Pete's Log: kanji kawaii
Entry #955, (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)(posted when I was 22 years old.)
The assignment: write a simple java applet that has some kind of "scene" which in turn incorporates some kind of "motion" in response to mouse events. Fair enough. So I spent some time trying to come up with ideas that would work well for this "scene" thing and would be fun at the same time. I quickly ditched the decapitation idea, and then also ditched the idea of doing anything pornographic (in part because I'm not qualified to judge such things for accuracy). So the next idea was to do some kind of silly japanese-themed thing. So we check, of course, the silly cse341 java program I wrote to figure out how to import gifs into java. Fair enough. Suns webpage plus an old java book that mysteriously showed up on my bookshelf one day also help.
Unless it is a loop variable in a tight loop, a variable should never have a one-letter name. Never. Because otherwise doing a search to figure out where the variable is used just becomes impractical. Obviously obfusc8ion is an exception to this rule.
So I spent a long time debugging some simple java code, because, as it turns out, java's fancy applet getImage function doesn't follow http redirects. And for some reason I'd given the url as http://www.nd.edu/... instead of www.cse.nd.edu ... badness, man, badness. So finally I fixed that and now life continues happily.
One of the biggest issues I'm having with java is I keep forgetting to recompile. It's like, hey, I'm editing this thing in emacs, and I'm viewing it in netscape. Years of habit have thus led me to
ctrl-x-s, alt-shift-downarrow, alt-shift-r. Habit leaves no room in there for javac blah.java... and every time I look at the unchanged applet, I sit there for a second, wondering why. I should be using appletviewer instead of netscape, then at least I'd feel closer to the traditional edit, compile, run cycle and maybe I'd be less silly.
netscape has crashed several times on me today, yet it hasn't crashed since whenever I began writing up this entry, which was more than several hours ago. What's the precise definition of "more than several?" that depends on the precise definition of several. arrrrrh! Anyway, since I don't trust netscape to keep this window in a stable state (I am, after all, using it to debug java code I wrote), and since I'm too lazy to paste this into an emacs buffer like I usually do when journal entries become long-term affairs, I'm just gonna submit this to the belligerent masses now. And thus my command: Belligerate!