Super Heaven

Remember that C course I was talking about? Well part of it is to create a final project in which you choose from a list of libraries to make an application that does what ever you decide. I chose the OpenCV library and so far I think I want to make something that detects objects from a video stream of a webcam. That’s nice and all, but I also decided that I needed a GUI for said app. 

And so began the quest to install GTK+ on my Windows XP laptop. Now that sounds like an innocent enough adventure, right? I wasn’t really sure what I needed to download from the official GTK+ site and was definitely feeling lazy, so I tried downloading a couple different installer packages to no avail. Then I downloaded just the developer package. Also, no dice.

I began looking around for some advice and came across these helpful instructions.  I got the gtk-demo to run and then eventually was able to compile this simple tutorial using the MSYS command prompt with this line (visit the link for the individual blog post to see full line. SORRY I’M BAD AT TUMBLRING) ::

$ gcc base.c -o base.o `pkg-config --cflags --libs gtk+-win32-2.0`

However when I tried running the program I received this pop-up error ::

base.o - Entry Point Not Found - The procedure entry point deflateSetHeader could not be located in the dynamic link library zlib1.dll.

It took a bit of googling to understand that apparently my system had conflicting versions of the zlib1.dll and basically I needed to help GTK+ find the correct one, which was probably not the first found in the path.

I also learned that DLL Hell is a thing. On a scale from 1 to 9, I had only reached the first circle of Dante’s Inferno as I was in a state of dll limbo, trying to figure out the order in which my 10 zlib1.dll files were being accessed. Then I realized I could assign them an id number in their file name to blatantly take them out of question. I did it to 6 of them before finally getting the tutorial to run.

My screen capture capabilities are weak, but in the middle of the prompt, that little empty window, that was my reward!

Oh hello blog that I’ve been regularly ignoring. It is currently the second day of the new year and I am writing this during the last moments I have in Nevada for a while. 

Fall semester of school ended with me being sick taking finals and generally being miserable. Luckily, the misery didn’t last long as I had a nice Christmas with the fam and experienced snow in a way that made me realize I don’t have proper snow experiencing attire.

Over the break I tried some Java problems on Interviewstreet and learned that interpreting the questions was maybe more of an issue than actually coding them. So I reviewed Python and JavaScript on Learnstreet and was introduced to Ruby finally. Ruby is kind of silly. I did enjoy placing the objects that were being acted on in the function definitions. Plus the default methods are sort of nice although they’d be better listed alphabetically. Does object.methods.sort() exist??

OH HOLY SHIT THAT IS A THING :: http://codepad.org/yRp6Mq5K

Plus I’ve been doing this MIT online C programming course which has been all sorts of interesting. I finally understand bit shifting better. It’s been a pain to figure out how to make the CDT Eclipse download behave though. Almost each time I run build it wants me to give it a different toolchain. Super bizarre…

Also, a fellow student has been posting cool stuff on our class board such as Google Summer of Code that I’d be totally interested in doing. But regardless of whether they do it again this year I’m going to attempt to get involved in open source soon. I’m looking at you, Eclipse.

So uh… it’s been a while since I last posted, but I graduated from Hackbright and am currently on my way to getting a Java certificate.

Through the kindness of others, I was able to magicke up a Twiliocon ticket! Today I skipped my pre-calculus class (sorry old Russian professor!) and arrived bright and early to get to know the Twilio API. The morning talks were both interesting and hard for me to focus on, so I did the quickstart tutorial for Python and was briefly excited about seeing “Hello World” show up on the local server.

However, my mind was blown when the Android talk began. The guy was using Eclipse, but it looked like Sublime! I was like whoaaaa I gotta go figure that out when I get home. And I did! I thought about doing it manually and then I was like wait… I’m a programmer. There’s got to already be a shortcut written out there in the wild, wild internets. Of course there is. I found this tight github repo with Eclipse themes: https://github.com/eclipse-color-theme/eclipse-color-theme

(Here’s what the Sublime Text 2 theme looks like in terrible quality.)

I’ve been using vi editor on all my Java projects so far, but now I have a new reason to get better acquainted with Eclipse!

Okay, so the title may be a bit dramatic, but I definitely yelled many curse words at my poor laptop yesterday while attempting to complete the Flask tutorial. The objective at hand was initially to install Flask itself. First off, I was at a slight disadvantage due to the laptop in question being a Windows machine. I don’t have Linux/Unix. I didn’t start with the correct version of Python. I’m not experienced with installing things on the Windows command line.

The worst part was that the instructions on how to set up the virtual environment for Windows on the Flask tutorial was not very helpful. It was especially insulting that I needed to run something called “easy_install” and it had clearly become difficult for me. Thankfully I finally realized that there’s got to be more information about this outside the tutorial. And thus I found my way to a blog post which was titled “Installing easy_install…could be easier.” Magically, my problems were solved. Or so I thought.

Frustratingly, Flask is not supported by versions of Python under 2.5 and over 3.0. Of course, I already possessed Python 2.4 and 3.2. None of which were going to work. When I got to the Python download page, I thought to myself “Wouldn’t it be fun to unpack this tarball on the command line?” NO, IT’S A TRAP DON’T GIVE IN! But alas, hindsight is only from the future. Foolishly, I attempted to make it work. After spending considerable time fretting over the many Python files, I decided to go ahead and download the simple Windows installer widget. I was the proud owner of Python 2.7 within minutes. Sigh.

I began the actual tutorial after finally completing the setup and everything was fine until Step 3: Creating The Database. Basically, I know what databases are, but have I ever used one before? Not really. I barely know what SQL is yet here I am trying to implement something called SQLite3 which sounds a lot like a diet beverage. So, I type up the code, import it onto the command line, and call the initialize database function. …the database file that does not exist cannot be opened. Alright, fine. If my homework doesn’t want to be done, who am I to judge it?

Epilogue ::

We went over the tutorial in class. My partner and I ran into this exact error once again, yet this time it was solved by a simple path name fix. I had thought my path name had issues, but tried to fix it with no luck on Sunday. Maybe tomorrow I’ll give it another go.

P.S. I’m sure Flask is actually super awesome. This is just another example of why I need to give myself more breaks during coding sessions!

According to the accepted measure of time developed by people using practices they labeled as scientific, I am 24 and a half years old. The language in which I am typing is called English. It is made up of sounds created by positioning the tongue in the mouth and vibrating the vocal chords while exhaling. Somehow words were assigned to specific objects around people in order to communicate with each other. Words also referred to abstract concepts that could not be seen or touched. As people needed to say more complicated things and refer to more complex ideas, longer sentence structures were implemented with rules which other people needed to follow if they wanted to be understood by everyone else.

People did this all over the world, but for some reason English became a language needed for international business relations. Children across many countries were taught English and most were able to speak it at least somewhat fluently and were understood by native speakers. However, in English speaking schools the children were taught other languages as electives and it didn’t seem quite as important to learn those languages to fluency. Many young students were only able to articulate broken versions of what they had attempted to learn.

Over the course of popular history people have done many incredible things and the more I learn how to communicate with computers the more I worry about us people of the world being able to communicate with ourselves. I don’t want cultural histories to be marred by a universal language overtaking regional ones, just as much as I don’t want a universal coding language to take out those deemed “less important” or “less powerful”. I’m not sure how much of what I’ve written makes sense or matters, but maybe one day it will sound entirely silly because we’ll all be hablando en Español.

And I will leave you with this image ::