Two Slashes

I don’t know when, exactly, but a thought came to me at some point this weekend, and it’s been stuck in my head ever since.

I find it highly unlikely that anyone has noticed (or, if they have, they haven’t bothered to say anything) that the software on my projects page hasn’t been touched in at least a year, in some cases quite a bit longer than that.

Considering my interests as a computer scientist, I guess I find it kind of funny that I could let such a thing happen.  I must admit that I myself am using some of the current “active” projects less and less.  Since I started using the Windows 7 beta (and now the release candidate), I have little use for SkipTo as I can simply press the Windows key, type a few characters, and away I go with the same application I would have launched with my own tool.  (Admittedly, I could have done this in Vista, too, but I won’t bother beating a dead horse, especially one I refuse to ride.)

Alright, maybe I caused this particular bug. I guarantee that you don't know what the solution was, though.

At heart, my best guess is that this is something of a motivation issue.  After hammering away at code for hours on end at my summer job, and after all of the work I’ve put in over the previous school year, it’s been a little hard as of late for me to come home, sit down, and find the desire to stare at monospaced fonts and locate misplaced semicolons for a few hours in hopes of doing anything productive.

I’ve also noticed that whatever efforts I’ve put into any form of development (outside of work) as of late have been for personal use with no intent of making them public, or helping other people with their own unique problems.  I’ve hacked together a tool to help me rename and reorganize my MP3 library, butchered the Last.fm plugin I use for WordPress into something that displays my application-usage statistics from Wakoopa, and made minor tweaks to various tools to enhance my own productivity.  I’ve modified WordPress themes, helped design a new one from scratch, and experimented lightly with Blogger (for 20SB, of course, as I have no intention of leaving WordPress anytime soon).  This lack of sharing and public utility isn’t something I’m completely proud of, and I hope to rectify it at some point, but (as any regular well knows) I have an odd habit of promising things here and then not delivering, so a promise this is not.

The best way I see to motivate myself at this point is to scrap the “crap” I’ve got sitting in my projects page (honestly, Visual Basic 6 is dying, anyway), and start working on a few fresh projects.  What I need, however, are the ideas for the replacement projects, things people like you might actually have a use for or that might be useful as a proof-of-concept.  I’ve picked up a few decent suggestions over the past few days from a handful of people, but I’d be more interested in working on things that more than one or two people would ever find useful.

If you have a suggestion, leave a comment.  In the meantime, I’ll be staring at that blinking line trying to decide what I’ll be making it run away from.

Alright, so that title has a largely-unrelated UNIX joke in it.  Take out the joke, and it’s pretty accurate to this post, though highly geeky.  Please continue only if you are prepared to be bored.

One of the computer science classes I’m taking this semester entails a lot of coding in C as we explore lower-level interactions with operating systems.  The first coding assignment we were handed was nothing more than a group of menial tasks, something that just about everyone in the class did in a day or two with little to no trouble whatsoever.

Our second assignment, however, is more interesting, if not infinitely redundant.  As I stated in my previous post, I’ve spent my spare time this weekend working on writing a simple shell according to the specification they gave us.  (In between helping all those iPhone-toting people do their thing yesterday, of course.)

Among other things, the requirements include:

• A rather crappy infinitely-recording session history system that keeps track of the commands you’ve run and allows you to list and/or re-execute them as you wish by simply referring to them with a number.  While this might be useful, there is a point where this becomes excessive for an assignment like this.
• A 256-character command limit. I hate to say it, but plenty of commands I use on a regular basis are way over this character limit.  Looks like I’m better off sticking with something that isn’t this project, eh?
• Keeping track of the number of successful commands entered.  Alright, so this behavior can be found elsewhere.  It’s not really all that interesting, though.
• …and more!  (Sorry, I had to.  Well, maybe it’s true, though.  There are other requirements for this assignment.)

Typically, I wouldn’t have a problem with an assignment, but there’s something so wrong about reinventing the wheel, especially when a simple search on Google turns up more examples of the exact same thing than is necessary.  (There are so many usable results that I’m wondering if people are just going to try and claim a result as their work and check that in.)

I understand the idea behind the assignment, and it makes sense to an extent to be doing some of the work as it serves as a demonstration of where the concept could be useful, but there’s no reason to be re-coding the same applications countless others have done.  The possibilities for implementation may be endless, but limit that list to the number of practical possibilities and you’ll find that the number shrinks quite nicely to two or three, at most.

Stick a fork() in me (oh great, another joke); I’m going to stop ranting before I turn this into a week’s worth of posts.  Back to coding…