jmoiron.net

I'm in portugal. The trip has been great, only 1 week to go; but for some reason I feel like I've done nothing, and in many ways this feeling is due to the fact that I have indeed done nothing. For the first time I decided to stay home instead of go out and sight see or visit people or whatever, and I think for the first time since I started this vacation, it will seem and feel vacation-like.

I've been working here and there on my pure C Huffman encoder; more than getting stuck on any particular coding issue, or sucking ass at coding which I am pretty sure that I do, I've spent a lot of time doing things that are decidedly un-huffman like. I've finaly gotten my option system completely bug-free, which was nice, because I had to think through that whole process myself. I think the way that I finaly did it was pretty good, although I'm sure there are ways that are a lot better. So far, I haven't had to use any includes besides stdio. Thats good, because it means my program is only like 6k after I strip it.

I've decided to do some word/pattern recognition to make the thing encode a little better; but I think the way things are going, I'm going to go ahead and do that after I get a working encoder. A few people have asked me why I'm doing this; I mean, I've already done it twice before in class (in c++) and it was a freshman project in java or something like that; But I don't know anyone who's gotten their encoder to work perfectly on all files and specifically file sizes. Finaly, when I did it I took some cheap shortcuts to make it easier for me to code. For instance, right now I'm stuck on a particular problem I'm having with a function changing elements in an array by address rather than creating a new copy for itself. In C++, instead of passing a pointer I would just use a string, and that way when the function realizes that it doesn't have a pointer it'l create itself a copy. It's interesting but this time around I'm thinking about using my own linked list to do the job. Of course, it might not run quite as fast as the built in string class, but it'l be pretty fast since its totally C; and it should be far less bloated as it wont have options that I don't need. Plus its pretty small.

I haven't done much with anything since I got here, where anything is a group made up of the things I brought that would actually further myself.. somehow at least. I've played a bit with Reason 2, that program's pretty neat. I've done precisely nothing with photoshop (other than spicing up a few photos I took) and as far as touching the webpage layout (like I promised), this is the first time I've even touched the files.

Much to my surprise, I've spent most of my free time watching anime; although that shouldn't be to my surprise, because that is very relaxing. I watched 9 eps of Azumanga Daioh, all 25 of Maze, 6 of Wanderers and 10 of KoR since I got here.. thats kind of a lot for 2 weeks, especially when you are busy in those weeks.

So, I'm about done saying what I want to say. I'm pretty sure the mozilla-whor layout will still be here when I get back from vacation. It took me a good hour or two to get the colors how I wanted them. When I get back, the two JM's are probably going to be working on the other page a bit, so design change might shock fall into neglect on this one. Ja!