Blog and coding
I now have a blog *. Go me.
http://camtarn.org/gizmoblog
It's actually a 'team diary' for the group project I'm doing at Uni. Unashamedly inspired by one of the other groups - although in our case, I'm using Simple PHP Blog rather than WordPress. I don't know if anyone's gonna bother using it, so I'd rather have something that only takes ten minutes to set up (and most of that is uploading). Also, I'm rather impressed with SPB, at least for this kind of small application.
I figured that our team needed some form of organisation - other teams have the aforementioned blog, one team created an Excel spreadsheet with macros to do version control and meeting agendas, and in general everyone seems somewhat more organised than us. That said, I'm really pretty happy with my team: I've had teams in the past where half the team can hardly program, and I've ended up shouldering the burden of virtually all the coding plus a good proportion of the report.
My Graphics project is coming along quite nicely, too. I now have a Java vector graphics app which runs with only minimal modifications on my laptop and on my phone, and I've learned rather a lot about line/curve/circle drawing algorithms and linear transforms in the process, which is nice. Although I still haven't figured out why my inverse transforms work perfectly for rotate and translate matrices, but go backwards for scaling ones.
I do kinda wish I'd known we were allowed to use Graphics2D before I decided to implement everything from scratch, however. I'd assumed that since we were being given extra marks for using curves, matrices and inverse transforms, that we actually had to implement them in order to get the marks. So I did, and they mostly work, barring a few little niggles, and some pretty severe performance issues.
However, it turns out that people are allowed to use Graphics2D, which basically provides much faster and more correct implementations of the code I spent days writing. Of course, Graphics2D doesn't exist in J2ME on a mobile - but I found TinyLine2D which does much the same, and I discarded it because of the above assumption.
Oh well. All that said, though, it's never a bad thing to get more programming experience, and since I'm already using Graphics2D for the group project, using something totally different has to be a Good Thing. I'm just gonna keep telling myself that ... :P
* /me suppresses sense of self-loathing at using the word 'blog'...
http://camtarn.org/gizmoblog
It's actually a 'team diary' for the group project I'm doing at Uni. Unashamedly inspired by one of the other groups - although in our case, I'm using Simple PHP Blog rather than WordPress. I don't know if anyone's gonna bother using it, so I'd rather have something that only takes ten minutes to set up (and most of that is uploading). Also, I'm rather impressed with SPB, at least for this kind of small application.
I figured that our team needed some form of organisation - other teams have the aforementioned blog, one team created an Excel spreadsheet with macros to do version control and meeting agendas, and in general everyone seems somewhat more organised than us. That said, I'm really pretty happy with my team: I've had teams in the past where half the team can hardly program, and I've ended up shouldering the burden of virtually all the coding plus a good proportion of the report.
My Graphics project is coming along quite nicely, too. I now have a Java vector graphics app which runs with only minimal modifications on my laptop and on my phone, and I've learned rather a lot about line/curve/circle drawing algorithms and linear transforms in the process, which is nice. Although I still haven't figured out why my inverse transforms work perfectly for rotate and translate matrices, but go backwards for scaling ones.
I do kinda wish I'd known we were allowed to use Graphics2D before I decided to implement everything from scratch, however. I'd assumed that since we were being given extra marks for using curves, matrices and inverse transforms, that we actually had to implement them in order to get the marks. So I did, and they mostly work, barring a few little niggles, and some pretty severe performance issues.
However, it turns out that people are allowed to use Graphics2D, which basically provides much faster and more correct implementations of the code I spent days writing. Of course, Graphics2D doesn't exist in J2ME on a mobile - but I found TinyLine2D which does much the same, and I discarded it because of the above assumption.
Oh well. All that said, though, it's never a bad thing to get more programming experience, and since I'm already using Graphics2D for the group project, using something totally different has to be a Good Thing. I'm just gonna keep telling myself that ... :P
* /me suppresses sense of self-loathing at using the word 'blog'...