What is everyone doing as they are browsing this forum?

[alexander]

Hey, what are you doing as you are taking a look through this forum?

Ok, ok I'll start, I'm writing a PHP interface to Google; a search engine that will run off of Google but display the results in the way you want to format them, or so i think i'd like it to work...

[Tormod]

I'm supposed to write a press release...

[geko]

Im trying to track an item in the post - it's turing into a nation-wide parcel-hunt lol

[Tim_Lou]

try to keep warm while typing...

its freezin in here...

[alexander]

Actually, today i did a lot of reading on the str functions, hoping that tomorrow i can write the parser for the string... this would be so much better if i knew Perl. But i guess that PHP will do, i figured out that the content for the search return lies between 2 <div> tags, i also wrote a function to generate google search URLs, I think that my next big breakthrough will be getting rid of the header and the footer on the page and leaving the content before the div tag and after the / tag intact...then some serious string to array conversion will take place.

[IrishEyes]

what else do i do while browsing the forum? during my day browses, or night browses?
daytime browsing is usually a ten minute block of time a few times a day while my kids are eating, reading, or having 'quiet time'. today, i made two posts while cooking dinner and refereeing a wrestling match, and trying to determine whether a dirt clod hit to the eye was a reason to visit the ER. I also do my bill-paying and e-mail responses while browsing. sometimes i work on my homework. usually i just try to escape into the forums for a few minutes though.
night browsing is different, as there are no distractions. usually, i send Tormod about 20 PMs about what went on while he was at work/home/sleep, try to read through all of the posts from that day and see what needs responding, check out the news sources to see if anything has come up that would possibly spark interesting discussions here, and -right now - i'm supposed to be working on the latest Hypography newsletter. don't tell my boss, but i'm really slacking on that darn thing. it's supposed to be done by friday, but i'm having a small bear of a time figuring out his wonder-tool. just need some more coffee, i think. luckily, tomorrow is a no-work day, so i can sleep in and the hubby will watch the kids. gives me a few extra hours on the computer to figure this out tonight.
alexander, i think you work too much!

[Aki]

pretend I'm doing homework, but really I"m just talking on msn.

[alexander]

Ooh, good one Aki, i gotta start doing that...

alexander, i think you work too much!

but i'm bored...
plus programming is fun, you start playing around with it and find out that something isnt installed on your system, so you go and correct the problem, but that doesnt help because you find out that you have 2 versions of something installed and the autoconfig script doesnt work, so you uninstall everything and install it again, the problem doesnt go away, you get really frustrated, want to throw your computer on the floor and jump on it, then you figure out that a few grand that you spent on the system might not be such a good thing to break... and so forth, but in the end you learn something.

[alexander]

To add on to that, people argue that i have too much free time on my hands.
here is a part of an email i wrote to one of my professors last week, i guess that i agree with people that say that i have too much free time...
(Edit: PDLC stands for Programming Logic and Design with C++)
[quote]

At first I was quiet perplexed as to why there was even talk about the
change of language for the PLDC, and why professors divulged Java to
be a replacement for C++. I can now understand their need in changing
C++; C++ can have very discombobulating syntax, by that presenting a
preponderance of perplexity for beginner programmers, that might
misconstrue and by that discourage the students to program in future.
I agree with the board's concern and the need to change the curriculum
to a middle to high level programming language, but why exhort to go to
Java?

Java is a proprietary, closed source, semi interpreted, OO language,
with syntax that is not much different, than that of C++. Java is
produced, distributed and supported by Sun Microsystems (only); if
Martha was to sell all her shares of Sun tomorrow, and Sun went out of
business the day after, there would not be any support for Java, no
bugs would be fixed, no new features, and no support for bog
corporations that reside on the use of Java, because Java is closed
source. Java requires special compilers, and the p code that all Java
programmers are so proud of, can only be compiled with a compiler
which the version is the same as that of the precompiler used to
precompile(interpret) the source. To make matters worse, Microsoft
provides runtimes with standards different from those of Sun.

Java source files must end in .Java and the compiled files must end in
.class. Therefore, the new universal language can not be used with MS
DOS which allows only 3-letter filename extensions. There's more, with
Unix systems, software is normally distributed as C source files, Perl
scripts, shell scripts, and other user readable code. Then, it is up
to the user (system administrator) to compile the code and install the
executables. Many companies don't like to let users see their source
code. Java to the rescue! Because Java converts human readable source
code into p-code, this gives companies a way to distribute machine
independent source which users can not read. Then, instead of running
fast compiled code, each system has an interpreter that slowly
"executes" the p-code.

Java is a miserable high-level language compared to languages like
Python and Ruby because Java isn't much more expressive than C++;
it is in many ways similar to ObjectC. People that had to port a few
Java apps to Python say that the difference in line count seems to run
around 4:1 for
Java : Python. Java isn't any easier to read, write, or debug. 1

Java is a miserable low-level language compared to languages like
C. Good C generally runs about 10x faster than Java (and
perhaps more strangely, about 2x faster than C++), and with several
times less memory usage. Java is pretty useless for low-level system
programming too, and can't really interact with other parts of the
system (by design). 1 There's no pointers or operator overloading in
Java.

Java is also very badly documented. The jdk 1.1 Java disassembler
requires the name of the class file but without the file extension,
yet this is nowhere to be found in the documentation that comes with
it.

To make an analogy, you need a sports car for some purposes and a heavy
duty truck for other purposes, but rather than getting two vehicles you
buy an El Camino and use that for everything. The El Camino is Java.
The people that drive real trucks will laugh at you, the people who
drive real sports cars will laugh at you, and the people who own and
drive both proficiently, well, those are the super-hackers (and
international play-geeks). But if you are just an average

[Freethinker]

Me? I'm running my company.