Losing all respect for Rex Ryan

Not that I ever had much respect for New York Jets coach Rex Ryan in the first place, but I now have zero.

In the Patriots-Jets game on Sunday, with the Patriots up 31-14 and 30 seconds left on the clock, Tom Brady tried one last deep throw. It fell incomplete, and the Patriots punted on the next play. Pulled from Yahoo! Sports:

New York Jets coach Rex Ryan felt "disrespected" by the New England Patriots for throwing a deep pass with the game well in hand Sunday.


[...]


"We need to stop them anyway, so it's no biggie, but I was surprised, and I did feel a little bit disrespected," Ryan said.


Ryan added that he didn't know if Bill Belichick was behind the call, saying it might have been something Brady and Moss did on their own.


[...]


Ryan, who created controversy in the offseason when he said he didn't come to New York to "kiss Bill Belichick's rings," said he called a timeout with 5 seconds left as a response to the Patriots' play call.

If he wants to trash talk before every game against the Patriots, there's nothing particularly horrible about that. But if he follows that up by crying like a little baby when the Patriots do something that he perceives as "disrespect," he and the rest of his team should be embarrassed.

A method with no unit tests is a broken method

If you write software, you need to write unit tests. If you've written a method/function, and you haven't written a unit test for it, it's safe to assume that it's broken (even if it compiles and your other tests pass).

I'm not necessarily advocating full-fledged test-driven development. I'm just saying, if you release code into "the wild," and there are methods you haven't unit tested, your customers will almost certainly run into multiple bugs in each one of them.

That's an atomic point. Separate from that, I'd like to mention that this isn't always a bad thing. For a startup that wants to iterate as quickly as possible (and is writing non-life-critical software), writing the code with no unit tests, releasing it, and reproducing each customer-discovered bug with a unit test before fixing it is a totally reasonable model. These startups just shouldn't operate under the illusion that their software "works". In the hours after they make one of these releases, they should feel blessed if a single customer is able to register or log in.

Using C, convert a dynamically-allocated int array to a comma-separated string as cleanly as possible

EDIT: There are no "dynamic arrays", so to speak, in C. What I meant was "dynamically-allocated". I've updated the wording to reflect this.

EDIT 2: Someone on Reddit pointed out that my Python example doesn't actually work, since I have an array of ints rather than strings. I've updated the code example so it works.

I'm much less experienced in C than I am in higher-level languages. At Cisco, we use C, and I sometimes run into something that would be easy to do in Java or Python, but very difficult to do in C. Now is one of those times.

I have a dynamically-allocated array of unsigned integers which I need to convert to a comma-separated string for logging. While the integers are not likely to be very large, they could conceptually be anywhere from 0 to 4,294,967,295 In Python, that's one short line.

[code lang="python"]my_str = ','.join([str(num) for num in my_list])[/code]

How elegantly can people do this in C? I came up with a way, but it's gross. If anyone knows a nice way to do it, please enlighten me.

Any teachers or professors using classroom management software?

Every few months, I get an idea for a web app. My most recent one stems from hearing constant complaints from my UMass professors about the UMass classroom management software. It does a whole boatload of stuff, but apparently it's extremely hard to use. Keep in mind, I'm hearing that criticism from Computer Science professors. I'd wager a bet that it's much worse for professors whose subjects are unrelated to computers.

With that in mind, I've been working for the last month or so on my own classroom management web app. I doubt I'll find many teachers or professors with this post, but if I do, could you please leave me a comment? Specifically, I'd like to know if you use classroom management software. If you do, what do you use, and do you have any complaints about it? If you don't, what areas of your job would you like managed by software? Grading and student notifications ("You have a test in 2 days!") are the obvious ones to me, but are there any good ones I'm not thinking of?

Little Joys of Rails (Part 1) - Renaming Associations

I've spent the last month or so teaching myself the basics of Ruby on Rails. By far my favorite thing about it is that, at every turn, I find a little feature or helper that works really well and does exactly what I want without feeling messy or "magical".

Unfortunately, I have no one to share these little joys with, as pretty much none of my programmer friends know Ruby or Ruby on Rails. So, I figured I'd start sharing them on here. Hopefully, Rails newbies (like myself) will learn something, and Rails veterans will be able to chuckle knowingly as they fondly look back on the glory days of learning Rails.

Renaming Associations

If you have one model that belongs_to another, the association (in both directions) is named after the models. For example, if I have Users and Courses, and I want a course to belong_to its teacher (who is a User), I would start with the following:

[code lang="rails"]
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :courses
end

class Course < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :user
end
[/code]

This is nice and simple, but if I want to access a course's teacher, I have to do it like this:

[code lang="rails"]
my_course = Course.first
puts my_course.user # Print out the course's teacher
[/code]

That's a little confusing. What if my course also has_many students (also Users)?

[code lang="rails"]
my_course = Course.first
puts my_course.users.first # Print out the course's first student
[/code]

So, my_course.user is the teacher, and my_course.users are the students. There's nothing to indicate that, I just have to know it. Wouldn't it be nicer if the associations could be named for what they represent?

[code lang="rails"]
class Course < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :teacher, :class_name => 'User'
end
[/code]

To make this work properly, the foreign key needs to be teacher_id instead of user_id (that can be overridden too, but I won't go into that right now). Then, you get to do this:

[code lang="rails"]
my_course = Course.first
puts my_course.teacher # Print out the course's teacher
[/code]

Much better!

Now, I recognize that this is far from a revolutionary feature. I'm pretty sure it's possible in Django and most other MVC frameworks. I was just very happy to bump into it.