Spending a lot of time at the computer has one big benefit: I get a lot done, or at least can do :-)
Last night I spent a few hours while watching TV and chatting to friends refactoring the forum software I have written, which eventually will be used to power the universitydancesport website. Its called paso and is coming on very nicely, though pretty slowly as its very much a side project while I do my PhD corrections. I had bumbled into my first Ruby On Rails project not quite sure how to go about it, and still not feeling very confident with the eXtreem Programming philosophy. I ended up with one big forum controller than did everything, boards, topics, posts, all done in one long file that was getting unwieldy. I realised that putting everything in one big file was a mistake, and that boards, topics and posts should each have their own controller. So I did just that. It was easy (if a bit dull), and thanks to my test suit (which is nearly twice as long as my actual code!) I’m sure everything still works. Cool. The next step will be some form of access control, watch here for details
Today I started on my corrections. Much of the day was spent making sure all the LaTeX source files still worked, getting the version I submitted checked into CVS and tagged all nicely (which took quite a while, the file system was convinced the files were in CVS, and the CVS system was convinced they were not!). After that I had to get LaTeX working on the new Linux install I set up between submission and the viva. With that all done, and after the minor panic when my thesis shrunk to 11 pages for 5 mins, but its back again now. I then had another go at going though the corrections, and came up with 13 stories, each one a small card with a task to do. When I have done them all then I will have done all the corrections. One of them I might write out as two or more new stories as I cant’ see myself doing it in one day. So if I write that one out as two new stories I will have 14 stories, each of which should take about a day (roughly). That means that in theory I can do the corrections in 2 weeks. Allowing for how any project always takes longer than expected, I might just get it done within the 3 month limit :-)
Oh I did actually do some corrections today as well. I changed the structure of the top levels (chapters etc) to reflect the new structure, and started moving some of the larger blocks of text to their new locations. Tomorrow I will try and complete one of my stories, and get that one step closer to finishing.
Technorati Tags : rails, ruby, refactoring, phd, thesis, corrections
