young grasshopper - learn, he must

well, i overslept this morning. at least nobody seemed to mind me arriving 45 minutes late. that's a good thing :)

the day was mostly boring. our new teammates are beginning to understand that we weren't kidding about being a little crazy. that's a good thing :)

we have a new mission, as a team. the kid and i have to deal with a rogue, ass-backward api written in c, and it's a large part of the conversion from oracle 8.1.7 to 10g. and so, the kid requested a tutorial in c. that's just up my alley.

lesson 1a) basic pointers
i showed him the way of the **, and got him to write a piece of code which prints out the arguments in reverse order.

lesson 1b) string comparison functions
i got him to write one, he didn't do a bad job.

lesson 2) intro to algorithms
i set him the task of sorting the arguments given into reverse order, without using variables. i then left to the cafeteria for 15 minutes. his head was on the verge of exploding by the time i got back, so i had to nudge him a little. looks like he's getting it ^_^

the tiger cub makes me proud.

i went straight from the base to work, and got there in time to clear up a whole lot of things. it turns out most of the work i've done so far was overkill - relatively speaking, i need to do next-to-nothing to finish the job.

after harrassing the tech-support guys some more, i finally figured out that the main difficulty i was experiencing was due to a fault in my code. *my* code. and that was simply because i misunderstood something in their supremely unhelpful javadoc documention. VERY upsetting, that.

erm. wow. like, that's my day. very nutshell-like.

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oh, i almost forgot. the wonderful feeling of coming back to a pitch black corridor, and discovering that they've done that drilling they've been talking about. and i haven't got my key back. nice of them to talk to me about these things.