I’m back at school for Winter Quarter, and I’ll be really busy. I’ve signed up for 18 hours of classes, as well as grading CSE 560. I like all of my classes (except Statistics, but that shouldn’t be too bad), and I’m looking forward to grading this quarter. For those of you who are unaware, CSE 560 is the course in our curriculum where you end up writing at least 6000 lines of code and six documentation manuals. It’s a daunting task and I ended up pulling several > 9-hour coding marathons to get it all done. It’s a tough class, but it definitely makes most people better engineers for taking it. I’m looking to use QT/C++ for my CSE 655 class where I write an interpreter for a simple imperative language, that should be a good way to get familiar with QT.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get anything done over break that I wanted to, I got sidetracked by Real Life ™, as well as a rewrite of a program I never finished using Boo (which also isn’t finished, but it’s on its way). Currently, I’m frustrated by the lack of debugging / reflection tools on Mono, it’s a giant pain-in-the-ass to track down bugs; it’s only slightly easier than C/C++ which is sad because it should be a million times easier. Supposedly there’s been a lot of work on the Mono debugger, but I haven’t seen any tangible results, mdb (the Mono version of gdb) just throws meaningless error messages for me. Hopefully I’ll be shown to be wrong in the near future and the Mono debugger will kick ass and be usable in MonoDevelop.