Posts with mood mellow (7)

my problem is...
Mood: mellow
Posted on 2007-10-05 23:51:00
Tags: cluesolver
Words: 240

Just kidding! (I have multiple problems, of course)

A problem of mine is that I can have trouble living in the moment. When I'm experiencing something I enjoy my thoughts wander to making the experience permanent somehow - buying a souvenir of a trip, arranging another get-together, buying the DVD when it comes out of a movie I'm watching. Even though I know a lot of the fun is tied up in the particular experience I'm having then (and watching a movie the second and third time is rarely as good as watching it the first), I naively try to capture it. Unfortunately, no DVD can capture the people I'm with, the anticipation of the event, the people I'm with. (except maybe Blu-ray?) And letting my thoughts wander in this direction can actually take away from the experience. Letting go and just realizing that I'm enjoying myself is worth the while.

I'm declaring a hiatus on clue solver work - every time I try to sit down and work on the UI I just can't. It's as bad as writing English papers back in college. If I were just trying to get it done I'd start over and do it in Javascript, but part of the point is learning about Google Web Toolkit. (I'm learning that I like and know Javascript better than Java, but oh well) Maybe I'll sketch out some mockups and pick it up in a week or so.

5 comments

Writer's Block: Music: My First Favorite Band
Mood: mellow
Posted on 2007-09-10 11:02:00
Tags: hpmusic music writer's block what do you have to say?
Words: 97

The first band I was a fan of was "Weird Al" Yankovic. This was in middle/high school, and I went through a phase where I listened to exclusively him - no radio, etc. I remember thinking "Why would I listen to popular music when I can hear a lot of popular songs but with funny lyrics?" It was always a thrill when I'd later hear the real version of a song I only knew as a parody. Not being exposed to more popular music always made me feel a little out of touch, though. I wouldn't recommend it.

0 comments

Java!
Mood: mellow
Music: The Killers - "Mr. Brightside"
Posted on 2006-06-15 10:25:00
Tags: java programming
Words: 689

I was feeling a little blah yesterday, so I did what usually clears that up for me - start a new project! (this probably isn't a great long-term solution, but it works for now) I decided to write a program that would turn my iTunes playlists (which are stored in the iTunes XML file) into plain ol' .m3us so I could listen to them served up from my computer. Not too tricky, since I already have an analysis of my songs in iTunes that parses the iTunes XML file.

To make it more exciting, I started writing it in Java, which I used extensively at Rice, but hardly at all since then. I was going to parse the XML file and then use XPath to get the stuff I needed, but the file is so big (200000+ lines!) that Java runs out of memory getting the nodes. Sigh. So I went back to plain ol' parsing it line by line and just picking out the parts I need, which turned out to be pretty easy.

It's not done yet, but I've already extracted the playlists and which songs they refer to (by referencing the database that is created when I do the analysis of my songs), so I just need to write the code to output them as .m3us which is pretty straightforward. But the point of this post is to point out some new stuff in JDK 5 (which is really 1.5) that are very nice compared with what we had back at Rice :-) The link describes them, but I'll point out the highlights:

• Generics! This means you can have a Vector<String> instead of just a Vector, and then having to cast everything you get out from there to a String. And it provides type-safety, which is always a plus. We actually used a version of this in COMP 311 (the JSR 14 that led to this being put in JDK 5), but it's nice to see it's "for real" now.


• Autoboxing/unboxing! Awww yeah. This is great - now instead of constantly converting between an Integer and an int, the compiler will do most of the conversions for you. This had been a major annoyance because int doesn't extend from Object, so if you want a Vector of integers you'd have to store them as Integers, and adding one to an element would look like this:
  
  Vector v;
  v.set(2, new Integer((Integer)v.get(2)).intValue() + 1));
  
  Now you can do this!
  
  Vector<Integer> v;
  v.set(2, v.get(2) + 1);
  
  which really warms my heart. Plus it was one of the things that students in COMP 212 would often forget to do and then (reasonably) get confused about why this was necessary. Really the right thing to do would be something like .NET does - have a ValueType that primitive types extend from - it's stack-allocated and doesn't contain any extra data members, but it is a "full" type and extends from Object. You still have to do some boxing and unboxing, but then at least you could have a Vector. (but I'm pretty sure it's too late to do something like that for Java, and this is a good compromise)


• Enumerations! So now you can have a real enum like
  enum Season { SPRING, SUMMER, WINTER, FALL }
  instead of declaring a class that has those as public final static int members, and you get type safety and some other nice things, much like .NET has.


• Neat for loop syntax so you can do
  for (Integer i: v)
  to iterate over all elements of a vector, for example. To do this the old way you had to something like
  for (Iterator it = v.iterator(); it.hasNext(); it++)
  and then get the element with it.next(). It's not a huge deal, but that idiom was extremely common, and having a shorter syntax is always nice!

