BlueJ to Xcode translation?

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Update: Never mind, ignore this post — I never even thought to check for a Mac OS X version of BlueJ. Now I just feel dippy….

Might there be anyone out there with experience developing for Java within Xcode who has a few minutes to spare helping me figure out how to translate this page into something useable on my computer? I’ve gotten as far as getting Xcode installed, but…well, after that, I’m kind of stuck, as I have no idea what the majority of what I’m looking at is, and all the documentation/help files seem to be written for people who have at least some background in programming.

I have figured out that in Xcode, choosing File > New Project… and picking Java Tool seems to be equivalent to creating a New Project within BlueJ (as outlined on the first homework assignment). However, I don’t know how to set up the class’s two required libraries as a permanent part of the Xcode enviroment (as detailed in Step 3 of the Working at Home page), so things aren’t exactly compiling. Essentially, while I know that I should be able to use Xcode to do everything that BlueJ will do, I don’t really know how concepts or methods map between the two environments — or if it’s even worth attempting. Since the whole class is going to be taught as if we’re using BlueJ, perhaps I’d be better off just sucking it up and installing BlueJ under Virtual PC (ick)?

Anyway, if anyone’s able and willing to toss a few words of advice my way, I’d greatly appreciate it. If I can’t figure out how to use Xcode within the next couple days (the first homework assignment, which proves we’re at least up and running, is due Friday), it’s going to be BlueJ under Virtual PC and/or using the computers at school for all my CSC142 homework…and that just seems like such a waste when I’ve got this shiny and perfectly capable computer right here at home!

Random Updates

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A few random things, since I haven’t updated anything here for a little bit…

  • Last quarter’s grades: 
    WIN07    ENG   120         CONTEMPORARY WORLD LIT         3.7          5.0     
         HUM   200         READING THE MEDIA              3.7          5.0     
         MAT   102         COLLEGE ALGEBRA                3.5          5.0     

Qtrly:     Gpa Cr  15.0  Cr Earn  15.0  P/S Cr   0.0  Grpts   54.5  GPA 3.63   

Cum:       Gpa Cr  45.0  Cr Earn  50.0  P/S Cr   5.0  Grpts  167.0  GPA 3.71   
Clvl:      Gpa Cr  40.0  Cr Earn  40.0  P/S Cr   0.0  Grpts  152.5  GPA 3.81

    No Dean’s List anymore, but I thought that might happen. I’m just thrilled I managed to pull a 3.5 in my Algebra class!

  • Prairie and I did our version of going to the beach for Spring Break last week. In our case, it was meeting up with her dad Lon down at Long Beach, on the Washington coast. Grey and windy, so this wasn’t exactly MTV’s Spring Break Miami (or whatever), but it was gorgeous, and we had a good few days. I’m still working my way through the pictures, but everything I’ve posted so far is in this photoset. More pictures will be appearing as I find time to work through them.

  • I went to the last night of Confessional with camera in hand, intending to take photos. However, lighting both within and without the Mercury is damn near nonexistent, and since I didn’t feel like lugging the flash around, I just put the camera away and enjoyed the night. Evidence of my appearance has popped up here, thanks to gravesme.

  • I was going to go get pictures of the Utilikilts 7th Birthday Bash down in Pioneer Square last Saturday night, but a head cold kept me at home instead. A bummer, but since school started on Monday, I figured staying home and resting was the better plan.

  • Spring quarter has started. This quarter I’m in PHI101 (Introduction to Philosophy), CHE101 (Chemistry), and CSC142 (Programming). Looks to be a fun (if busy) quarter.

  • This upcoming weekend is Norwescon. I’ll be heading down there as soon as classes get out on Friday, and spending Friday afternoon/evening and all day Saturday at the ‘con. I’ve also been asked by spitkitten to shoot the Fannish Fetish Fashion Show on Friday evening — really looking forward to that! Of course, I’ll have camera in hand the rest of the time I’m wandering around down there as well.

And…yeah, I think that about brings me up to date.

Quote of the Day

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There’s a long standing theory that Hollywood action movies deliberately play up US urban gang violence…a part of a propaganda effort to persuade foreigners that America is not to be [messed] with. The British equivalent is Faulty Towers and Monty Python, which simply makes people want to stay the hell away in case it’s contagious.

