h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Job, just skip this again, dude.

Those of you who have actually been reading through my horrendously boring journal postings lately will already know that last night I completed the testing of the datasets I needed to test, for my previous assignment. Also, you will know that I finished the report this afternoon, and then went and had lunch.
Now that I'm back again, I'm now doing the last assignment I currently have due, and it's due in... 73 hours.

I've done a little work on it, but not a lot. The last question is a bit of a , since I have to use programming language 'a', to transform source code for programming language 'b', into source code for programming language 'c'.
This is a lot like writing software which translates English into French, or vice versa.

Luckily, languages 'b' and 'c' are both markup languages, which means I don't have to do anything very interesting to the data to make it work, but since I don't know 'a', and I don't know 'b', and I only vaguely know 'c'... well yeah it's a more interesting problem than I'd have hoped for at this late stage.

I'm hoping I can get it done before I leave tonight, so that I might actually have a weekend for once.

Wish me luck!

As usual, I'll post updates here; mainly to give myself the occasional break to stop my head from hurting too much. I won't hold it against anyone for unsubscribing. Not that I would anyway.

GOOD LUCK JERMS!!!


although selfish as it may sound i wouldnt actually object to having you here on hootoo this weekend

*goes back to her hidious project, that isnt going as well as she had planned*

congrats Jerms (not that I understood it)
with the project Aris
I shall feel heartily ashamed if I don't finish something next week with your fine examples to spur me on

The only thing which would be good about me having to work on my assignment over the weekend would be being able to be on hootoo, too.

There would be no shame in that, BC! The only thing spurring me on now, is the thought of being able to be lazy later...

Well I have an update already... I'm reading through a virtual /pile/ of documentation on how these various languages work, and I've realised I have no idea where the actual translation is done.

...I should probably mention that the code I'm writing - in language 'a'... well it's really more like languages 'a', 'b', 'c', and 'd'. It's not a one-step process, and each of the parts is written in a different programming language. Sort of. Except for 'd', which is really just used as a way of automating the other three steps into one process. Sorry if I've just confused anyone. Again.

Hope it's going well.

Yeah, it's not.

I've also just realised I have no idea at which can stage I change the input stream from the keyboard to a file, and to change the output stream from the screen to another file.

However if I can answer those two questions (this one and the one from before), then it should start to rocket along...

My fella is a programmer by design...

*anotherbsubtledadjoke*

...and I know enough about the whole thing to know that...I will never understand it

Well I know where the translation is done, now.

Now I just have to figure out how to switch the input and output streams to be files, and I'm good.

I'm also wondering if I need to do bracket matching, but since we're assured that the input files will be valid, it's probably safe to assume I don't need to. I think. Hope that's true. It's not a biggy anyhoo, I can always implement it later.

I'm currently testing some of the individual sentence constructs. I've just made the most complex work correctly under every possible input; but now for some reason the simplest will barely work at all.

Typical. Wonder what I've done wrong?

It's currently 6:30ish. If I can figure out that one question (the input/output stream switching, not the simple sentence construct), I might actually finish tonight. Maybe.

By the way, I currently have open:
- eight windows of source code files.
- four directories.
- two terminals.
- a CD player, and
- this internet browser.

And I'm using them /all/.

By the way, I currently have open
Typical. Wonder what I've done wrong
Forgot to keep eyes open,

'Job, just skip this again, dude'

YOU CARE!!!

"Eyelids - Ces n'est pas automatiques."

Of course I care, Job!

Okay... next update:
I went home quite late on friday night. Went to bed. Got up saturday morning. Ate. Showered. Walked back to uni. Realised that everything I needed to know could be found through google. Tried to go to google. Discovered that I had no internet access at uni any more, because my unicash account had hit 0.

Cue much swearing.

If I'd had some warning, or if it had run out on friday instead, then I would have simply gone and put some money on it.
But it being saturday, everything was closed for the weekend. I wasn't even sure if I'd be able to put money on it today either, it being uni holidays now.

So, I walked all the way home again. In a very bad mood.
Sasha was kind enough to rescue me and go into town with me so I could have a cheer-up spider. And then we went into town and I got as drunk as I could afford. (Which wasn't very - damn, but town's getting expensive!)
On sunday I went to J and R's place, and used their 'net connection to both google the stuff I needed, and to ssh (Secure Socket Hosting) into uni and copy the files I needed to work on, so that I could work on them at their place.
Also J did a similar paper to this one, so he was able to give me some pointers.
I owe them both a big thank-you gift thingee. Still trying to think of something appropriate. Suggestions, anyone?

I got to sleep so late last night that I stayed at their place rather than walking home. And then I slept through the alarm, and was an hour and a half late for work this morning.
After work I came straight to uni, and I'm still here.

It's twenty past six, and the assignment was due in at five. I'm counting on the lecturor not picking up the assignments until tomorrow morning, although I know that the stuff which is submitted electronically gets timestamped.

The annoying thing now (second to last one I hope!) is that I know how the constructs should go, and have done for a while, but for the last three hours or so I've been battling with the C-style interface. Specifically, trying to turn a literal string into... gasp! Another literal string! It should be ing easy, but instead I've been dealing with pointers and arrays and dereferenced objects and godknows what else. I'm getting flaming sick of it.
I used to think C was an alright language. And later in the course we have to deal with Haskell, which is probably the language I like the least. But this use of C is starting to make Haskell look versatile and easy-to-use.

And I'm still annoyed that I've had to postpone this assignment so much because of the other two before it. If I could have been doing this a week ago at least I could have asked the tutor for advice, but of course they all went on holiday on friday. And google just doesn't want to tell me what I need to know.

Grr.

Wow shock horror- I actually read that.

I should read more of your posts. If I had time I would read them more often.

And you should add more entries, too.

I should. But currently I'm (not) revising and little happens in my life at the best of times so who knows.

Oooh it's my birthday the day after tomorow I'll post a journal then.