Free Reconfigure by Epredator, Ian Hughes Page B

forty-five minutes of tappety tap tapping, pausing only to mentally tick off tasks, she had the first pass done. FMM v0.1 alpha was ready to run. She had done her usually trick in that all the major variables were wildly public. As she attached the script on the main stage to her invisible ‘MyController’ object, the inspection panel on the right lit up, listing everything that was or could be set. It included little triangle twisties offering expansion of the more complex object structures.
    When she had tested her previous C# version she had set up a Twitter App ID on the site and generated all the secret and public key strings she had needed. Just to be sure, she created a brand new app. She called the app DrillInstructor in keeping with the FMM theme. She liked the idea that this would be barking orders at RC. She riffed again, thinking both parts out loud. “How tall are you private RC?”, “5 fractal levels sir!”,”5 fractal levels? I didn’t know they stacked Marmite that high!"
    She copied the individual key strings from the API webpage and dropped them directly into her code. Whilst she performed these she sang to herself “I wanna be your drill instructor.” Tune!
    The code inspector panel rippled with the changes as she hit save in the text editor. She now had a mostly blank stage on screen, save for a single text entry field looking all lonesome. She clicked the run button and the development environment swapped to the runtime view with the unlabelled, but very nice looking, entry field slightly off centre on the screen. The log file showed a stream of debug statements as Roisin had pretty much debug logged every operation. A good thing to do if you are going to start any project but particularly one that could make the Universe disappear! Connection to the stream looked good. There were no funny error messages from Twitter. She typed into her new text box.
    “ls”
    She gazed at the console window, not a glimmer of a response, not the slightest indication she had actually sent anything. She was expecting several ‘Got ls’, ‘Passed ls’, ‘Processed string’ and other short distinct messages from her code, but nothing! Every programmer knows this feeling. Roisin knew this feeling too well. Whilst quick and instinctive with her coding she did occasionally, (by occasionally she was deluding herself as it was almost every time at some time in a project), forget to call the functions she had written. Non tech geeks do this all the time too. Put water in the kettle and forget to turn it on, bread in a toaster but not started toasting, not plugging the phone in to charge overnight. She had written the routine to take the text, she had placed the field to collect it, but she had not got the field to call the routine. She hit stop, said “Doh!” She then rectified the situation. Sure enough there was no function being called from the ‘OnEnter’ on the input field. She selected her function AskRC() in the entry field configuration panel to lock it in place. Roisin realised that she might get a whole load of DM information back in any request, a history of the entire conversation. She made sure that the initial connection did not get all the DM’s up to the limit, but only new responses. She also stripped all the JSON to only look for ‘sender_screen_name’ and associated text. These messages tend to have a massive payload of metadata that she really didn’t want to bother with. Having checked the documentation she was happy she had the right string stripping going on. She hit run again and typed into her entry field.
    “ls”
    This time the console lit up once the connection stream had been made. Amongst all her debug noise she saw.
     
    "sender_screen_name": "rayKonfigure",
    "text": “Cap,Chair,Coin,ComputerDevice1,ComputerDevice2,Human,Phone,Power,Table"
     
    Result! She gave a woot of excitement and a mini air punch. Working code pleased Roisin. A little shot of adrenaline hit her.