inbetween

I've never understood object oriented programming. NEVER. Not even once.

Sure, there's inheritance and I grok that (that's a geek term -- I get it), but designing object oriented code seems a dark art to me. How the hello do you know when to use it? If I wanted to design a system, where do I start? Delegation relationships? Has-a, uses-a, looks-like-a-duck?

Side note: I'm tired of people telling me that fortune cookies originated in the USA. Thanks, I do get it.

The real problem that I've noticed is that all the books I've read that try to "teach" object oriented programming all deal with too-abstract concepts. I get that a geometrical object should have a .draw method. Yep. And a circle's .draw method is different from a square's .draw method, and that the circle and square override the .draw method that they inherited from the geometric object. Hooray.

What about real software? Ok readers. Here's a challenge. Lets say I'm going to design some fancy web application thingy do. I've got an database, some templates, and users, photos, write-ups. How do you design it? How do you start?

Please, enlighten.

I've been studying like a fox. Yes! Like a fox! And apparently I've been mixing metaphors like a mad man. Yes! Like a mad man.

Finals have descended upon me like a storm, so of course my kitchen is clean, the laundry is done, and the fish tank is sparkling. Yes! Sparkling like a fish tank.

These are the highlights from my adventures in studying. Yes! Like an adventurer who should be doing something else.

I've started reworking the negativespace.net page. Its ugly, based on tables, and doesn't work. I don't think that cascading style sheets will work for it, the layout is too complex, and CSS is a real pain in the wazoo. And don't even get me started on the crashy-monster called Dreamweaver. I'm not doing anything that it shouldn't be able to handle, but it can't handle it. Hello? Negative margins are a standard element of CSS. Even Internet Explorer understands them.

I've been contemplating a photo-blog web application (hence the previous post) but I still don't know about stuff. It will be written in Perl (not perl and not PERL and certainly not P.E.R.L.), and object oriented. It is a learning experience for me. I might put up a public repository for people to follow along (and maybe even contribute), and maybe even start a blog just for dealing with it.

Last night, I cooked. I cooked like a mad man. Baked smoked salmon, with garlic and red onions. Yummy. Sticky rice on the side (I always make twice as much as I need), and roasted vegetables. I think we went through two bulbs of garlic. Yikes, that's a lot of garlic, and the house still has the sweet odour of roasted garlic.

And! Chez Dukay's latest vintage is already drinkable. Its been in the bottle for less than a month, and its already good wine. I'm surprised. It is a medium sweetness Reisling, with just a little bit of spicyness. Very surprising. Twenty-nine bottles remaining.

Started working full time today. Spent four hours working on one file in shakespeare land. Whoo hoo... that's exciting. Four hours.

I get the graphics from the graphics guy as a big, layered photoshop file. I slice the file into smaller graphics and use Photoshop to turn the graphics into HTML tables (I know tables for layout are bad) and turn the HTML tables into a single HTML file. Sounds easy, right? Nope. Using rowspans and colspans is a bad idea: it really screws up the layout and spacing of the elements, and makes things a nightmare to maintain. And dreamweaver doesn't understand them. The solution: nested tables.

Everybody all together now: ouch.

There are changes aftoot in the graphics arena, so I'm working on
other parts of the project. Or at least I'm trying to work on other
areas. One of our testing servers is constantly running out of
space. The other testing server doesn't serve: it eats files which sit
in its belly waiting for something to happen to them. So I've decided
to work on the links database, and in that respect, I'm having a bit
of nerd-equivalent writers block.

Warning: highly technical mumbo-jumbo in the rest of this entry

update: I was right. It worked. I found the answer. Normalize the data first, then parse it. Writing this entry jogged my memory with normal forms.