getting too much to handle” response.

Last night Sangeeta and I walked a couple of miles. My legs got tired and now my ankles feel well-used. Not bad, just used.

Yesterday I programmed a pluralizer. It takes a word and returns the plural of that word. I actually wrote the original code in LPC for my New Moon creator requirements, before I found out that MudOS has a built-in function to do that. So I thought I’d wasted all that effort and research. Until yesterday, that is. I found the old code, converted it to C++, and now I’ve got a wonderful pluralizer. The toughest part was initializing several lists of words which have unusual ways of converting to refer to multiple objects (“bison”, “cactus”, “mouse”, “child”, etc.). I’m using STL vectors and strings, and there’s no built-in way of creating those kinds of things. Luckily, another LPC-inspired tool was available to me! Several years ago I wrote explode() in C++ because it was so useful in LPC. I just converted the word lists to strings and used explode() to initialize the vectors. Piece of cake.

So, with all that coding, my hands got pretty tired. Then I kept coding on New Moon and they became even more tired. Then they got sore. They’re still a little sore, and I’ve got a lot more programming to do in the coming two weeks. I hope they hold out that long.