Five Minutes

There’s some fuller blog posts (and software releases) coming in the next few days (Shanghai’s awesome, but it’s been a pretty hectic fortnight here, hence my dropping almost completely off the grid), but I just had to share this screenshot, having been increasingly uncertain whether I’d passed my Internet and Java Programming exam after all:

For the record, I ended up with three distinctions and a high distinction for the semester, so I’m pretty happy with how things worked out. As for finally being done, I’m deliriously happy.

        public void init() {
                findRoom();
                buyWater();
        }

        private void findRoom() {
                search(Buildings.ONE_WHICH_LOOKS_LIKE_WAGYL_THREW_UP_ON_IT);
                try {
                        regardArchitecture();
                }
                catch (VomitException e) {
                        shrug();
                }
        }

        private void buyWater() {
                try {
                        Machine.insert(0.20);
                }
                catch (MachineSwallowedCoinWithoutReasonAgainException e) {
                        System.err.println(Person.SWEAR);
                }
        }

        public void doGet(HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse resp) {
                readExamPaper();
                winceAtPoorlyWrittenQuestions();
        }

        public void doPost(HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse resp) {
                writeResponses();
                makeJoke(Lotus.NOTES);
                finish();
        }

        public void doDelete(HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse resp) {
                leaveCampus();
                forgetEverything(java.lang);
                $var = ... oh, shit;
        }
}

I enjoyed the exam about as much as the rest of the unit (that is, not at all), but I’m pretty sure I did enough to pass. I must remember to read sample exams more closely, though — I was completely broadsided by the 15 mark question on Java GUI construction in a unit supposedly about building Java-powered Web sites. Obviously applets are back in vogue.

Now for the nervous wait for results in about six weeks.

General catch-up post, since I haven’t blogged in a while:

• Not dead. Just been busy.
• Now done with uni, bar one exam and my computer science project, which is complete apart from a couple of bugfixes and some documentation which are due in Monday week. I’m looking forward to having some actual time to do things outside of uni. Who knows, I might even get Dubnium 0.2 out at some point.
• Went and saw Muse tonight, who were good, but not quite great in the way they have been the other times I’ve seen them. In fairness, I think some of that was due to the crowd, who (at least in my area) weren’t quite into it the way I expected. Against that, they played Citizen Erased and Fury (the latter for the first time in almost three years, apparently), so I’d forgive them almost anything for that. Looking forward to seeing them in Brisbane in a couple of weeks.
• Got my new MacBook Pro yesterday. It’s very speedy compared to the venerable G4 iBook it’s replacing (indeed, I’m pretty much certain it’s quicker than my dual core Athlon 64 desktop, too), but there’s a couple of things that irk me, most notably the fact that the Linux Atheros wireless chipset driver may actually be flakier than the Broadcom chipset in the iBook, and I never expected to say that. I suspect I’ll need to sit down with ndiswrapper at some point and look at getting that set up. On the bright side, suspend actually seems to be working, bar Atheros-related flakiness.

Hopefully it won’t be another three weeks before my next blog post. No promises, though.

I wonder how many of the series being pitched in my university’s Television Scriptwriting unit this semester are edgy, sexy shows about the life of a struggling writer in a big city? Three episodes in, Californication does seem like writer porn of the highest order. It’s the life every young writer dreams of — babes, smooth talking, throwing up on paintings that deserve it, more babes…

Well, the guys, anyway.

(OK, some of the girls, too.)

In unrelated news, post-production for science fiction shorts less fun than previously expected. Damned bluescreens.

I’ve mentioned my final Computer Science project a couple of times now on the blog without actually describing what it is. Now seems like a good time to do so, having just spent a solid afternoon and evening on it. The summary (which remains one of only two pieces of actual paperwork written for the project thus far — thank $DEITY this isn’t a group project with meeting minutes and the like) reads as follows:

To develop a networked simulation of a garden system that allows users to maintain the garden by interacting with individual plants, which are simulated using the principles of L-systems.

Put more simply, the idea is to build a client/server system that provides something like a SimGarden over the Internet. Fortunately, much of the theoretical work needed for this has long been done, and most of it is in The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants, so that has largely left me to worry about the parts of the project that don’t involve quantifying plant physiology and behaviour, like rendering L-systems in a manner that can render a simple plant (without leaves) at more than 0.4 frames per second on my iBook.

I’m still working on that little problem, but the fact it’s rendering at all is progress — it means the 3D turtle is working (yes, it’s just like Logo, except in Python and with an extra dimension to confuse people), the L-system parser can at least deal with simple L-systems, and all in all, I’m feeling rather content with life, given that five weeks ago I didn’t even have a project (the project I had planned fell through due to the supervisor leaving the university) and four weeks ago I had no idea what OpenGL code even looked like. Of course, said contentedness is likely to evaporate any moment now, given the amount of work that’s still ahead.

I sign off tonight in the traditional fashion: screenshots.

One of the units I’m doing this semester is Internet and Java Programming, albeit not by choice — it’s a required unit for the Computer Science major here. Whether that actually makes sense is a debate for another blog post, but today’s lecture and workshop featured some gems. In particular, I wanted to share these three slides:

Now, I’m no Java expert, but that looks like a big fat SQL injection vulnerability to me. If so, it’s good to know we’re teaching our graduates of the (near) future secure coding practices. For the record, the sole mention of prepared queries in the course appears to have been a throwaway line in last week’s JDBC lecture which didn’t mention why you might want to use them. Oh, and the textbook uses very similar examples too, and fails to mention any potential problems even in the chapter on security.

