Notes on codes, projects and everything
The making of this plugin was completely a random act of hand-itchiness. A friend of mine (@cornguo) published a fun app online. There is a name for this kind of app, but I can’t recall at the moment. It typically displays some buttons (usually in a grid), and clicking them causes some sound to be played. The interesting part in cornguo’s app is that there’s a text-input field where the name of the buttons can be typed-in for replaying.
It is useful to have the terminal around whenever I code. However, while real screen estate is finite, having a terminal further limiting the amount of information that can be displayed at the same time. The problem with the terminal is that I don’t really need it all the time, so I usually find it buried under a group of windows.
Back then when I was attending a job interview, I was asked to write a Fizz Buzz program to prove that my coding ability. There was only a pen and a piece of paper, so basically means there’s no way I can refer to the documentation for the API syntax. Fortunately I somehow managed to remember and not screw up.
It is very much expected that there will be endless stream of new (and often times better) tools introduced to solve the same set of problems. While I am slowly resuming my programming work, and in the process of reviving my very much dead postgrad project, I found some alternative to the tools I had used in the past. I suppose I shall just jot them down here so that there’s a reference for later use.
I was thinking whether it is possible to avoid exposing PDO and PDOStatement objects to the users of my database library (mainly just me). While I was working on my project I sort of notice that there is a almost fixed pattern whenever I work with the database. With this in mind, I added in some new functions to the library, and decided to make a quick release for this.
Often times one would have to write code to evaluate logical statements. For example, given statement p and q, what is p implies q? As there’s no operator for implication in PHP, one would have to rewrite the statement that consists only in NOT (!
), AND (&&
) and OR (||
) operators. When there are a huge load of these statements, code can be difficult to read.
This update took me quite a bit more time than I initially expected. Anyway, I have done some refactoring work to the original code, and thought it would be nice to document the changes. Overall, most of the changes involved the refactoring of function names. I am not sure if this would stick, but I am quite satisfied for now.
Writing a usable form and database library has always been a painful experience. So why bother re-inventing the wheel when there are so many to choose from already? I am writing one mostly for learning purpose. After numerous attempts, I finally get my form and database library in shape. It is nowhere complete, but nor it is perfect, but it is currently the implementation that is closest to my original design. I will keep working on it so it can be used in my personal projects in the future.
I finally put in some time and effort learning myself a bit of Rust. Though I am still struggling with ownership and lifetimes (which is essentially everything about the language, to be honest), I find it more interesting compared to Golang, which is relatively boring, though being functional (no pun intended). While learning the language, the one thing I came across often is the Option
enum, then I remembered that I read something about Monad.
After publishing the previous note on setting up my development environment, I find myself spending more time in the CLI (usually via SSH from host). Then I find myself not needing all the GUI apps in a standard Ubuntu desktop environment so I went ahead and set up a new environment based on Ubuntu Quantal server edition beta-1. For some reason my network stopped working and didn’t really want to spend time finding out the cause, so I reinstalled everything again today using the final installer, as well as the updated Virtualbox 4.2.6.
I didn’t realize that I have been working for 3 weeks until the Labour Day which was a public holiday. Many things happened in these few weeks and I am still struggling to catch up with it. My superior and colleagues have been very helpful and offered me some helpful tutorials and books. I was instructed to build a event scheduler application using codeigniter in the first week and then work on a side project that extends a form using DOM methods and properties.
Previously, I started practising recursions by implementing a type check on lat (list of atoms), and ismember
(whether an atom is a member of a given lat). Then in the third chapter, named “Cons the Magnificent”, more list manipulation methods are being introduced.
Recently I am involved in developing some small modules for a enterprise class website using CodeIgniter (CI). There was no restriction given on which framework should I use for the development and I chose CI as I learned a bit on it (when I was considering whether to shift my personal development project). Of course there are other reasons why I chose to learn CI, for example the superior documentation and screencasts available.