3.5 Today was a bit of Launch academy prep, some cs50 work and some work on an old timer project.

I did a quick LA assignment on variables and prompt(). That was super simple, but I hadn’t actually used prompt before, so I used it again tonight.

The cs50 problem from last night was still unfinished so I dug into it again. It was implementing caesars’s cypher. I didn’t get hung up on the what, but wow did I get hung up on the how. I’m not used to not knowing what is in the standard library, and also not used to not knowing how to import outside libraries. I saw a bunch of people criticizing the use of atoi, but then the course outline actually recommended it! I still need to get my feet under me in c, but a few small things are starting to go smoother. One thing is for sure, when we hit the python section it is going to feel like a home run for me! Once I got one or two things figured out from last night it went fairly smoothly. I commented out what I was thinking last night before I stopped, and that helped get me into the mindset today much faster. I should do that more often.

The time timer project is an old one that I put up to help my daughter understand time a little bit better . more visually. Multiple hands confuse little kids, so a big pie chart that fills in is easier to understand. Tonight I added a prompt() call to grab the time delay from the user and then I also made it so that it is time-based as opposed to delay based. Previously it just had a watch timer that ran an update function every second. From what I have read that can be bad if the page gets moved out of focus on some phones and can also generally keep bad time. I set a start time and an end time, and then every time the loop runs it checks the now time against the end time. At worst it will be one loop out of sync.

The other funny thing that happened is that I’m working on an assignment right now about cracking some simple hashed passwords. The build command is ‘make’, so every time I want to build my app I type “make crack’ and then think about how strange that is. Yep.