September 7, 2009 by Mark.

A food budget is a little bit different then a financial budget because you are budgeting quantities of ingredients rather then a lump sum of money. It is something that my wife just introduced me to and I am very excited to start doing it. Say you purchase a pound of ground beef but you only use up half of it. For example, rather then making the same dish again in order to use up the rest of the beef, you could make another dish with that exact amount of beef. However, she is having a difficult time trying to manage the data especially when you have more then one or two ingredients to work with.

So, I’m setting out on a journey to build her an application that would manage a database of ingredients. It would link the ingredients table with a table of recipes, making it easy to search. To be honest, I’m not a database person. In fact I have not done any DB work since first year at Seneca. I might need to pull out my old text books in order to re-learn how to use a DB. I’m thinking of using SQLlite for the back end and straight up C++ on the front end (though C# has crossed my mind). It will be all open source obviously.

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July 3, 2009 by Mark.

I’ve been pretty bad at keeping my blog up to date as of late. With my wedding just around the corner, most of my time has been wasted planning things and what not. I found myself wishing for an extra hour or two a day just so I could fit in all the stuff that I like doing, such as programming and reading books. But, alas, it is an important part of life that requires a great deal of effort. And there is really nothing I can do about it (perhaps eloping would be easier) - everything, and I mean everything costs money.

I’m nearing my one year anniversary at McAfee (amongst other things) and finally I am at a comfortable stage in my life. I have a stable job which does not work me to the bone. I couldn’t be happier with it. But, my financial situation is inching closer and closer to the red line, all because my expenses as of late have been sucking my savings up. One of which was the purchase of a new house in Hamilton. So, I’m looking for a way to get a few more bucks. I started looking into something that has interested in for quite some time - Teaching.

Hamilton is home to Mohawk College. I attended this school before going to Seneca College and found it a decent place to learn. Though, after learning of what they had to offer I opted out for the Computer Programming stream at Seneca. What interests me is not the full-time position but night school, part-time classes. A teacher at Seneca told me that Ontario requires its colleges to have a certain amount of professors with a Masters degree or higher. But only for day school and only in their core streams. Night school, however, does not have that requirement but I bet having a Masters looks good when applying for a teaching position. My Bachelors might be beaten out of a teaching position by someone with more educational experience. So I’m hoping my experience working will carry some weight.

On Mohawk’s webpage they specify a few courses that interst me (if they are available in night school). These are ‘Introduction to C,’ ‘Object Oriented Design,’ and so on. Being first year courses, I fear that they might not be available in night school. I will be contacting the head of the Computer Department at Mohawk with regards to this. If anyone from Seneca or perhaps, any other college in Canada, can offer advice, it would be greatly appreciated.

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January 20, 2008 by Mark.

During my studies, every assignment I have been handed (with the exception of one) has been started from the very beginning. I was asked to produce an end result by designing, implementing, and testing the software I have written. I have no problems with the Software Development Life Cycle, its actually logical and concise. What starts to bug me is being shoved into a very dirty, unorganized code base and then told that I am not allowed to clean up. Instinctively, my brain figures out more efficient ways of doing things with the code then what is presently in place. But what I’m told is that features have priorities. In the back of my head, I know this is a time-bomb waiting to go off.

So, I move on. Each task that needs to be done has to work with the dirty code, forcing me to jump through hoops. The new code may end up being buggy or having some undesired effect. Lets, for instance, say this new code causes a bug. A fix is issued and it takes 20 minutes to fix. In another portion of the code, something else breaks because it was hooked up wrong. Another 20 minute fix. And so on, and so on. All those 20 minute fixes add up and eventually take up more of my time then it would to refactor the old code into something that is easily extensible and understandable. At this point, the code is twice as big and refactoring would take 2 days. Also, each feature that would take 10 minutes to implement, takes more and more time to implement because the code is convoluted. 10 minutes turns into 15 minutes, 1 hour turns into 3 hours, and so on. Great waste of time, in my humble opinion.

So when is an optimal time to refactor? Would it be at the very beginning when the problem is initially found? Should we wait until the critical features are implemented? Should we just forget about it and keep adding patches until the code is a giant maze of unreadable spaghetti? Why should my job turn into a Dilbert comic?

I honestly don’t know. My first instinct is to give refactoring a try at the very first time I notice a problem. Fix it before it spreads, essentially. Some think otherwise.

Posted in C/C++, Seneca, BumpTop | No Comments »

November 5, 2007 by Mark.

The Presentation Info:

Location: Seneca @ York, room T2109.
When: Tuesday, Nov 6, 2007 at 11:40am.

I will be discussing the relationship between Human Computer Interaction and high performance 3D graphics. Also, I will demonstrate the work that I have been doing lately on the BumpTop 3D Desktop. All are welcomed to attend.

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October 22, 2007 by Mark.

A few weeks ago, I aimlessly wandered into Dave Humphrey’s office and we had a quick chat and got to catch up on what we have been up to. I inquired about the Moz Dev stuff thats going on in Seneca, and he inquired about my job at BumpTop. As our conversation went on, he asked me to show him what BumpTop looks like. So as I was pulling out my laptop, Evan Weaver and several other teachers managed to squeeze into Dave’s already cramped office. I gave a quick demo to them all and, to make a long story short, It caught the attention of Evan Weaver and the like. He expressed an interest in having me give a short presentation to his game programming students. I agreed. Since Cathy Leung is teaching games programming this semester, I will be presenting during her course, on November 6th at 11:40am. I don’t quite have the information on where it will be held or what I’ll be talking about, but stay tuned and information will be posted soon. There will be a demo of BumpTop somewhere in the midst of that presentation.

On a different note, I’ve begun diving head first into the magical world of assembly language. Oh how marvelous it is. Mainly, it has to do with building my game engine and trying to take advantage of the SSE/3DNow! architecture.

Seems fun so far (Famous last words).

Posted in C/C++, Seneca, BumpTop | No Comments »

July 10, 2007 by Mark.

From the sounds of the title of this post, there should be something about tea. But rather its more of my reflection on my own education up to this point and how it applies to this job. I have been working at my current job for the last 3 months and I have noticed that some of the courses that I have taken (that I thought were just a waste of time) have started to crop up in my daily routine. For example, the information that I have learned in the User Interface course has been almost invaluable in my line of work. The tasks that have been put in front of me within the last few weeks have forced me to review the material covered in that course. Everything about icon design, readability and even text position are actually on my list of things to do. I am delighted to see that my education is being put to the test.

But, I am not going to lie, there are subjects that I wish were available at Seneca. In essence, there are some aspects of this job that grind me squishy brain to a halt. Things like physics and vector calculus take semesters to learn but instead are forced into me in a matter of hours. But like any other lab, this place is full of people with higher levels of education then yours truly, so its not as bad as it might seem.

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