Older blog entries for sune (starting at number 3)

Hacking: I've finally gotten around to doing some hacking; for the two past nights I've been doing the grunt-work of a freeciv-protcol library in Python. I'm not sure if I want to take it much further, though, or if grokking the protocol (my original goal) is enough. . .

Having a freeciv client (oh no, not another freeciv client!) in Python might be the entire exercise worth, though. Should make scripting a fairly easing thing to integrate. Mmm. . .

Work: Greatness abounds at work. Almost all of today was spent writing a custom, RAID-capable, company-specific Debian installer; just having to enter hostname, etc. and have a Debian base-system on RAID when you come back from the coffee-machine is going to rule. Oh, and the best thing ofcourse is that's it's fun doing :-).

Scheme: What better way to spend the time of your lunch-break at work than solving mbp's Scheme-challenge? I can't think of any, so here's my stab:

-- (define (f s)
  (lambda (g)
    (if (equal? s "")
	(let ((t (g (lambda (h) ""))))
	  (if (equal? t "")
	      ""
	      (g (f ""))))
	(string-append
	 (string-head s 1)
	 (g (f (string-tail s 1)))))))
f
-- ((f "Js nte ceeWnae")(f "utAohrShm anbe"))
"Just Another Scheme Wannabee"

Wonder if not there's a nicer way of doing that then-branch?

And, now back to my regularly scheduled work.

work: I have not been to work in something like two weeks time, exams taking their toll. So, not much to say but that I'll be going back in-to the trenches tomorrow, yay!

comp.sci.: My one exam is finally over; hopefully I'll never again have to hand-craft SLR-parse tables, or convert IEEE floats from binary to decimal.

comp.lang.python: Sadly a lonely post to comp.lang.python is the only hackish thing I've done in a while; it seems I learned something from my first-year comp.sci. programming-and-data-structures course, though, since I cooked up a binary search of a list of numbers in no time (as is only fitting :-).

real programming(tm): I have been thinking about getting back into freeciv-hacking, as I recall it was actually not so bad. I probably spent more time hacking the sources than playing the game :-). <rant> This was probably brough on by my getting pissed with Activision after buying CtpII. CtpII is probably the suckiest Civilization-clone out there. For one thing the AI is so bad it probably could not beat my old, computer-illiterate grand-mother. And don't get me started on the UI, makes me want to cry :-/ </rant>

att. conservation notice: first diary, c.s. student, unix sys.adm.

work: nothing much interesting to say here, I work as (part-time) system administrator for a small web-enabled company, where I am the local *nix guru, Perl hacker and geek in general. Good job, nice people and good perks, and I just got green light to move our servers to Debian (they are being reorganized).

edu: computer science major, with a minor in math., trying to prepare for exam (T-7days and counting). C.S. is generally a full of cool things for me to learn, but there are some really boring things too, for example creating SLR-parse tables by hand :-(.

programming: hmm. . . I did some Windows programming yesterday, needed to somehow get a list of existing drives. It seems one cannot do this, so you have to do something like,

  for(int i=1; i<26; ++i)
    if(_cdrive(i))
      printf("%c exists, whee!\n", 'A' + i - 1);

hackish, to say the least, imho.