An odd case of senioritis

In high school, I used to wonder how people managed to get senioritis—the mythical disease contracted during graduation year with the symptoms of being really, really lazy. I was actually the opposite way; senior year is probably when I worked the hardest, since I was taking calculus classes at Purdue, as well as AP French and Physics C (for both kinematics and e&m). Now that I'm on my way out of college, however, things appear to have changed. Not only do I procrastinate madly on my homework, which has resulted in all-nighters for both of my parallel computing assignments, I've also picked up a habit of not going to a significant percentage of my numerical methods class. I don't think it will ever become a serious problem, though it makes me feel like a serious slacker.

Fortunately, this whole slacking business seems to have an upside. Since neither of my classes has a "real" programming component (yet), I've been doing more extra-curricular programming than I thought I would have time for. RITA has made decent progress, and some people use it for monitoring purposes even though it's technically not production ready. The key items that still need attending to include cleaning up the terrible mess I've made out of the code, as well as implementing a few more options. That aside, I was able to code up some other needed features, such as syncing to ResNet's traffic stats on the hour (which can still be tweaked some, I suppose), displaying the traffic graph, and creating a task tray icon with gauges to determine how close you are to the bandwidth limit. The tray icon was probably the most tedious, but it ended up being the most interesting. At first I had static icons set to display at low, medium, and high levels. The granularity of that is highly dissatisfactory and the icons weren't even displaying properly, for some reason, so I ditched that. In the end, I just dynamically drew the icons as necessary. This saved me the trouble of drawing 196 icons and calculating 14 different colors to use; even though the middle area turns to an ugly brown color, I'm still happy that it actually works.

The other project I've been working on starts with Ragel, which is a state machine compiler. I was interested in seeing how efficient an IRC library parser, which is really quite simple, could be in C#. SmartIrc4Net is one obvious benchmark to compare against; the single regular expression in Parse::IRC is another. Ragel is supposed to be really fast, so I wanted to try it out. The problem is that Ragel only supported Java, not C#, so my first task was to implement C# output for Ragel. This didn't turn out to be very hard; instead, it was mostly fixing errors that surfaced because of differences between C and C#, such as type safety rules.

Implementing a simple parser for IRC is not so hard; the syntax is pretty easy to break down. By "simple" I essentially mean that it's like a single regular expression. I was able to implement it at the end of the week, though I had trouble getting Ragel's scanners to work. Instead of using scanners, I used one of Ragel's cool features, embeddable actions, to mark tokens on transition enters and exits. I finished my first "benchmark" comparison against the giant Parse::IRC regular expression as well, after sticking it into a C# Regex object. The benchmark was simply to parse a few IRC commands a million times; as it turns out, Ragel is about 33% faster than a compiled Regex object in this measurement. It's kind of fun to suddenly start worrying a lot about efficiency, even though parsing is probably a small task compared to, well, what the rest of an IRC client would do. There is still more to be done with the Ragel parser, before I start trying to actually incorporate it into a library, though. More on that later, maybe.

Along the way, I got kind of annoyed at switching between Vim, a DOS prompt, and Visual Studio. Lucky for me, I discovered custom tools, which are basically processors that take a file and spit out code in a certain language. I implemented a custom tool processor for Ragel yesterday, so now I can use Visual Studio for everything. Using cmd.exe gets pretty annoying, especially when you're used to bash.

There's still much that could be done—I haven't done anything with Django this semester, which is kind of sad, but I guess you have to prioritize at some point. Hopefully this motivation sticks around long enough for me to eventually get to more web programming. Even though I've always been more of a desktop/non-web programmer myself, Django is a pretty cool piece (pieces?) of software, and I guess the web is the future and all that jazz.