There’s a fractal I’ve been wanting to make for a while. And the other week I woke up with a flash of insight and coded it, and it looked like this: And I was really happy, until I realized it wasn’t the fractal that I’d meant to make. Oops. So I revisited it and remembered […]
This is something I did for a course I’ve been taking, but as I couldn’t find much information thought it might be helpful to document it here. Let me know if there’s anything you think I’ve missed! Overview The internet is a rich source of dynamic data, and is increasingly used in our applications. Many […]
I’ve been a little quieter than usual for a number of reasons, one of which is that I’ve been working on a workshop for the University. It’s aimed at getting 17-18 year olds interested in taking Computer Science, and I’m using Processing for that. I’m experimenting with what I’m calling an Activity Based Curriculum. I.e. […]
This is a post I co-wrote with Douglas Gresham. Douglas is a software engineer at Google, who blogs at www.douglasgresham.co.uk (less often than he should, go bug him for updates). I’m a graduate student, though I firmly believe that great programmers are not the result of university courses in programming. But university courses take us […]
If you know me at all (or have just been reading my blog for a while) you’ll know I’m really interested in how to be more productive, more effective, and generally achieving more. And of course I read Zen Habits and all these other blogs that talk about flow. Flow is about being completely absorbed […]
When I was doing my undergrad, I knew a lot of geography students. One of them told me that geographers spent a lot of time debating what geography was. I found this completely ridiculous, of course, imagining the only thing to be more pointless than studying geography was angsting about nature of geography. (Of course, […]
I recently handed in an assignment on testing. It was fairly simple, and I expected it to take just a couple of hours and not teach me anything. That was not the case. I really think that every situation is an opportunity to learn something (even if it’s not what you think you will). Lesson […]
You can ask a specialized, fairly technical question to the world in general… And get a response from someone who really knows what they’re talking about! (I have books by this guy!) Made my day! If you’re interested in JUnit 4 and testing, a brief explanation. JUnit 4 allows you to create parameterized tests. I.e. […]
How do you define progress? As a grad student, the weeks I spend reading papers and thinking don’t feel like progress – it’s the week, or day, or hour, when things start to come together that does. In going back to training, it’s not the gradual improvements in fitness and energy. It’s when I can […]
Couple of things I found using Prefuse that I’ll document here for reference (I had a hard time finding the answer to these). 1. NullPointerException thrown by GraphMLReader This means there’s an issue in the XML, even if it’s valid according to W3Schools (which mine was). Double check it, for me it was an issue […]