— originally somewhere in this forum thread, via learethak

I am so smart…S-M-R-T…

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Another quarter done! The last day of my English/Humanities class was last Friday, and I had my Algebra final this morning. Amusingly, I’m actually feeling cautiously optimistic about the Math test — rather than being a comprehensive test, it was just over the last couple weeks of class. Those last couple weeks were covering the basics of Trigonometry and, rather surprisingly, I was actually catching on to Trig far better than I had some of the earlier stuff we’d covered.

I never could beat all the right equations for circles, ellipses, hyperbolas and the rest into my head, but for some reason, all the equations we worked with for sines, cosines, and tangents actually stuck. It helped a lot when I found a couple mnemonics for the basic trig functions — both ‘SOHCAHTOA’ (pronounced like it’s spelled, for Sin = Opp / Hyp, Cos = Adj / Hyp and Tan = Opp / Adj) and ‘Oh hell, another hour of algebra’ (since sine, cosine, and tangent are always referred to in that order, this phrase maps to [Sin] Opp / Hyp, [Cos] Adj / Hyp and [Tan] Opp / Adj) helped me keep those straight in my head. As for why or how I was able to keep the Law of Sines and Law of Cosines in my skull, I haven’t got a clue. Even the introductions to radian measure managed to avoid fading into obscurity before I needed to use them.

So, I’m hoping that once grades come out, I’ll end up with a solid A and B in Eng/Hum and Mat, respectively.

On that note, though, I did recently realize something that was a pleasant surprise, and I’ve meant to brag about mention to my parents. I double-checked my grades to date (not including this quarter), and found this…

TUE, MAR 20, 2007          NORTH SEATTLE COMM. COLL.                            
                         UNOFFICIAL STUDENT TRANSCRIPT                          
HANSCOM MICHAEL D                                                               
----- --------- --- ---                                                         
SEATTLE          WA 98---                                                       

 TERM     COURSE ID         -------- TITLE --------       GRADE      CREDITS    
 WIN06    ENG   101         COMPOSITION                    4.0          5.0     
          MAT   097         ELEMENTARY ALGEBRA              S           5.0     

 Qtrly:     Gpa Cr   5.0  Cr Earn  10.0  P/S Cr   5.0  Grpts   20.0  GPA 4.00   

 SPR06    MAT   098         INTERMEDIATE ALGEBRA           2.9          5.0     
          MUS   113         MUSIC IN THE U.S.              3.9          5.0     

 Qtrly:     Gpa Cr  10.0  Cr Earn  10.0  P/S Cr   0.0  Grpts   34.0  GPA 3.40   

 FAL06    CSC   110         INTRO TO CMPTR PROGMING        4.0          5.0     
          ENG   102         COMPOSITION                    4.0          5.0     
          HIS   101         WORLD HISTORY TO 1500          3.7          5.0     

 Qtrly:     Gpa Cr  15.0  Cr Earn  15.0  P/S Cr   0.0  Grpts   58.5  GPA 3.90   
                                      VICE PRESIDENT/DEAN'S LIST                

 Cum:       Gpa Cr  30.0  Cr Earn  35.0  P/S Cr   5.0  Grpts  112.5  GPA 3.75   
 Clvl:      Gpa Cr  25.0  Cr Earn  25.0  P/S Cr   0.0  Grpts   98.0  GPA 3.92

See that bit, third line from the bottom? I made the Dean’s list! Okay, so for many people this wouldn’t be a big thing, but while I’ve never doubted that I’ve got a couple brain cells to rub together, good grades have never been a common occurrence in my life (something about having a disturbing tendency to ‘forget’ to do my homework during my high school years…).

I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep that up — as I said, I’m hoping for a B in my math class, so my GPA may very well drop a bit — but at least so far, I’m not doing too shabbily. Yay me!

A little tense…

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One of the most common constructs of political speech is what’s technically known as the ‘passive tense,’ which conveys what happened without directly assigning any specific responsibility. For example:

The passive is used when the subject of the verb action is not as important as what happened. Note the difference between

  1. He burned down the house. (Active verb)

  2. The house was burned down. (Passive verb — who, or what, caused the house to burn down is not known, or is not as important as the fact that it burned down.)

Politicians use this form a lot, as it’s a convenient way to weasel out of why something happened.

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales fell back on a classic Washington linguistic construct on Tuesday when he acknowledged that “mistakes were made” in the dismissals of eight federal prosecutors last year.

The phrase sounds like a confession of error or even contrition, but in fact, it is not quite either one. The speaker is not accepting personal responsibility or pointing the finger at anyone else. It is a construction that other officials, from Richard M. Nixon’s press secretary to Ronald Reagan to John H. Sununu and Bill Clinton, have used when someone’s hand was caught in the federal cookie jar.

