Today is a good day…

<WARNING>Computer terminology to follow</WARNING>

First of all… I’m 3 days ahead of my own personal projected schedule for the project my mentor has me on. Although, I learned on Friday that the 6 weeks included a bit more than I was originally told (which I assumed since there was no way he could think this project would take 6 weeks unless he thought I was a novice at programming). Just the same, he was pretty happy with the progress I had made and let me know a few of the features he was going to want me to work on. There was three general features he wanted me to add: a form edit feature in which he wanted to be able to update information to a database on the fly before it was approved (as opposed to as it was approved); an informational feature that allowed submitters to view what was already in the database so they didn’t have to be preempted by my data cleanliness checks; an asynchronous data association feature (basically if multiple users were approving data at the same time there is the possibility that they could overwrite each other’s data). I finished the first and second throughout the afternoon.

The third is why today is such a good day. My mentor and I argued for a bit about how exactly to do it. He said we could just use a thread pool for asynchronous data processing… I know you can control how many active processes there are in a thread pool but I still didn’t like the idea because there were situations that data could still become corrupt because there are 2 distinct functions that associate to the same data. Well… I came up with a fairly good idea to do thread queuing instead… Just a Queue data structure with containers for Threads and a control function that runs the threads in the queue as long as threads exist (the calling function kicks off the thread control which in turn exits if it is already running). I can’t test it on my actual site since I don’t have the database connections at home, but it works beautifully on a test site I made.

<END_GEEKINESS/>

Life has been boring and interesting in an odd way. I went out with some of the other interns the night before last… I work with a very wide array of people. I still don’t do much most nights. I keep thinking I might go into down town Raleigh and try to meet some people at a bar, but I haven’t been in the mood to drink at all which kind of kills my purpose. I’ve been talking to Theresa quite a bit which definitely helps with the loneliness and she flies down in 6 days (the anticipation of which is making me significantly more irritable). I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night looking for her for some reason which is as frightening as it is confusing so it will be nice to actually have her close for a few days (that is an understatement by the way).

I think thats enough broken thoughts strung together in one paragraph for now.