Due to the way holidays have worked out, I’m currently the only member of the Qurator team who is still in the department, at least for the next few days. The person who I’m working with on the code doesn’t come back until Monday at the earliest, and I finish on Wednesday, which doesn’t really give much time for an explanation of what I’ve done whilst he’s been away, so I’m having to write a document that describes it all instead.
At the moment I’m trying to write a GUI for building expressions using comboboxes and buttons instead of free text. Thankfully the grammar for the language is fairly simple and small, although I’m having to reduce it further in some clever ways in order to make it easier to write a generator for it. For example, instead of supporting ID IS [NOT] NULL, I’m just allowing ID IS NULL with the option to invert it to NOT (ID IS NULL). There’s also three different ways to say “X is not equal to Y” (X != Y, X <> Y and X ~= Y, as well as NOT (X = Y) I guess), so instead of giving the actual symbols I’m just allowing the user to choose from a text description. Effectively I’m normalising the grammar to remove any duplicates, and I can get away with doing this because I’m generating expressions rather than interpreting them. Anything that reduces the number of possible expressions makes life easier. Using Swing in Java takes a bit of getting used to as well, although it doesn’t help that the last time I worked with this was over two years ago in a single lab session.
Being on my own at work is really boring though, so in a way I’m glad that I finish next week, even though the work itself isn’t too bad. Apparently I get two days of paid leave which I have to take whilst I’m still working here, which is why I’m finishing on Wedneday instead of Friday. I’m not too bothered about the holidays, but if the University is going to pay me whether I’m in work or not then I don’t really see much point in coming in.
More than anything though, I just want this week to be over and done with as quickly as possible. Other than the possbility of a Rogue Students meetup this Sunday and the prospect of seeing Cars at the cinema it looks like the week is just going to drag on into the distance, whereas next week I’ll finally be freed up to do stuff (which reminds me, I really must book a holiday at some point).
Back to the grindstone…