Blogzot.... for HoudahSpot

My review of HoudahSpot as seen on MacZOT.com

-- Do you use a mac? Are you running Tiger? Do you use spotlight? Do you ever wish spotlight could do MORE? Well, that's pretty much what HoudahSpot is - an extension of spotlight which gives you a bit more flexibility in how you search. Instead of JUST searching by text, you can easily combine criteria to hone in on the stuff you're really looking for. Check it out! --

NOTE: If you're seeing this on June 16, 2006 head over to MacZOT, you might be able to get a Free copy of HoudahSpot

Search easily in Tiger, Mac OS X, with HoudahSpot

This is to test publishing to my blogger account.

Little One, the Big Cat

Little One, the Big Cat
Originally uploaded by Turtlebud.

My sister has a few cats - this one curiously is named "Little One." No, they weren't trying to be ironic when they named the cat, it was actually a little cat when they got it.

oh, yeah, i'm working on my "final" for my physio class now. it's kind of like a post mortem of the semester. for one of the presentations that I did, I'm supposed to say the things that were difficult about it and say how I solved those problems. The tomorrow morning we share and hopefully learn something from each other. Gotta really try to get to bed by 12 tonight so I can get up and get to school early (yawn) tomorrow.

Okay, so turns out I wasn't quite done with the program... geez. Well, there was one small bug that I didn't catch. Fortunately, my partner found it and I was able to fix it before demo'ing my project. Yes, you heard right, my partner sent me email. I wasn't sure what had happened with him - last I heard, he was out of town with a family emergency and was supposed to be back last friday. I sent him emails each time I finished fixing what I thought was the last bug, but didn't hear from him. Well, until today around 1pm. I was a little flustered at first, but everything turned out okay - at least I think it did. I ended up doing my demo anyways today cause we had some extra after class and even though there was a bug that caused my program to crash at the very end, the prof was pretty nice about it. I feel quite fortunate. Anyhoo, our original demo time is tomorrow at 4pm. I hope I can skip it and have my partner go himself since I have to be at school at 8am for my physio final, then off to work. So if I don't have to come back to school, that'd be ideal.

Bought tickets for the Matrix Reloaded today - going to see it on thursday. :)

Okay, okay. I THINK I'm done (well, pretty much) with my part of the program. I am worried though, cause I haven't heard from my partner all weekend. Actually, the ideal thing that could happen is if he decides he's going to take an incomplete in the class or something cause then we don't have to worry about integrating our two parts of the program. It's crazy. I feel like I've thought it's done at least 4 or 5 time already, only to realize that there are still bugs in it. I'm realizing the purpose of things like unit testing and the such that we do at work. Everyone hates it cause it's tedious, but I'm learning how necessary it is if you want to write a piece of code that doesn't break unexpectedly. Essentially each test that you prepare for your code can test a few or many logic paths in your code and all the tests that you perform on it can cumulatively test ALL logic paths. Then, when your program is being used, it'll be unlikely that a "special" file/sequence will break it. Boy, it seems like there have been so many times that I've seen that at work - and the time it takes to fix it just delays everything. Best to just get it done the first time. I guess i'm learning that.

Well, like I said, I THINK it's done now (minus that one bug which I can hopefully fix tomorrow). I'm afraid to test it with another file/testset cause it might not work again..... But I need to come up with a few more test sets and then get started/finish the writeup by tuesday. So I guess I should go to bed now so I can get up for work tomorrow.

Up and down, up and down. Today I _thought_ I had my part of the program working - well, it _does_ work..... for some cases. So tonight I tested to program on a set of data that I had worked out by hand. Unforunately, my program bailed in the middle of it. So now I'm back to square one - well, maybe not THAT bad, square one and a half. I feel like I'm close to finishing it up, but each test set that I run on it seems to reveal another bug. Hopefully before it's due, I can get all the bugs ironed out. Well, I'll probably we logging in a bit later tonight, ideally with the program a nice and working, but likely, closer, just not all done.

Another night, another late night. True, I like my classes this semester, but I hate being stressed out and stumped trying to get a program to run correctly. Like so many other times, I feel like i'm just feeling my way around when I program. There isn't that authority that I'd like to have, that mastery over programming. Hopefully one day, I'll get there. But for now, i'd settle for a working program.

Another hope is that my partner has got his part of the project close to working. He's out of town because of a family emergency so I'm not sure how much his head will be into this project. Can't say I blame him though. Don't know how I'd feel if something tragic happened in my family, but I had a final project to finish.

At least it's friday - which in my case means I have the weekend to make this program work or else. Well, not the WHOLE weekend, cause mother's day is sunday so we're going to do something for that in the afternoon/evening. Welp, I guess that leaves saturday, which is notorious for begin very unproducting. Bummer. Still keeping your fingers crossed? I'm going to need it this weekend.

I always found reading other people's blogs were quite interesting, yet I didn't know what to write myself and here I am, _trying_ to write a blog... I wonder "what do I write about?" "is what I write boring or insignificant?" "why am I writing it?"

Well, i'm up late yet again, working on a my final project for one of my classes (string, tree, & sequence algorithms - sounds interesting right?) Actually I really like the class for some reason. I actually find the material interesting and "neat". But I am also kind of stressed cause I have til next tuesday to finish this project and still have a ways to go. Plus, my partner has been out of town for the past two weeks or so, which means that we have to integrate our work together, come up with testing data & a final write up all this weekend. ugh.

So I guess this is my break - and now it's time to get back to work. Keep your fingers crossed - hope I can find all the bugs in my program.