Man, there’s been a lot of stuff that I’ve been thinking “I need to blog that”. but of course I haven’t. So let’s do a bit of everything here.

Stuff that’s been happening:
I’ve been writing a new program for a friend of mine – it’s a Point of Sale program that runs cash registers. Really expandable, easy to use. The hard parts so far have been interfacing with a scanner (to read bar codes), and the register keyboard. Each key that gets pressed fires a unique keycode, so I had to track each key, get the modifiers and keycode and map them all into a big huge action map – for example, the grunt presses the ‘Visa/MC’ key – and the keystroke is ASCII 112, with ALT+SHIFT modifiers (that’s how the system interprets it, anyways. The old program is a 15 year old DOS program that requires a hardware dongle to run! Such Antiquity!

This weekend we went up to Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton. Wow. It’s really cool, and the moving floor and 36 inch telescope are amazing. It’s even more amazing when you realize that the whole thing is over 100 years old!

Hockey last night marked only the second time that I’ve ever intentionally hit someone. We played a team called Phase Matrix, and last season they won their division and moved up into ours. This season we’ve played them 4 times and every time we play them, they start out well, then after we get a couple goals up on them they start to play dirty. Their captain is the king of the dirty players. Last time we played them he crosschecked one of our guys from behind into the boards, just crushed him right in the back. So last night I was forechecking in behind their net to get the puck and he was almost to it, so I motioned toward the puck with my stick, then threw my hip into him instead. As he was going down, he grabbed my sweater and started pushing and pulling me, and as he pulled me down I popped him a couple.. Not my finest moment, but a well deserved minor penalty, and I wasn’t going to let him keep getting away with crap.

Last friday I had a brilliant idea too.. I’m writing a Swing application, and I wrote a lot of framework to do UI stuff so that we didn’t have to do a lot of monotonous things.. so we define how screens look in XML, and the framework will do all the creation and layout behind the scenes. I also introduced the concept of a semantic action. Java’s swing framework provides you with stuff to catch mouse clicks and the like, but as a programmer and user, you don’t care that you clicked the mouse, you really care that you’re trying to perform some action, like saving your work or creating a new action, so I wrote an abstraction layer that translates system actions into semantic actions. Anyways, to get to my idea.. I’ve been struggling with getting Swing’s DND framework into our application and to play nicely. the Java Drag & Drop framework deals a lot with data transfer, serialization, the flavour and type of data, and the like. So I’ve been trying to get it to deal with our data structures, which are a generic type of data wrapper, but I realized that I don’t need to do it at all, I can just have a drop action fire a semantic action event, and that action should deal with populating data.

And last before I leave: a playlist for monday morning!
Oops I Did It Again – Britney Spears
Just A Little Bit – Gina G
Roadside Attraction – Spirit Of The West
Dizz Knee Land – Dada
Crazy Train – Ozzy Osbourne
Southside – Moby
Sober (Live) – Tool
Planes And Satellites(Live) – Sonia Dada
Barbie Girl (Techno Remix) – Aqua
Mutha Don’t want to go to School Today – Extreme
Synaesthesia (Remix) – Ministry Of Sound

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