With the Thanksgiving break finally upon me I now realize that I need to be a better behaved blogger. The nice thing about having the blog on my website is that I’m pretty committed to keeping it going despite my occasional/frequent droughts.

It’s been busy for me at school and elsewhere. I’ve started regaining my social life in the midst of my more intense studying aspects in the hopes of finally becoming the well-rounded individual. Also, I’ve finally returned to the developer stage with some interesting projects.

I’ve pretty much abandoned my trivial web projects in favor of a few more serious research and other projects in Python and C++. This is the third time I’ve been programming in C++ and the first real exposure to Python. It’s been fun dealing with interface/facade ideas in these languages instead of using the familiar Java concepts. It’s also interesting to try plugging in these tools into some fun new libraries.

I must say that I don’t despise C++ as I used to. It’s really not much different from Java except for the exaggerated power you feel from managing your own memory.  When I switched over the first time I can still remember how uncomfortable I felt with the lack of the amazing Java library and documentation, but you can overcome that.  The code can obviously be much more elegant at times as the magical pointer garbage can be pretty interesting. The biggest concern is that your code doesn’t start looking like something written by Escher.

Python is fun and different, but I’m not sure that I’m used to it yet. When working with C++ and Python at the same time you start to realize how uncomfortable that void of high level management is. I really have no idea how long it’s going to take me to get really comfortable with the language. You know what I’m talking about; there’s that point where you feel like you’re working on a code assembly line and the code colors and connecting shapes are all in arm’s reach.

The current situation with Python is a lot like that episode of Futurama where Bender is floating through space. A small species of people form on his body and evolve into a fully civilized species and he plays god for a little while. Then he screws up and causes a nuclear war, killing off his little world.  He then meets up with a god-like galaxy and they start talking and figuring stuff out. I think I just encountered god after playing around and blowing up my own mini-universe. Soon I should a good approach for creating life, but right now the options are just blowing my mind.

I’ll keep you up to date and I hope to have some descriptions of my tools and projects soon. Until then, I guess I hope that you’re staying healthy and looking forward to a happy Thanksgiving.

I love coding in text editors because I don’t have to think about all the extra stuff. That’s not to say that I don’t love code completion and auto-generation tools, but it’s nice to sit down with just just you, a cup of hot apple cider, and ASCII. There’s no better tool for this than Notepad++, in my opinion.

It boast an expansive built in syntax-higlighting library and great tools for automating some of your frequented commands. But a major problem, aside from the inability to do multi-line regex stuff, is the way comments are set up. I found out that I love the fact that it shrinks them, but I hate that it uses a non-monospaced font. But you can fix it, and fast.

First open up your %APP_DATA%/Notepad++/stylers.xml file in Notepad++. The APP_DATA variable usually points to your ‘Documents and Settings/youruser/Application Data’ folder, but I could be wrong. Then do a find and replace to find “Comic Sans MS” and replace it with “”. That’s right, nothing.  Save and restart Notepad++ and you are ready to rock.

Thanks to Nathan for pointing this out to me. I’m fairly confident that he doesn’t even know I have a website. The only place I don’t talk about it, annoyingly, is at work.