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New Zealand

For those unaware, my NZ plans are on indefinite hold. The supervisor I wanted cannot accept me for the next year, I am not eligible for most forms of financial support for International students, international tuition is prohibitive, I feel I don't know enough about the field, and my girlfriend is also now considering UBC. Also, I found something a little closer by ...

Employment

Hello working world! I am now gainfully employed by a company that develops software for brokerage firms. I get to use an esoteric platform which I might never use again, but which is very effective at database access and manipulation.

One neat thing about the position is I get to take note of a lot of differences between the proprietary and open source worlds. The platform lacks a lot of niceties I find in the Open Source world. There are strange limits to characters, software used to get around feels limited, shared drives?! While the software that we develop and ship seems to be managed well, we of course use a lot of packages in our work that I can only describe as unmanaged. I can imagine, in an open source environment, someone regularly updating one metapackage that depends upon all the real packages we need to work, and we just install that to set-up. Also, from a Getting Thinds Done perspective (not related to the book/website/philosophy of the same title), I wonder why companies go with proprietary Unix rather than Linux. I have yet to access a Unix that didn't feel combersome, lacking, and limited. And it's not just that I'm more familiar with Linux-based systems. One prominent example would be the shell. Maybe it is more that that adminstrators don't bother supplying useful defaults? I don't know. Perhaps we use a proprietary Unix because the platform doesn't support Linuxes.

The Platform

Now this is pleasant. I generally dislike custom SQL languages, like PL/SQL. And this is somewhat like it. Especially in its "I look horribly ugly and no one has bothered to love me" kind of style. However, its capabilities are swell. How oft I have wanted to create an arbitrary, temporary table to stuff in a bunch of related data (records) into a double array of varying-typed data. Perhaps there are simple systems to achieve this in C and Java, but I have yet to find them. As well, I dislike heavily having DB access constructs stuck inside /strings/ that go unchecked until runtime! Clumsy and lousy! Give me support for the DB in the language, please! This is a reason why, despite not really caring about C#, I enjoy LINQ :)

I wonder what things I will discover as my ignorance shrinks?

C++, Perl, and JavaScript

I still think C++ is a terribly ugly language, but at the local Value Village, I recently acquired three books, one of them is O'Reilly's "Practical C++ Programming". I might as well be decent at it, even if it is ugly. Who knows when I'll have to use it for something important. The other two books are JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, and Learning Perl. I previously had the luxury of access to O'Reilly's Perl Cookbook. I think my Perl skills, despite regular use, have actually waned a little since then. Read more, Richard, read more!

Duplicity

I haven't done much programming on this in a while. 2 weeks, since jobness began to interfere. I must allocate more time before I lose where I was :(

Life stuff

Coming in a following post!