Rex Flex

I’ve been pretty busy with work lately, but it has been very interesting. The past couple of days I’ve been working with the AES/Rijndael to encrypt sensitive user data in the application I’m currently working on. It has been pretty interesting and has proven to be quite a learning experience.

The main reason it has been a challenge is that some of this data that we’re encrypting needs to be decrypted and searched through for reports. We have already decided on using SQL Server Reporting Services (which I haven’t worked with before) to handle these reports, however there was the question of decrypting these fields through SQL Server. Luckily we should be able to create CLR User-Defined functions to handle this.

I have also spent some time cleaning up the solution. This particular project has been going on for the past year and a half (or so) and has had quite a few hands touching it. I went ahead and organized the projects in the solution and fixed the dependency problems that everyone had been just dealing with for the past year or so. I think taking care of these issues will make my life a lot easier in the long run.

In an old post I found online here the author asks how you would go about writing a simple for loop. I was bored tonight, so I wrote a simple program to time several different types of loops to confirm which is the fastest at iterating through a generic list, yes… that bored. My list contained 67,108,863 integers.

Here are the results:
Foreach loop: 1185.8ms

int tmp;
foreach (int i in array)
{
tmp = i;
}

Standard for loop: 932.1ms

int tmp;
for (int i = 0; i < array.Count; i++)
{
tmp = array[i];
}

Optimized for loop: 726.1ms

int tmp;
int cnt = array.Count;
for (int i = 0; i < cnt; ++i)
{
tmp = array[i];
}

Finally, we’ve finished our second, and final, project for Projects 1.  Code freeze was tonight and we got it in.  I must say it’s probably the biggest piece of shit I’ve ever had the pleasure of working on, but it’s over.  Seriously, why not use objects in an object oriented programming language?  Classes, who needs those… I don’t really get it, but whatever.  We turned in our Form1.cs that contained over 2500 lines of code and called it good.  I’m hoping that next quarter I can get in a team with someone that has more knowledge of program design so that I can really learn how programs such as these are supposed to be coded.

I’ve fallen victim to World of Warcraft. I think it can happen to anyone. I play on the Tichondrius (PVP) server. I’m a level 23 Gnome Warlock that goes by the name of Qwik. Look me up, give me some gold, I won’t turn it down. I just recently figured out about the battlegrounds. I wish somebody would have told me about these things sooner. They’re awesome, you go in and play capture the flag, and kill tons of horde. Anyways, I’d really recommend going to Pure Pwnage (Music) and downloading the song World of Warcraft is a Feeling. It pretty much sums up the people that get involved with WoW. Also, download all the videos; they’re a really good watch.

As far as school goes, I got put into the advanced C# class. I decided to setup a wiki for people to reference if they get stuck or something. You can check it out here. “WTF” has become the slogan for the advanced C# class. Currently we’re creating our own Integer data type. We have to overload all the operators and everything. Can you say, “WTF?”

Related: The Daily WTF