Programming: June 2006 Archives

The beginnings of Perl were directly inspired by running into a problem I couldn't solve with the tools I had. Or rather, that I couldn't easily solve. As the Apostle Paul so succinctly put it, ``All things are possible, but not all things are expedient.'' I could have solved my problem with awk and shell eventually, but I possess a fortuitous surplus of the three chief virtues of a programmer: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris. I was too lazy to do it in awk because it would have been hard to get awk to jump through the hoops I was wanting it to jump through. I was too impatient to wait for awk to finish because it was so slow. And finally, I had the hubris to think I could do better.
  -- Larry Wall

I wrote my second Python script for Tichu game data this weekend. My first script was recording a game's score and any GrandTichu or Tichu calls made. It would take that data and generate an HTML table. Which I would then paste into my game reports. It works well enough for me. So I stopped improving on it. Although certain others would disagree and argue that the data is not presentented effectively.

However, I still have an urge for more data shown about a game. So I wrote a program that would take this and output this. Last Thursday, Adam and I tried to enter hand data during our game of Tichu. And I have learned that it is slow, takes thought power away from playing the game, and other people are not so understanding about this process. So, I am going to set up a camera to take a picture during evey hand played. Hopefully, this will finally allow me to finally record every hand played during the game. Of course, data entry will be a bitch!

And what do I intend to do with this data? Who knows... if you build it, they will come! Perhaps a cute flash app to present the game. Perhaps a data-mining application. Or perhaps an ugly HTML table that others can complain about.