Posted
Sun, 04 Sep 2005 13:38:52 GMT
to Posted in Life, Programming
Tags New Jersey, travel, work
So writing 2 days behind turned into 3 turned into 4 turned into….... well, a week.
Things were pretty busy between diagnosing hardware problems (old power supplies dying really screws things up, you know?), software problems (no matter how many bugs you fix, running software in the field will always bring about more), and a combination of the two (what happens when you write code for a winch when you don’t have a 100% working example in the lab to test important things, like almost everything except movement).
End result: lots of code changes, lots of issues corrected, a lot of end user usability concerns written down. All in all this was pretty much what everyone expected going into this, and since nothing catastrophic happened, everyone appears quite happy. I had an awesome (though really tiring) time down here and am very glad I made the decision to. In the end, I learned a few new things, and came up with several ideas on both how to improve the user interface of the project as well as how to set things up in order to allow a trip like this to run more smoothly from the development side (I will be writing about some of those later).
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Posted
Tue, 30 Aug 2005 21:21:36 GMT
to Posted in Life, Programming, Work
Tags New Jersey, Rutgers, travel
Actually at the Rutgers University Coastal Observation Oceanographic Lab Station (also known as the RU COOL Station) today . I found out what the old Leo15 station used to run on. A Sparc 5 workstation. Though considering some of the old computers are old DELL machines, I think the Sparc 5 was probably a fine, fine choice at the time.
Apparently this place used to be an old coast guard station. Its a huge building. I can’t understand why there is no one here. Unless, of course, they all took a day trip to Atlantic City. Ah well, from the looks of things, if there are any hardware problems that will require the hardware team needing to take things offline for several hours that I will at least be able to try my hand at fishing.
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Posted
Mon, 22 Aug 2005 13:44:01 GMT
to Posted in Geek, Programming
Tags competition, java
So today I participated in Google Code Jam ‘05 qualification round. Despite my being a 4th year CS student, this is actually the first code competition I have ever been able to participate, mostly due to work. The questions reminded me of Sedgwick’s homework assignments. The exception being that you only have 1 hour to complete both questions, and points are awarded based on time as well as completeness.
Question 1: 185.63/250
Question 2: 319.50/750
Total: 505.13/1000
My points for the second round would have been much better if I hadn’t of miscounted while iterating through a vector. Miscounting errors have always been a problem for me, and something I have to watch out for in the future.
Ah well. I mostly wanted to see how I would fare (and the answer there is better than a lot of people). Even if I had scored high enough to qualify, I will be in New Jersey when the real first round would occur, making it impossible to actually participate.
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Posted
Fri, 19 Aug 2005 17:30:14 GMT
to Posted in Life, Programming, Work
Tags travel
Reporter: “Sean Smith, you have just finished correcting 12 semi-critical bugs, what are you going to do now?”
Sean: “I’m going to Disney World New Jersey!”
So….... I have just finished a large stint of bug testing and fixing. Some last minute testing turned up a crop of bugs that were semi-critical and required resolution. The more frustrating part was that several of them were hardware problems, not software problems, due to someone blugging in an obviously damaged ethernet cable into the communication bus.
Due to my efforts, my relative familiarity with large sections of code, and the fact that most of the programmers are now on vacation (one on Maternity leave until the 4th, one on Vacation until then, and my supervisor just started a one week vacation so he could spend some time with his family), I was asked if I could possibly go to New Jersey with several other members of the team, to help with the deployment at Rutgers University.
Hmmm…..... let’s see….... I haven’t traveled anywhere besides to Ontario and back since my high school years. If I DIDN’T go, I wouldn’t really be doing much except waiting for bug reports and probably finishing up my work term report. I am supposed to move, but thanks to my compliment of truly amazing friends, I am putting my stuff into storage early and then moving into my apartment when I get back.
So yeah, I am heading down to New Jersey from the 27th to the 2nd. It should be an adventure.
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