Scaffolding

I’m not dead, but I’m working hard to pass the exams. My linear algebra library showed up for what it really was … crap. I had to rethink it from the beginning not because of a poor design (but it was poor actually) but for a misunderstanding of the C++ power. Poor noob. So my simplex algorithm implementation is delayed, but I’m getting to the point, and I’m quite proud of a nifty trick that I conceived to gain a better interface and faster performance, we’ll see. When I’m finished I’m going to post it.

I’m getting pretty addicted to StackOverflow, a question-answer web app from developers and for developers based on a peer-review-like system. It’s a great place to get quality knowledge about programming, and a good place to show your skills, if John Skeet agrees

As if it wasn’t enough, I’m taking a Red Cross course on First Aid and I have to admit that it’s quite interesting and can be really useful.

Nikita, my sister’s Jack Russel Terrier had seven puppies. She started her labour this Sunday, at half past three in the afternoon. By midnight she gave birth to six furry and noisy pups, some of them were spotty the other black, as their father.
Just one of them survived the first night, the other five died by cold because Nikita was still waiting for the last troubly pup and left them apart. Probably we should have understood that, and we should have brought them indoor.

I feel terribly guilty.

Here’s a small piece of code which I am particularly proud of. It’s a compact implementation of Matrix per Matrix (or Vector as special case of Matrix) multiplication. If you strip the comments and the layout spaces the executable code is 10 lines long.

Matrix& Matrix::operator*(Matrix& m) {
 
    if (columns != m.rows)
        throw(SizeMismatchException());
 
       // Allocate return matrix filled with zeroes
       Matrix* r = new Matrix(rows, m.columns, 0);
 
       // Core computation
       for (int i = 0; i < rows; ++i)
           for (int j = 0; j < m.columns; ++j)
               for (int h = 0; h < columns; ++h)
                   r->at(i,j) += at(i,h) * m.at(h,j);
	return *r;
}

I think it’s quite nice. I’m also rather sure that someone else dit it before …

Where’s the snow?

I know that this topic is well covered everywhere, but I have to admit that until today I’ve always underextimated the power of gedit. I’m a Mac user since 2004 and I usually prefer TextMate as an editor for my toy experiments. I still currently use the trial version because I’m basicly stingy, nevertheless I think it’s the best guy on the block. I tried gedit when I had to work on Debian first for an University project some years ago, and I really liked it, but then the iBook came, and TextMate came as well, with a brand new set of cool features.

Recently I started using Linux (Ubuntu) again on my desktop machine, and I needed a good editor. I’ve used Komodo Edit for a while, since I’m interested in Perl development, but I think it’s still kind-of crunchy on most machines. Then gedit came again. In it’s basic configuration it looks like a plain text editor, but if you tune a little the settings you can really obtain something similar to TextMate.

It still lacks my favourite TextMate-like theme (All Hallow’s Eve), but maybe when I finally ultimate my recent project I can give it a try.

Ubuntu as well has become a very good piece of software, it’s easy, shiny and stable and the recent Darkroom theme just rocks.

We started our videogame project. Again. Since in the whole summer we didn’t get to anything, we(I)’ve decided to include more developers in the team, lucky guys …

Unfortunately, to convince them I had to omit the Perl detail, but that’s ok, maybe the translation of the project in Perl can be a personal project of mine, soon or later (yes, yes). In the meanwhile we’re still deciding which language to use, and the holy war is still at its top. More news later.

This week-end I’ve been working on a small C++ project that will probably turn out to be useful for an University course as well. Since the project started growing large I decided to recall some of my make notions to get the compilation, linking and cleaning less boring. I should have set up a backup system.

I’m going to London on November 20 with a pair of friends. I’m quite excited for the trip, I’ve never visited London before and I have great expectations about that.

Since I realized that it’s unlikely I could finish my Wordpress template anytime soon, I decided to start my blog with a ready-to-use one. My thanks to the guys of Design Disease.

I’m configuring the new blog, please show patience and your curiosity will be satisfied.