All Things Yummy

At work, I had one of those rare moments where everything just all fit together. For one of the projects that I was assigned (at the last moment!), I had to write a HTML parser to parse out the form elements. Because people write bad HTML code, it’s kinda tricky to create one… so I looked around for one but I could only find libwww and even that felt kinda… clunky for what I was doing. That was yesterday.

So today, I sat down and started coding… and voila! About four hours into it, I had my working html parser… that’s about the same amount of time I had spent looking for HTML parser yesterday. Happy happy! ^_^

Got the EyeToy yesterday, so I played all evening yesterday (instead of writing my workterm report… Bad Daniel!) I’m incredibly sore today… EyeToy is either a great workout, or I’m incredibly out of shape. :/

I now have two friends who are engaged and know a couple who just had 11 pound(!!!) baby. It’s making me feel old… and I’m only 21. Ah, the mysteries of life.

Hmm… Other interesting tidbits from my life. FutureShop is shipping EyeToy for PlayStation 2 today, so hopefully I’ll get it tomorrow. It looks like a lot of fun and it was on sale too! Had my workterm evaluation today, and apparently they like me. I got excellent, which better than I expected. My boss actually wanted me to work into Christmas to get some other stuff finished… but alas, I’ll be in Texas during that time. My wireless router’s wireless part seems to be broken, so I need to try to figure out what might be wrong with it. I haven’t started on my workterm report yet, so I really should start working on it. I didn’t clean my spam mailbox for couple of days and it now has slightly over 3000 spams in it (~22MB). Got an email from a friend in Africa, which was also pretty cool. And that’s all the noteworthy thing that I noticed today.

Anyhoo, last week of work! Looking forward to 2 weeks of fun and workterm reports until school starts. o_O

It wasn’t that bad in the morning… but by lunch time, it looked like there was at least 10 to 15 cm snow on the ground. One of those times where I’m glad I drive a SUV. Turn the 4 wheel drive on and off you go!

Anyhoo, went to the Bank during lunch time and raised the credit limit on my Visa card to $5000. Financially wise, I’m all set to go out and buy that Digital Camera… I just need to make the decision and go out and buy (if I do decide to buy it).

Lawrence wrote a comment on my Friendster account… so I logged on to the site to approve it and I realized that out of 12 people listed there, there’s 0 females… I do have a gay friend, but it’s not quite the same. :p Note to self: Stop hanging around with computer engineer friends and find some friends of the opposite gender.

Today at work, I came across what’s gotta be the strangest bug (software wise, not real life!) that I’ve ever seen.

It started innocently enough - the ICAP server I wrote dies under heavy request modification stress. I realized that one of the required headers called Encapsulated was not being sent properly. Since Encapsulated tells the server the location of boundaries of different data sent over in a single request, it’s pretty important.
So, I start sniffing packets… Packet captures on client side showed that right data is being sent over… Packet captures on the server side (on the networking layer) showed that right data is being sent over… but once it got to my program, the Encapsulated header would mysteriously change to another syntactically valid but nevertheless wrong value. And I wasn’t using any libraries to connect either! It was all low level socket programming (you know, select() and stuff) so nothing should’ve gotten in anywhere…

Anyhoo, I figured out the pattern that caused the server to crash thereby sort of jumping over the sections that caused the crash (at a slight Performance hit… it’s a QA tool, so compliance is more important than performance anyway)… but I still don’t understand why it worked the way it did. Not a slightest clue. Bah!

Finished Harry Potter series… It seems to get better as characters are fleshed out. One of my pet peeves, though, are people who should know better acting stupidly. The fifth book is filled with Harry Potter acting stupidly when he should’ve known better… Argh! Sheer Frustration! :p

Another section that I thought was amusing was that final battle between Death Eaters and Order of Phoenix… I dunno… the description of it sounded like mix of scenes from Star Wars and Power Rangers. Hmm… do you think the name Harry Potter is somehow related to Bugs Potter?

Interesting observation, though… In FanFiction.net, Harry Potter series have 100,000+ stories written for it (including quite a few weighing at 3, 4 times size of Order of Phoenix at 600,000+ words). Lord of the Ring series have about 25,000 stories written for it, and the rest barely goes over 500.

Anyhoo, yesterday, I woke up at 7AM and went to Barbarian RugbyWear’s warehouse sale. We got there at around 7:45 (door opens at and there were probably couple of hundred people lined up already. Bought 12 different rugby shirts for $180 (including tax!) I’m totally set clothes-wise for next couple of years.

I’ve finally went over to the dark side - I’ve started reading through Harry Potter series.
I’ve finished the first book so far… thoughts? Standard kid’s affair, and I really don’t understand what the hoopla’s about, but I have to give it to Ms. Rowling for the very interesting world that she creates. Characters are too predictable and flat, and storyline is quite straight forward but the environment in which the characters live is enhanting and charming.

The only other thing that I’ve felt - and this is a serious matter from my view - is that it seems to be missing a heart… Sort of like big hollywood-ized version of your favourite story that doesn’t seem to have captured the feel…

So, my favourite children’s book author continues to be Antoine de Saint-Exupery and Roald Dahl.