noah’s mark

In thinking about observable collections, you come upon one basic performance penalty that is applicable to a much larger design paradigm, or at least one real (and defensible) penalty. This is the price of eventing, and in certain situations it can bloom somewhat quickly. I can only imagine that this and the complexities of choosing a good eventing system were the reasons why Java has no observable collections (as I wrote about here).

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If you look over at the “Pages” thingy on the right side of your screen over there, you may notice a new page called “Virtual Fence Simulation Project.” For my Math Modeling class, we have to take some problem and create a nice, lengthy paper about it. I decided to do my project Zack Butler’s cow herding research, and I’ve posted what I have so far here (its due this coming Monday, February 26). You can download the simulator, view the javadoc (yay! Javadoc!), and see some screenshots (more to come, of course). Head on over if you are curious. And, seriously, who isn’t curious about cows? The only thing cooler is fainting goats! (youtube)

One of my favorite parts of Raymond Chen’s blog, The Old New Thing, is how Raymond’s comments are all nicely highlighted. If you head over there, you’ll see what I mean. He can either write comments on an existing comment (which shows up as a contained box with a highlighted color) or just write a comment on the post, which also shows up highlighted. Either way, it makes it really easy to pick out Raymond’s comments in the resulting conversations about his posts. Since I was jealous, I decided to figure out how to do this. In this part, I’m going to show you how to add the second feature, which is making any author comment highlighted. Compared to the sub-comment, this is just a minor update to a few files.
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I’ve always been of the opinion that Java was kinda ugly, kinda kludgey, but a decent general-purpose language. Like most, I felt that the large framework that comes standard with Java, together with the many developer tools written to help you write Java code, really outweighed any of the minor inherent language issues and implementation issues. Well, now I’ve changed my mind. I’ve decided that now, I really, really dislike Java. In fact, if it were possible, I would piss on Java and set it on fire (is that possible? does urine burn? is that a hate crime?). I’ve just had enough.

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So, I’ve unofficially been on blog-cation for the last few months. Don’t worry, it’s not that I’ve become less pessimistic about the world, or that I don’t have enough grading to complain about (trust me, I just finished CG1, and they are as awful as they were the last time I graded this course/project). I’ve just been, well, lazy. There you have it.

To the point, I just attended the Microsoft night-before-interview thingy at RIT, which was supposed to ease students’ worries about their interviews over the next few days. Unfortunately, the night seemed to do very little in that department.

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