Advogato blog for rufius

Updates

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:16:59 GMT

Just got back from LA. My stint with Google is over :(. It was a great experience despite my awful apartment.

Managed to get myself some confidence in my abilities and am now working on two OSS projects.

Back to the grind of school now. At least I’ll be starting a new research project.

Oppose the Orphaned Works Act of 2008!

Sat, 5 Jul 2008 17:09:09 GMT

I won’t go into full detail of its evil here, as you can read and get the gist of it here: http://blamcast.net/articles/orphaned-works-open-source-copyright.

Essentially, it means any company can take a piece of software (among other things) and “claim” they looked for the author and then use it without obeying the GPL license on it. When the copyright holder sues on grounds of infringement, the people that violated the copyright merely have to provide “proof” that they looked for an author and could not locate one.

The only way to really prevent the infringement if the bill passes, is to register with some sort of copyright registry, which costs money no doubt.

Oppose it! You can go here: http://capwiz.com/illustratorspartnership/home/ to find out how to easily write your congressman/woman.

Do something nice today.

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 22:19:16 GMT

To be honest, I’m long overdue on saying something. I am alive, just barely, but I am.

I came across this article today. It made me realize that society has become disenchanted with… well society itself. Do something nice today for someone you don’t even know. Seriously.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89164759

busy

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:14:59 GMT

Long two week, many tests, projects and homework to be done.

With that, I leave you with some food for thought: “When the rich wage war its the poor who die.” - Mike Shinoda

the dark arts

Fri, 1 Feb 2008 18:09:07 GMT

I am now as we speak ever approaching the dark arts. Actually I’m just going to be working on compilers and filesystems for the next two years in a directed study with a professor in the Computer Engineering department. A friend in IEEE needs help with his senior project so that’ll be the beginning of my learning about compilers. Filesystems shall follow shortly thereafter.

Should be fun and challenging, seeing as I get frustrated to no end with the obsession of online frameworks and building social networking sites. Not that I think those are bad or trivial things, I just don’t find them to be particularly interesting problems. Even if compilers and filesystems are no longer “cool” to the academic types, I still think they are.

And now I’m off to read more of “Functional Programming: Application & Implementation” by Henderson. If anyone actually reads this, stay tuned. A little while from now I may be posting a Lispkit implementation with a compiler that builds native code which I know is a dirty dirty thing and I should have my mouth washed out with soap for it but I don’t care :).

PS: More wine fun is coming as well Hooray for shell32!

cheers

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 02:08:34 GMT

cheers

So I found out a couple evenings ago that I got the internship with Google. I would start sometime in mid-May and finish up sometime in mid-August. It would be good fun though it is mildly disappointing that my friend (Danny) that works for Google wouldn't be there during the time I'd be there. He’s finishing up his last semester of college and wwill be arriving there about the time I would be leave.

I’m excited and anxious all at the same time, dealing with getting myself a place to sleep will be interesting. Maybe I can just sleep under my desk and shower at the office?

jeers

I was less than pleased with my grades this semester. I ended up with a B+ in both Algorithms & Software Eng. This could change though for Algorithms as I emailed the professor and he said we could speak about possibly getting me an A- which would be great.

Software Engineering on the other hand, I apparently bombed the final. That puzzles me but I’m going to meet with the professor. Surely I didn’t do that poorly? I’m not a bad student…

notes

Anyway, back to programming on wine

first patch

Wed, 5 Dec 2007 02:11:06 GMT

So after many failed attempts I finally got a pair of patches committed to wine. You can see them here and here. I’m finding that the more and more I learn about wine, the more and more I get addicted to working on it.

The code, compared to many projects written in C that I’ve seen is very clean. The community is helpful and there’s always something to do since I’m pretty sure there’s a sizable 40-50% of the api thats not completely implemented yet.

Hears to exams and coding.

exams

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 21:10:51 GMT

Exams are coming up, this probably won’t be fun.

Thoughts on “Crappy Coder Signs”

Sat, 24 Nov 2007 03:12:00 GMT

I was browsing my feeds in Google reader and came across this blog entitled “Signs You’re a Crappy Programmer (and don’t know it)”. For the most part I thought it was fairly accurate with the exception of not following the rule of trying to make your functions less than 20 (30/40/10/whatever) lines of code.

Now I’m not hardline on it, I think one should try to make all functions as short as they possibly can, but I do understand that some functions just can’t be made that way. I think preaching hard line either way is a bad plan but one as a general rule should try to keep functions short and sweet. Writing big long functions makes it hard for people besides yourself to follow the code quickly. I’ve dealt with my share of crappy functions that were a hundred lines long and totally unclear. Thats what you get when you work with people that aren’t programmers first though.

Beaujolais Nouveau - Recipe for Connections

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 07:10:18 GMT

Last night I went to my boss’s party titled “Beaujolais Nouveau.” Apparently this is in reference to some French wine, but I’m not a wine drinker and thus I had none and was not interested in it. Overall an interesting night, lots of professors, business people and tech enthusiasts. My boss’s wife is “big on the tech scene” or at least was before taking her current job.

The main highlight of the night was actually meeting Alex de Carvahlo, organizer of BarCamp Miami and RefreshMiami. I’ve been hunting for some tech groups to get involved in in South Florida but it seems its only a budding area. Despite that I’ve now got something else to get involved in outside of IEEE and ACM. I also met a guy by the name of Nathaniel, though his last name escapes me. Nathaniel organizes NextMiami which is another tech enthusiast & venture capital group. These should both be good contacts for the future.

Any one that even gives this blog a passing glance a developer in South Florida that knows of other interest groups?