Accused of cheating!

I was accused of cheating today. I’m all riled up so I can’t possibly sleep, which is what I should be doing right now. Grr!

I’m taking a web publishing class as part of my degree program at a local college. The teacher mentioned to us on several occasions that we were not allowed to use WYSIWYG editors for the class. He wants us to hand type all the HTML. That’s fine with me, in fact, I hate WYSIWYG editors. I figured I would not be violating this rule if I were to use Emacs (my editor of choice) which is text based and provides absolutely no WYSIWYG functionality at all. I also assumed it would be OK to write the HTML using compact lisp symbolic expressions to save my poor hands from RSI. In case you’ve never seen HTML written this way, here’s an example:

(:html
(:head (:title “Title of the web page”))
(:body (:h1 “Hello World!”))))

Writing HTML this way saves a lot of typing and avoids the “angle bracket tax”. After writing the HTML using s-exprs I run it through a translator that spits out normal HTML, which is what I turn in to the teacher.

Well, today I got 2 emails from my teacher. The first one said I did a excellent job with my assignment and he even gave me some extra credit points. The next email, which came a few hours later, he retracted my grade stating that I must have used a WYSIWYG editor to do the assignment. My HTML was too advanced and well formatted to be hand written. He then said he would give me a break this one time and let me redo my assignment by hand like the rest of the students in the class.

His response to my assignment made me very mad. I spent a lot of time working on that assignment and to be called a cheater without first allowing me to explain myself really ticks me off. So after cooling down a little bit I sent him a nice email explaining exactly how I did the assignment and included the s-expr source file. I also explained why I did it that way, mentioning RSI and the AB Tax. Hopefully the issue will be resolved in the morning and I can get my excellent grade with extra credit back!

Alright, I’m done venting, maybe I can get some sleep now!

Darcs woes

I really like Darcs a lot but there are some issues that are making it very difficult for me to love it. The biggest showstopper is performance and memory consumption. My source code repository is about 350mb, not really that big. When I do a "darcs put" or "darcs push" to my remote server it chews up 99% of my processor and 1.3 gigs of memory. I let it run for about 4 hours then killed it. I imaging the 99% processor usage is due to swapping because I only have 1gig of RAM. Darcs is written in Haskell (another reason I was attracted to it) and uses garbage collection, which may be partly contributing to the memory consumption issues.

So I'm going to stick with Subversion for now and maybe try Darcs again when the performance/memory issues are resolved.

This foo walked into a bar…

Coming up with unique blog names is a real PITA! I spent several days googling name ideas only to discover someone had already thought of them. I was sure that “blogrammer” would be unique but google turned up 111 results. The title of this post is one of the worst titles I came up with. I finally settled on the slightly meaningful yet arguably lame title you see above. It is based on a book that I really enjoy reading called The Pragramatic Programmer by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt. If you are a programmer and have not read it, go buy it. Right now. It’s chock-full of all kinds of programming wisdom.

So what is this weblog about? It is mainly a tool for me to collect ideas related to my career as a computer programmer. I hope post a bit of code and write about new technologies or techniques that I discover. I’ve kept a non-public pseudo journal of things that I’ve learned in the past so hopefully that stuff will somehow get merged into this blog. Another goal is to make an effort to share information with my programmer friends.