the daily grind

I need a vacation….my sanity depends on it. Last week, I couldn’t wait for the weekend. Maybe it was because I had to work each night at midnight for about an hour. I’m not having fun anymore. I’ve been very short and filled with attitude lately.

I know, go figure, me full of attitude.  About the only thing that I have taken joy in lately is getting behind a keyboard and punching out code.

I’ve decided that I need to conquer one realm of programming that I have been avoiding….client-server applications. I started fooling around with some perl code, then dove straight in to build a chat server/client. This is something similar to AIM. While doing this, I’m attempting to write my code in a manner that lends itself easily to reuse. Right now, I just have a proof-of-concept running. Before I’m done, I hope to have a complete communications protocol established that I can easily reuse in other applications. I hope to also release it under the GNU so others can learn from my code and build something from it.

Spent a good deal of time today trying to get rid of a bunch of crappy legacy code that I’ve been hauling around. I built a bunch of libraries to make graphs. These libs used a lib that I wrote to actually draw bmp images. Building new types of graphs was very painful as I would have to actually draw the graph at a pixel level. I kept the OO framework of the graphs, but switched the core over to use gnuplot to actually do the graphing. This gives me a fairly robust, feature complete and well-support graphing engine on which to build my graphs.  I need to continue working to make the graphs completely platform independent (I have hard-coded paths to gnuplot and some other windows-isms in my code). It’s nothing that can’t be fixed.