Coding

I recently started trying to set up zoneclient to update my DNS listings if my IP changed. I wanted to have it checked extremely often, yet not waste zoneedit’s bandwidth by checking up with them every 3 to 5 hours via cron. This problem was brought into new light when Irfan tried to pull up my site during Biology class and failed. Tandoc was nice enough to let me check what was wrong after class, (we finished a bit early) and my IP had changed, although I could do nothing to fix it from school.

I was having a problem with zoneedit. Although it claimed to support getting my external IP from my router, for some reason it was checking the wrong page. I have no formal or even really informal experience in Python, and my attempts at poking the code produced nothing helpful. I contacted Kal, the sole maintainer of the code. He replied in close to an hour, which was a pleasant suprise. I explained my problem and gave him my logs, and within 5 hours of email back and forth the problem was completely solved! I now have the script running every 5 minutes. Excessive? Yes.

I’m also writing a C++ fish tank simulation program as qualification for Camp CAEN‘s advanced C++  Game Development class. We’re supposed to draw a fish tank in text on the screen, then when space is pressed, randomize all the positions of the fish and draw again. Multiple fish in one position are shown as a * instead of their type letter. This program is also supposed to be able to read in the number of fish and tank dimensions from a file at runtime. When I started it had been quite a while since I had done any C++. The initial part went relatively quickly, (drawing the fish tank, having the fish randomize) but I was stumped with the memory errors I was getting when I started easing the thing into being dynamic and read its settings in at runtime. After spending quite a while troubleshooting with the help of those in ##C++ on freenode, I found that my problems were because I was accidentally declaring a local instance of the member variables I was attempting to initialize in my constructor. Whoops. Let’s see if I make that mistake again in a hurry.

EDIT: Alter Ego!