It’s days like this I wonder why I tossed in a good job to finish my degree this year. 0.59 semesters to go.

(Slides © 2007 Edith Cowan University; fair dealing usage asserted under the criticism and review provisions of Australian copyright law.)

Bit of a catch-all post today, as I need to head off shortly for tonight’s installment of the fun game called Let’s Shoot a Student Film!*

• Had a heart attack moment in Feature Film Scriptwriting this morning, as the first thing our lecturer/tutor said to me was so, Adam, where’s your assignment — which seems fairly normal for me nowadays, except that he was referring to the synopsis I’d handed in yesterday. I’m still not sure what happened to it, but he was happy enough to take a copy I printed out there and then, didn’t ping me for a (thoroughly deserved) late penalty, and promptly marked it in about fifteen minutes during the tutorial, complete with a page or so of notes. To top it all off, I even got a good mark. All’s well that ends well, I guess, but I really need to get better at estimating how long scriptwriting-related tasks will take — I seem to be prone to underestimating or overestimating severely.
• Nineteen people have downloaded the source code for the Wordpress Gopher interface code I posted yesterday. That’s… mildly disturbing.
• I think the staff at the university’s café are actually starting to get concerned about the amount of coffee I’m going through this semester, judging by the look I got today when I went for a quick cup during a break in class. They may have a point.

* Fun not guaranteed. Please check the label before ingesting. Do not catch foot on extension cords for Gulliver lights.†
† Not that I would know anything about that last one. Ahem.

Well, I got the feature film synopsis in only three days late (that was the assignment deadline I mentioned whooshing past a couple of days ago). I’m not especially happy with it, but I figure I’ll at least get to change it around completely before starting to worry about the scene breakdown.

It was nice to get that out of the way, but it was equally nice to come home tonight and be able to spend about half an hour watching a pair of quendas (bandicoots for you eastern state types) scoot around the back verandah eating whatever they could get their paws on. Mum had her camera to hand and grabbed a few photos, including this one:

I actually wanted to call my Summer Winter of Code project Quenda, but figured it would have been too close to Quanta.

Still, my thought for the day: At least I’m up to date on my assignments again. Until tomorrow, at least.

My first classes for second semester are tomorrow morning, so it’s fortunate that I’m now not too far off having my Summer Winter of Code project at a releasable state. Since I need a decent night’s sleep before being up bright and early for Video Production (should be fun) and Internet and Java Programming (…less so), here’s the state of play in bullet form:

Things done since the last update

• Switched to wxStyledTextCtrl for the source code display, which means that syntax highlighting now works, at least for PHP. (Side rant: Why is the documentation for wxStyledTextCtrl so lacking? The only decent source of documentation for it is the documentation for the Python binding, which is hardly ideal, and still requires a fair bit of piecing things together.)
• Breakpoints and the current line are now shown by (differently shaped) markers in the gutter, rather than changing the background colour of the line(s), which should be far friendlier for everyone, especially people who are colour-blind.
• Added a popup menu within the source viewer to provide another way to run to the cursor and toggle breakpoints.
• Tooltips now work (mostly) when hovering over variable names in the source viewer.
• Added the breakpoint pane to the main interface. At present, it supports function call and return and exception breakpoints, plus the usual file/line based ones set within the source viewer. Watch breakpoints are to get a different interface.

Things left to do before releasing 0.1.0

• Come up with a better name than wxDBGp. Suggestions welcome. An icon might be a good idea, too.
• Figure out some wacky method for making tooltips work in the call stack and properties panes, since mouse motion events don’t seem to be emitted after the pointer initially enters wxListBox and wxTreeCtrl controls.
• Add a watchlist pane (it’s going between Output and Breakpoints).

And now, the moment you all look forward to: more screenshots! (Well, I look forward to it.)

Syntax highlighting now works. Mostly. For PHP, anyway, since I haven’t wired up the other wxSTC lexers yet with style rules.

No Windows screenshot this time. This is far, far better, as proprietary operating systems go. There’s a few graphical glitches, particularly in the toolbars (the alpha blending doesn’t appear to be actual alpha blending, for one), but it works entirely better than I expected, given that I’ve put very little work into a Mac version thus far.

From here, I guess the remaining work will be done in minutes stolen here and there from uni assignments, but I’m confident it’ll be released — nay, unleashed — upon an unsuspecting world before the final date of August 20.

Odds: My university marks should be out in the next 24-48 hours. I’ve got the whole bag this time: one unit for which I already know, give or take a couple of percent, what I finished with, one unit for which I have a rough idea, and one unit for which I have no clue whatsoever as the exam was worth 70% of the mark. I’m not particularly worried about any of them, but I’m still nervous. I’m always nervous at this point in the grading cycle.

Sods: My car decided not to start tonight when I wanted to go and pick up a pizza. It’s definitely an electrical problem and the battery’s definitely fine, so I can already feel part of my tax refund slipping away getting it fixed. (Well, that or the Google Summer Winter of Code mid-term payment.) Will probably spend part of tomorrow morning looking at it myself before coming to the inevitable conclusion that I’m going to need to get some sort of professional to do so if I actually want it fixed.

Procrastinatods (which I’m claiming as a word, dammit, if ginormous made it, so can this): I resolved to write my short film script for next semester during the break, along with a rough outline for the documentary proposal I have to do. Thus far, I have done neither, and classes start again in two and a half weeks. I also have plenty of work left to do on the GSoC project (more on that later). This isn’t looking good. Guess I’ll have to revise my estimates of sleep for the rest of the year down from two hours per night to 90 minutes.