5 comments

flag burning, mostly
Mood: mellow
Music: nothin' at the moment
Posted on 2005-06-23 10:15:00
Tags: activism flag burning python challenge
Words: 263

So the House passed the flag-burning amendment yesterday, and people think it has a chance in the Senate.

Quick poll on the subject:

I wrote my senators (Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn) just now.


I would urge you to vote against the constitutional amendment that would give
Congress the power to ban desecration of the American flag. I agree that the
flag is a powerful symbol of our country, that many have fought and died for.
However, they have fought and died for the freedoms that the flag represents,
including the freedom to disagree with the government. Free speech is one of
our country's most important rights, and any curtailment of such should be
avoided.

In addition, flag burning is such a rare event that it seems foolish to amend
the Constitution to prevent it. Our Constitution has been amended very few
times in the history of our nation, and never has it been amended for trivial
or symbolic reasons.

All these concerns notwithstanding, the text of the proposed amendment is very
broad and open to interpretations. Does this mean that wearing or washing a
T-shirt with a picture of the American flag on it is "desecrating" it?

I hope you share my concerns about this amendment, and I would be interested in
hearing your thoughts on the matter. Thank you for your time!


In non-flag related news, I did another Python Challenge level, but I'm stuck on level 5.

ASMC rehearsal is tonight - hopefully it won't be as tiring as the last one. Especially since I'm more tired going into it...

8 comments

weekend, pictures, etc.
Mood: mellow
Music: Dave Matthews Band - "Sleep to Dream Her"
Posted on 2005-04-11 08:53:00
Words: 204

Ah...some good Dave Matthews Band in the morning really mellows me out. Good stuff!

Had a good weekend - got stuff done that I had been putting off for the past two weeks (while working on Robolab), caught up on sleep some, played some games, went out to dinner and watched a movie. The latter two were with wildrice13, amorphousplasma, and skip_conrad - we went out to Zorba's and watched Amelie, which I hadn't seen. Very cute movie, although I had some difficulties because I first couldn't get comfortable, and then when I did get comfortable, I was afraid I was gonna fall asleep :-) But it was good, we played some smash and then I went home exhausted. Felt much better on Sunday - slept in a bit (went to late mass), and we put new sheets on the bed which are softer, which makes it a lot more comfortable. Neat!

One of the things I did was put up pictures from Beer Bike. For reference, I used this tutorial to remove red-eye from a few pictures.

I have a new idea at work that I'm fairly positive about...hopefully I can figure out today whether it's worth pursuing or not.

Have a nice day, all! Peace out.

8 comments

random thoughts (are there any other kinds?)
Mood: mellow
Music: none
Posted on 2005-03-23 23:17:00
Words: 292

A list of random thoughts:

- Elissa, a friend of mine from Rice, has had an article published in the Chicago Tribune. Congrats! (thanks to Stanton)

- I took the elevator at work today up to the eighth floor (the top floor. my floor!), and stopped on every single floor. I think this is the first time that's happened to me. Whee!

- Work is like super stressful, which sucks.

- We played Timesplitters 3 tonight for the first time. Verdict: it was fun, but takes some getting used to over the old one. The missions have a plot, which is new. It also froze on us twice, which is bad bad bad.

- The song "Let Go" by Frou Frou (on their Details album) is really really really cool. It's the first track on the CD (which is in my car right now), and it mellows me out just hearing the opening. Pavlovian or something. On a related note, Frou Frou rock. I could listen to her voice all day, reading the phone book or something. (kinda like Dave Mathews)

- I've been really in to the Grey Album lately. I've never heard Jay-Z before, but I do like some rap (some of Eminem's stuff), and the mashup is very cool - addicting stuff. I'm reconsidering getting that mashup album that they did with Linkin Park and Jay-Z (Collision Course) - I hesitated because you really only get 6 songs (and it's pricey!), but I really like the one I heard on the radio, Numb/Encore. Actually, I think "Encore" is one of the Jay-Z songs used in the Grey Album. Neat! Anyway, what was I saying? Um, mashups are neat, which I'm sure everyone else discovered months and months ago. Fine, be that way.

- Time for bed. Good night!

2 comments

new cd's!
Mood: mellow
Music: Vertical Horizon, "I'm Still Here"
Posted on 2005-01-12 13:04:00
Words: 107

So I got some Christmas money from my grandparents (thanks!), so I bought a bunch of CDs from Amazon.com, and then David went through and converted a bunch of them to used CDs to save money. That means this week I'm going to get like 10 different packages, most of them containing one CD each. Which is exciting to me :-)

I love getting a CD of a group that I like, and then discovering that a song that I've heard before and liked is by them (for example, the music I'm listening to now). It happens reasonably often given the number of CDs I get. Good stuff!

2 comments

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