Long-Overdue Post

How long has it been since the last post, hey? I think I will send an email out to the guys to write something. Our poor blog hasn't been updated much lately. -_- I will just write some stuff for the time being.

What have I been doing? Right now, I am working on Java stuff. Despite the horrendously slow virtual machine, I quite like it. :) More specifically, I've been learning J2EE technologies, leaning towards using the open-source implementation, Tomcat. Looking into the Struts Model-Viewer-Client framework, too. All in all, I have been doing *alot* of learning, and have much more reading ahead of me. -_-

It has generally been a very long time since I did any web work, so I thought I would update my skills a bit. I would have liked to look into the Python and Ruby-based (I hear good things about Ruby-On-Rails - what a cool name) web application frameworks, but there is only so much time I have. :( There are quite a lot of Java web development jobs right now, so I thought if I stick with Java, it might prove to be a useful endevour in the future. :) Apparently, Python is making quite a bit of headway into the web application area, too. That is pretty cool... but I think Java is still the King of Web Applications, right now. I quite like Ruby better and would like to see more people adopt it, but nothing can be perfect...

My first Java web application project is going to be my homepage; I am going to completely revamp it to make it more nifty and smart. :) Including a new design that is going to use vector-based graphics made with Sodipodi, touched up with Gimp ofcourse. Might look into some Blender stuff, too. But just a bit - 3D modelling is something I am a complete newbie with. I plan to write a simple blog app, based on shamelessly stealing code from existing implementations. Pebble is one such blog application that I very-nearly was going to use outright, but I didn't really want anything so complicated, so I decided I would just write my own. I'll make Blogger export posts from here to there, too, so I get free updates to my homepage from the other guys (if they write entries). This would all be a great learning experience, and I am finding it kind of fun (so sue me anti-geek all you people). :P

Besides Java, I am also doing an Advanced Graphics unit at my university. So far I have made OpenGL programs to generate a 3D Sierpinski Gasket, and another that is rendering of our solar system with orbitting planets and moons. But my gasket was wrong apparently. I didn't have the unit text book at the time, and couldn't find out the algorithm to generate such a shape, so I had to think it up myself. I thought my psuedo-Sierpinski algorithm was pretty good. :P My solar system one was meant to be completely accurate, but when I finished it and ran it, you couldn't see anything because the planets are so freaking far away from each other, the sun is so freaking large, so you just end up with a black screen, with a yellow sun and no planets (too small to be rendered I guess). -_- So in the end, I just hacked up a few values to make everything look nicer, but vastly unrealistic. :P The code is a bit dodgy in some areas because both projects I did in one night (and a very, very late night it was). When I have cleaned it up, I will post it on my homepage. :P In the process, I discovered my NEC Versa E6000 laptop's graphic card (an ATI Radeon 9100 IGP) is not accelerated under Linux. :( Hopefully something comes out soon. There are official binary drivers, but it only supports 2D for my chip. :(

All that programming stuff aside, I found a new band I like today: Little Birdy! I really like the singer's voice. Very cool people... and from Perth! :P If they have a concert here, I think I would go. Depends on how the crowd is like - if it is anything like the teeny-boppers at the Avril Lavigne concert I went to (bad idea - but hey, I got the tickets for free :P), then no thanks. :P

Also got Liferea setup on my laptop, so I get all the RSS goodness from all my favourite sites. :P

Okay, that should be a big enough post for now. Man it is so easy to write about stuff forever.

See you.

Steven