Finally home. Nice to make it here today, instead of tomorrow. Of course, tomorrow would be today if it were today.
Things that suck right now: deadlines, performance review coming up, more deadlines, not enough bodies, not enough knowledge, and other stuff. Not sure why I was stressing about a performance review the other day. It’s not for a while (next month sometime maybe?) and I know what it’ll say… “deadlines not met, employee slated for exectution.” Believe me, I wish I could slow down time these days to get more in. I have a bunch of stuff to do now. Not all huge, just lots of little things. Little things that have to work properly togeather. Little things that will be a bitch to finish and debug (and get done on time, though I have to admit I’m glad I’m not a Java coder right now). Figure out a, implement it in b, and then integrate it with c, as well as create d, which works with c, and works properly. The steps aren’t that big, but I don’t look forward to getting it all working togeather. I told da boss man something along those lines and he asked me if I was not sure of my abilities. Every once and a while I have to go back and ask that same question, when I think I can’t do something. Is it because I haven’t tried, or I honestly think I can’t do it. I know I can do this shit. I’ve learnt more and had a hell of a lot of fun in the last while doing C stuff. I guess I’d just prefer to eliminate those pesky “deadline” things.
As for the performance review I’m not sure why I even thought about it a few days ago. Guilty concience maybe? In it I’ll just tell the truth. Yes, we are/were behind. Yes, I haven’t coded as fast as I should have. Yes, I think my coding has improved over the last few months (readability! splitting things into separate files!). No, I haven’t been a “good leader” to “my team”. Yes, I lock my computer all the time, even when I am one of the only people in the office and you have gone home. Yes, I prefer tuna sashimi to salmon, except in one restaraunt.
I’m coming home tomorrow at a decent hour though. Too much shit to do here. Dishes are still sitting out on the counter, and they’re not the easy ones either, these are the second half of the “cleaning out the fridge” dishes, so they are containers that once held what was at one point food, but now has been thrown away, leaving only little bits and pieces stuck to the plastic to fester and turn gross. Cats are almost out of food, litter needs to be done. Oh, and that laundry thing. Clean socks are a must. Doing some other laundry, like towels and sheets would be a plan too. Of course, even if I do leave work early you know that I’ll sit here and work on random code anyway. I’ll just do it in clean socks (or in between spurts of dishwashing.
The testers (hi Hillyup!) finally got around to testing a project-that-shall-not-be-named. This PTSNBN has been done (that was the cause of my stress at the beginning of the month) for a few days now, but now they have their greasy paws on it they are already finding bugs in code that was working. Bah. Code-rot I’ll bet. I had the following:
[...]
/* get start of line /
linebegin = strtok_r( &buffer[2], tokens, &rptr );
snprintf(util, strlen(string)+3, "%s ", string );
fputs( util, file );
/ stuff in the middle /
fputs( data, file );
/ and the end of the line /
lineend = strtok_r( NULL, tokens2, &rptr );
snprintf( string, MAXBUF-1, " %s\n", lineend );
fputs( string, file );
[...]
Or something like that. Anyway, the first call to strtok_r was working fine, but the second, expected to grab the end of the line after the token, gave me garbage. Worked fine before, but not now. Replacing “&buffer[2]” with:
char line = 0;
line = malloc( MAXBUF );
linebegin = strtok_r( line, tokens, &rptr );
[...]
free( line );
worked perfectly. Must have been debug flags vs. optimized flags doing different stuff with memory or something.
Anyway, like I was saying, they are testing the PTSNBN now, which means that either a) it’ll work perfectly and no bugs will appear, leaving me free to work on my other deadlines, or b) Reality(tm). I’ll give you 42 guesses at which one I’m banking on happening. It’s nice to see it even almost working togeather though. Nice to look at a project and say “I did that, and I made it work and I created this awsome cool thing out of nothing, taking nothing but an idea and turning it into code and then into something” Or in my case, “something” is replaced by “this little utility here, and a little server there”.
Ahhh…. there we go, finally some Enya in my playlist. Nice and relaxing, soft…. Must pick up her new album, it sounds pretty cool.
Man I hate browsers. 4 different browsers, all viewing this entry differently. Two of them are supposed to use the same rendering engine as well (galeon and mozilla)… might be a nightly build problem though…. yup, that and it bitching about missing “<P>” tags.
Oh well, bed now, gotta grab my 6 hours of sleep!