the corner office

Phew. No more late nights for a while... my Honours Project module is DONE. It's late, so I hope they still accept it. It started out being quite exciting and ended up being more character-building than anything else. I chose to do a Linear Programming project, which was meant to be 25% theory and 75% programming - just up my alley. The theory bit turned out to be a bloomin' nightmare, especially for someone who hadn't done any real maths for over 5 years. Then, late in December, as I was putting the final bits together, I realised that my proposed solution, which had been through a draft review, the lot, had some flawed logic. So I had to ditch a chunk of diligently tested 'engine' and re-do things using a different algorithm. As I said, character building.

On the plus side, the programming was fun. I started out building the back-end stuff using Eclipse's CDT on Linux. I'd hoped to write the app in Linux, but left it too late to get the OK from my lecturer, so decided to just do it on Windows. At first I thought wrapping my head around MFC would be fun, even though MS seems intent on shoo-shooing VC++ developers to Windows Forms, but soon came to the realisation that MFC ain't just some Swing without the garbage collection. When I couldn't find a decent built-in grid component, I knew it was time to re-evaluate my GUI toolkit choice, stat. I settled on wxWidgets, which I've grown rather partial to. It's small, simple, and well-documented. Lots of open-source apps don't play nice with VC++, but it worked like a charm.

Now, sleep.