I’m not doing so hot at updating this blog regularly, am I. :) School’s keeping me busy (seems like I say that a lot) but I’ll try to figure out a focus, something that’ll get me writing. (And be interesting to read.)

In the meantime, I think I want to master regular expressions next. I’m familiar with them and have used them often, but there’s a lot of power in them there regexes. In other news, I’ll be coding a family website in Rails over the next few months. It’ll be a good testing ground for my Beyond work. And at work, it looks like this web app I’m working on will be almost all Javascript. Not what I expected, but I’d much rather work in Javascript than ASP.NET. :)

Technorati Tags: Rails, Javascript, ASP.NET

It’s been a while since I wrote about programming. Almost a month, in fact. ~sigh~

So, the BYUFHLC is on hold for now due to time constraints at work. (I have to get all the new extraction software done by a month from now when we present it at the ICAPgen conference.) After ICAPgen I should have enough time to finish it, though.

Haven’t coded much Ruby (or Rails) lately. I may start using it for prototypes for this extraction software, though… Considering that we’ll be switching to a Linux server sometime within the next few months, it almost feels like a waste to code the stuff in .NET (not to mention that I much much much prefer Rails), but it’ll have to do. At least I can rest assured that I’ll be able to recode it in Rails five times as quickly. :)

In other news, Matz is coming to BYU to give a colloquium two weeks from tomorrow. (11 a.m. on the 19th in 1170 TMCB, if you’re interested and on campus.)

Technorati Tags: BYU, Family History Library, ICAPgen, Ruby, Rails, Ruby on Rails, Matz

Some of our projects at work have been using ActiveXZip, a free zip compression library. The only problem is, it apparently doesn’t work with ASP.NET 2.0 (we upgraded recently). Nor do I particularly care for the annoying splash screen that comes up whenever you initialize it.

My co-worker found SharpZipLib, which showed a lot of promise. I downloaded it and tried porting our existing code over to use it, but I’m running into some trouble using it to create a zip file. The sample code is…well, look at it this way — it takes 40 lines of code to add a file to the zipped archive. Forty! In ActiveXZip, it’s one. That’s how it should be. A zip library ought to take care of all the nitty-gritty technical details and let me worry about my app instead.

I wish I were coding in Ruby or Python… ~sigh~

In the meantime, today I discovered Stevey’s old blog (and his new one) and will be reading through the archives.

Technorati Tags: ActiveXZip, SharpZipLib, .NET