Except for that out-of-work thing, life is good

[chipotle]

I'm sitting here with the "Jazz Traditions" channel on the Dish TV audio network playing--great music for doing other things to, I've decided. It's good enough that if I just sit around and listen to it I won't be annoyed (like I would with easy listening or a Snooze Jazz Smooth Jazz station), but not intrusive enough to be distracting when I start paying attention to other things. What I've been paying attention to today has been cooking and C coding.

I've put on a pot of chili, the first one I've attempted in a while. I'm suspecting that I don't do it too much because good chili is expensive--the ingredients in this batch come to about $13.50. If I'd gotten the on-sale ground chuck instead of a "chili grind" and gone with a cheaper brand of crushed tomatoes, I could have saved another $2, and I'll have to see what the whole shebang would have cost at Albertson's rather than Lunardi's--but I doubt I'd have ended up with it under $10. If you wonder why it's rare to see a good bowl of chili in a restaurant for under $4, now you know. I'm expecting I'll get 4-6 bowls out of this, of course. If you look at it that way, it's an investment against eating lunches out, even if I only have two or three of the bowls. (Which reminds me that I need to check in with the Florida unemployment office when I finish this update to claim my next "paycheck.")

Why C coding, you may ask? Do you think that upon completing that textbook you can legitimately put C on your résumé? Well, actually, yes, I can, but I know that for practical purposes it won't matter--I won't have it in any job listings. (Thinking about it I can actually list it as a skill from NetPoodles--I did some C debugging--but I still won't be a professional C coder.) It does mean that I could conceivably get a certification in C, which might help ameliorate that lack a little; I'm considering trying to pursue a few other certifications in web coding and technical writing.

I suppose ultimately it's because I'd like to get back into coding, and C is a good base to do that from. It's still being used, of course, and the other languages I'm interested in--Objective-C, C++ and Java--are all based on C (I'm sure some Java programmers might dispute that, but c'mon, guys, it looks more like C than Objective-C does). I keep telling myself to learn Java and its associated acronyms (JSP, EJB, J2EE) but I'm honestly more interested in Objective-C and the Cocoa API. What will I do with it? I don't know. I have crazy ideas about an XML editor--all of the ones I've seen strike me as far too complicated, and I have an idea for a UI that would make it much more like a conventional text editor, possible to use it as a word processor (albeit one much closer to Yeah Write in feel than Word), but still be a true XML editor able to create any well-formed (and possibly DTD-validated) document. Nobody's likely to write this program for me, so that likely leaves it up to me to try it.

The problem, of course, is that my track record with personal projects is abysmal. Not just with creative writing, but even my recent Yodel! program is stalled due to decreasing interest (I'm unable to convince myself it's really providing a service other things don't do better, but perhaps I'll find a different way to look at it in the future). I haven't done the "Road Trip" website I've been planning. So am I really likely to be able to single-handedly pull off something as complex as this when the first step is "learn Objective-C and Cocoa"?

I don't know. But hopefully I'll have a good bowl of chili later tonight.

Comments

Grind your own...

[doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com]

And see how that turns out. According to Alton Brown, five quick pulses in a food processor will turn 6 oz. of meat into the right grind for chili. Repeat as necessary for as much meat as you need.

Re: Grind your own...

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

I'd considered that, but at the store I was at, buying unground chuck didn't cost any less than their "chili grind."

If I'm feeling sufficiently motivated I'll get some unground chuck and pork and do that myself, and adjust the seasonings in a slightly different way than this time--I needed to put in more salt, and I think I'm going to do a chili caribe for the spice mix. (Which technically I should probably grind myself, too, with mortar and pestle--but I don't know if I'm going to be that authentic.)

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Don't sweat it... My C++ experience was zilch at the end of my last job (Mplayer) and I spent time working on a C++ class library for a while, both to learn the language and to develop something I could hopefully make Windows games with. I didn't get too far, but what I did get was enough to qualify me for my current job, which requires a pretty good C++ engineer. I'm doing just fine.

Of course I had a lot of C experience before that, but C++ is very different, and we are a very smart bunch here.

The short of it is, yes you can at least generate good code samples, and the code samples can be shown to prospective employers. But be sure to pick up and adhere to a good coding style, you do not want to show prospective employers spaghetti code, or badly documented code.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

Actually, I'd started trying to learn C++ before C, long ago (well, a few years), because I'd wanted to do programming in BeOS and C++ was the One Anointed Language. I don't think of C and C++ as too different, but that may only be because I've seen Objective-C code, which is darn strange-looking. :)

As for coding style, well, I hope I'm going to have a good one. I've been told by people who've seen my coding in other language that my stuff is well-structured and easy to follow, with sufficient comments. The code samples are something I'm definitely thinking about--presuming I actually come up with something useful to show down the road, of course. :)

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

There are some pretty serious differences between C and C++... One is procedural, the other is class-oriented. Since you know Java, you're probably halfway there, as you say. If you can keep to Javadoc commenting style, you'll probably be able to impress future employers as well, since C++ commenting is traditionally lax to non-existent, in the case of the standard template library.

Not looked at Objective-C myself... There hasn't been a call for it in any jobs I've had. :)

Most important thing to do is get C debugging experience, and be prepared to get down and dirty with Microsoft Visual C++ or with gdb and dbx, in my opinion. If you've never worked with a language where you had to examine crashes by checking the stack traces and variables and going through the code step by step, there's a lot to learn there-- in particular, Java insulates you from an awful lot of memory concerns like uninitialized memory, free memory reads and writes, and buffer overflows, since it has its own memory handling layer.

Nearly the first thing I did when making a C++ class library was to work up a smart pointer, since I'd gotten to really like the Java pointers for not having to think too hard about when to release an object.