Mkava's Ramblings

I have posted the latest edition of the SimpleIRC (or as I jokingly refer to it, StupidIRC) over in the new “Helpful Junk” section of the site. I’m going to try to keep it up to date with all of the changes that may occur to it throughout the lifetime of its usage for CSIS 440 this semester. I’m hoping its simple enough, yet robust so it can be used in future projects for this class, or even as a way to teach people how IRC works a bit for those being trained in as network programmers at NFNet (people who will be using the IRC protocol on a personal level but instead of just using it, they will know it by heart). Four commands a basically decent structure should make things magically. =)

At time of this posting, Dr. Walker has yet to comment on it. Nor any other classmate was not there for the creation of the latest documentation for the simplistic protocol. *sigh*

snega2usb is a hardware project that allows reading of SNES and Genesis carts directly to a computer via USB. Essentially, it allows an emulator to read/write from/to the cart as a means of playing the cart as if it was a ROM of the game. It’s an interesting project, and certainly provides a look at the legality of space-shifting digital medium and all that lovely legal business.

I thought this was pretty sweet either way. If I could find my Genesis carts and didn’t have a working SNES, I’d be on top of this in a snap. Hope the designer can actually get the project through and make it to production, as it would be great to see something like this out there for people who have a cart collection but a non-working console.

Information can be found at: http://www.snega2usb.com/wordpress/

One project I have been slowly working on throughout the summer has been a tool that essentially provides the National Weather Service forecast and radar without a browser (at least, not a direct one). Was curious if anybody has ever attempted something like this that involves parsing the XML file from the NWS or really anything like the project idea of a desktop app showing the weather.

I’ll get a page up about this project soonish, as well as actually finish this site one of these days. >.>

For the last few months, I’ve been working with Oracle quite a bit at work. It’s actually quite nice for a few things but certainly has its oddities. One great part is the pseudocolumn rownum, which I have used more than I want to think about. And when it comes to administering an Oracle server, oi. Thankfully, I don’t have to do that and never intend to let an employer know that I can probably learn how to do so with nominal issues. After using Oracle for a few months, I got quite used to the error codes. Mostly they are extremely vague and just plain annoying to get what the error is pointing at. At other times, checking the error code and doing a Google search makes quick work of the simple mistake and away I go. (I did come across a wonderful error code site in the process as well, www.ora-code.com) But now with MSSQL I’m finding out.

My previous experience with databases prior to starting my current job was mostly MySQL on a good ol’ Linux box. I’m quite used to it from most angles, such as setup, managing users, databases, and permissions, and even just plain using it as heavily as I can. Now I have some experience with Oracle, enough that I feel comfortable. But MSSQL, oh hell no. It’s like the developers took all the great things about MySQL and Oracle, and replaced them with errors. I’m sure its not _that_ bad, but it seems every time I want to modify something on the database I work with, I get an error.

Like today, I was adding stored procedures for my current project. I could add every single one with ease, except one. For some reason, it didn’t like my syntax for using a database and setting additional properties besides. Got good ol’ message 102, which essentially means nothing. It’s even more vague than most Oracle error codes. So after spending 20 minutes Googling and playing with the ‘create procedure’ method, I just ripped it apart to nothing but just the ‘create’ call. And then it works. The database was assuming constants on me, and not telling me in the process. This is probably more of an issue with my lack of experience with MSSQL, but either way, it’s annoying.

I think in the future I’ll try to stay with MySQL (if Sun does keep it in its nice shape like they seem to be planning) or even Oracle, as I know both of those fairly well now. Thank goodness for various database types, Google, and that hacking at code works sometimes. =D