While listening to this week’s edition of NPR’s ‘Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!‘, I heard mention of a wonderful new term for the passive tense, also mentioned at the end of the just quoted NYT article:

The nonconfessions inspired William Schneider, a political guru here, to note a few years ago that Washington had contributed a new tense to the language. “This usage,” he said, “should be referred to as the past exonerative.”

Christina’s Candyman

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Candman Video While Christina Aguilera generally isn’t one of my first choices when it comes to music, one of my co-workers just turned me on to her new single, “Candyman.” Heavily inspired (in a good way) by “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” it’s an incredibly infectious little 40’s swing-style pop tune, and it’s getting a lot of play around the apartment right now.

Apparently Back to Basics, the album that “Candyman” comes off of, has Christina experimenting with a lot of different vocal styles from the past, with Christina describing it as “a throwback to the 20s, 30s, and 40s-style jazz, blues, and feel-good soul music, but with a modern twist.” When I browsed through the album on iTunes, most of the snippets didn’t really grab me — they had a bit too much of a ‘modern’ (hip-hop) twist to them. However, along with “Candyman,” two others ended up finding their way into my collection: “Nasty Naughty Boy” and “I Got Trouble.”

All three songs are together in the second half of the album, and they all concentrate on a very 40’s sound — though each is from a very different musical style. Where “Candyman” draws on the big-band sound, “Nasty Naughty Boy” uses slow, sultry jazz styles (think Jessica Rabbit’s “Why Don’t You Do Right” in Who Framed Roger Rabbit with the vamp amped up — this one is just begging to be used in a burlesque routine), and “I Got Trouble” heads down to play with a very southern blues feel.

Of course, this being late 2000’s pop, and Christina being Christina, the lyrics have a tendency to slip over the line from innuendo into straight-out raunch. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it does make for a good laugh.

As I said above, the rest of Back to Basics didn’t grab me, but those three? I’d definitely say it’s worth spending the three bucks to snag ’em off of iTunes. And don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone you’re listening to Christina Aguilera if you don’t want me to. ;)

Prairie and Penelope

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Prairie and Penelope, originally uploaded by djwudi.

My girl and her latest friend — Penelope, a wonderfully soft, cuddly, pink bunny.

While I’ll freely admit that I’ve never been the gothiest of gothlings, I’m still at times very amused that I ended up with a girl who’s big into the pink and fluffy side of life. Just one of life’s odd little quirks, I guess.

I’m keeping my black wardrobe, though. ;)

Flickr: User Interface Overload

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User Interface Overload, originally uploaded by djwudi.

On the one hand, I really like the new collections organization structure that Flickr just added. It’s not perfect, but it’s nice to have more control over organizing my photos.

However, the interface is getting…well, cluttered is about the nicest way to put it. By the time I’m looking at one of my sets, I’ve got no less than five different sets of toolbar/breadcrumb buttons above the pictures!

  • Line 1 (constant): The global account options.

  • Line 2 (constant): The main navigation menu bar, where every option (save ‘Home’ and the search field) is a drop-down menu with more options.

  • Line 3 (appears when navigating within collections): The ‘breadcrumb’ trail leading from the user’s main page to the individual set.

  • Line 4 (appears when viewing your own set, not visible for other people): Set-level editing options. 3/5 of the items are dropdown menus.

  • Line 5 (constant): Set-level view options, available to everyone looking at the set.

It’s getting to the point where it’s UI overload — which is doubly grating on a site that’s normally incredibly well-designed and remarkably intuitive to navigate through. By the time all five toolbars appear, not only does it push the photos (which, I believe, are supposed to be the focus of the site) pretty far down the page, but I’m starting to lose track of which options are hidden in which set of menus or links!

Additionally, while the breadcrumb navigation (Line 3) is a necessary addition now that Collections allow you to organize your sets and collections up to five levels deep, it feels kind of abandoned — just shoehorned in somewhere — and quite possibly easily missed. Since that breadcrumb line is the only indication that a set is part of a collection and might have other, related sets ‘nearby,’ it seems that it should be better and more obviously integrated into the overall design. Perhaps somewhere around the set title and Line 5? Over the title, or either under or integrated with Line 5?

Honestly, I’m not entirely sure what the best solution might be. This just strikes me as an area where there’s a lot of room for improvement.

Happy π Day!

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π/2, originally uploaded by brionv.

Once again, it’s 3/14 — π Day!

Prairie and I will be stopping off at the store on the way home to get some pie for dessert. You should too!