Tigraine

Daniel Hoelbling-Inzko talks about programming

Working till late...

The weather has been pretty great the last days, and I used the last weekend for some relaxing and even some bathing in Wörthersee.
I also discovered my new favorite relax location (although it doesn't serve coffee) and I also managed to make some photos (click the image for the flickr photo gallery):

Unterkreuth

But after coming home today (chilled to the bone, Wörthersee is still way too cold for bathing!), I figured out I need to do an java assignment for university till Tuesday.

Needless to say that I thought I'd be done in 2 hours doing some simple hash table implementations.
What happened? They managed to throw 10 pages of mostly meaningless gibberish that specifies how my classes should behave and how the underlying algorithms work. While detailed instructions isn't something bad per se, omitting the UML diagram IS BAD! After going through the doc 2-3 times I still haven't identified all of the "added complexity" that should be teaching us OO-design and am searching the course forums for answers to questions that aren't answered by a 10 page long assignment paper :(.

So, yeah: I started at 21:00 and now it's 3 in the morning and my concentration has hit rock bottom so I am reading through specs and their explanation without being able to see the sense in it.

If you can't remember what word preceded the one you just read - go to bed.

And while we're at it. If you bother with Visual Paradigm: Get yourself a real-edition. Doing everything twice (in code and in UML) really sucks. Especially since code stubs can be exactly derived from UML and vice-versa it sucks doing it in a so terribly clumsy tool as Visual Paradigm for UML. (VP works great, it's just a lengthy process to create a damn operation (public void main(String args[]) is easier to type than to click 30 check boxes and drop downs!)

Filed under programmierung, personal

Quote of the Day: On PHP

If you are following Jeff Atwood at CodeHorror.com you may have already read it. But the statement is so true I really need to repost this quote by Tim Bray:

So here's my problem, based on my limited experience with PHP (deploying a couple of free apps to do this and that, and debugging a site for a non-technical friend here and there): all the PHP code I've seen in that experience has been messy, unmaintainable crap. Spaghetti SQL wrapped in spaghetti PHP wrapped in spaghetti HTML, replicated in slightly-varying form in dozens of places.

Spaghetti-code is the main thing that always comes to my mind when I try to sit down and do a template for this website.

Filed under internet, personal

Windows Live SkyDrive could be smarter

image

Skydrive, one of the cooler things Microsoft released lately under their Live.com brand has somehow replaced my private FTP server for sharing files with myself and others.

It's cool, it's easy and it's free. You get 5 gigs of free storage with your Live.com Id that you can use to upload data to the cloud.
You then get a quite neat folder view online where you can download those files, set their permissions etc.
So, if I want to share some files with a friend I can add them to the folder's permission list and they can see them with their Live.com Ids. If anyone should be able to see something I just add it to my globally shared folder.

So, whenever I need data at university I just upload it to SkyDrive instead of emailing it to myself as I used to do. It's usually just boring university assignments but after a few weeks things start to get messy. I started out by creating one folder for every course, not dividing up into assignments. So now I have 20 files in my dbtec course folder, all called "Dbt_AssX.doc" accompanied by some .sql and .txt files.

I then tried to correct that mistake, created a new folder to split up stuff, and - voila, there is no way to move a file from folder a to folder b! That sucks!
I was already concerned about the missing API (uploading stuff through the browser isn't cool!), but being unable to move stuff around is quite annoying.

If we're at it, I'd really appreciate some sort of slightly more accessible UI. Deleting a folder isn't as easy as clicking the folder and hitting delete, no, you need to click the folder, access it's properties through clicking on it's name and then pressing delete.

Filed under internet, personal

Klagenfurt University could use a Campus

Don't get me wrong, I love studying at Klagenfurt University, but whenever the weather gets more and more appealing I start dreaming of some cool cafe's and other stuff on the university campus.

Currently the only café that is really located inside the university is the iQ. And that's ok, but the university is lacking more open space. Maybe you get what I mean by this picture.

university (click to enlarge picture)

The red area is university property, while the yellow stuff is parking and the blue stuff is streets (with parking).

What happens is that whenever you step outside the building after 10 meters or so you happen to either reach a parking lot or a street.
If you follow this geo-link you might find that there is plenty of green around the university, but when you are there the perception is that there is only cars :).

So here it comes, cut down some roads and open up the area. Remove the front parking (eastern parking lot) and make it a nice little park for students. Also I'd like to see the road in the east closed down and some nice cafés opened up. Giving so much space to parking is just a waste.

On the parking side: Before you can get anywhere near planning a cooler campus we need to get public transport in Klagenfurt up to speed. There should be a frequent shuttle bus from the nearby train station that may also take students to the Wörthersee in summer, so more people would consider the train a viable alternative to the car. The STW bus should come every 15 minutes at least, having 2 buses per hour is simply unacceptable.

Klagenfurt university may be one of the few universities in Austria that isn't directly located inside the city so you could make something out of the place without having to redesign transportation for a whole city. But as it's currently more space is wasted than really used. It all feels too small and not really comfortable.

Filed under personal

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