March 23, 2006

• School, Fun, and Programming

  Today in class I was thinking about how much I can’t wait for graduation. Everything being taught to me is starting to feel like regurgitated penguin meat! I got a real sense of de ja vu today, and this isn’t the first time it’s happened. It really feels like I have learned everything this school has to offer to an undergraduate computer science major in the areas I’ve decided to learn. I’m starting to think I should have taken the independent study this semester instead. All I can do now is try not to let the boredom of this semester get to me and look forward to my job waiting in NYC.

  One way I’ve been fighting the boredom from this semester is by going out with friends. My bank account is telling me that I’ve been going out too much though. Last weekend was definitely fun. Saint Patty’s Day was an absolute blast. I went with some friends to a favorite bar here in Ann Arbor called Ashley’s. With songs blasting on the juke box, drinks all around, it was just a plain good time. I’ll post a couple of pictures from the night when I get home from the lab here. I also went bowling on saturday with some friends. I did absolutely atrocious, but I can’t complain because it was a great time. There was four of us, and the one who never bowls ended up beating us all.

  On to programming news. I’ve been doing a bit of study of the boost library for C++ (http://www.boost.org). They have a LOT of really cool pieces of code in there, and I would like to use them in a project. I’m about to start on a project for adding remote procedure calls to the SQLite library (http://www.sqlite.org). Basically, this will turn SQLite into a client-server database. I need to come up with a name for it though, so any ideas are welcome!

  I have decided to code the server in C++ and use the boost threading library. This will give me cross-platform threading, which would be a complete pain to code up being threads in the windows world are about a 180 turn from threads in the unix world. I also plan on using those super cool smart pointers in boost. These are, in my opinion, one of the coolest features to be included in the next C++ standard. Any semi-competent C++ programmer will use these things, virtually eliminating all possible memory leaks, and eliminating the overhead of a garbage collector. Used correctly, these things are fast.

  I’ll also code a client library to issue calls to the database server. I’ll most likely due this in C due to this being the code other projects will link to. I don’t want to rule languages out by using something else; C seems to be that standard language everything else can call to.

  One last thing I’m trying to do is find an Apple Airport router, so if anyone has one lying around and is willing to help me out, tell me. I would like to add NAT PMP support into LibNAT for all those Apple crazies out there. It is a very simple protocol, and should not be hard to code into the library. It helps that I designed it to be modular so it will be easy to add such features.

  -Adam

  • 6:41 pm
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