Month: January 2006

Don’t forget your Fortune Cookie.

An Internet Service Provider in Clinton, Iowa wins an $11,000,000,000 suit against a spammer.

Free Medical Books – Over the next few years, many important medical textbooks will be available online, free and in full-text. The unrestricted access to scientific knowledge will have a major impact on medical practice. FreeBooks4Doctors! is dedicated to the promotion of free access to medical books over the Internet.

MOTIVATION. Psychology tells us that motivation – true, lasting motivation – can only come from within. Common sense tells us it can’t be manufactured or productized. So how is it that a multi-billion dollar industry thrives through the sale of motivational commodities and services? Because, in our world of instant gratification, people desperately want to believe that there are simple solutions to complex problems. And when desperation has disposable income, market opportunities abound.

AT DESPAIR, INC., we believe motivational products create unrealistic expectations, raising hopes only to dash them. That’s why we created our soul-crushingly depressing Demotivators designs, so you can skip the delusions that motivational products induce and head straight for the disappointments that follow!

Armed with a digital camera and that non-stop wit of yours, you now have the power to turn a simple photograph into an inspirational message that will burn forever in the hearts and minds of dozens. Print it, frame it! Make two — we know you’ve got hundreds of digital images and photos to spare!

One formula (of many) for a successful blog is to create a “learning blog”. A blog that shares what you know, to help others. Even–or especially–if that means giving away your “secrets”. Teaching people to do what you do is one of the best ways we know to grow an audience–an audience of users you want to help.

It’s what I try to do here because–let’s face it–you’re just not that into me ; )

Even if a learner is personally motivated to learn a topic, if the learning content itself isn’t motivating, the learner’s brain will do everything possible to look for something more interesting. This applies to both getting and keeping attention, as well as memory.

Never underestimate the power of FUN to keep people engaged.

I couldn’t agree more!

I have programmed using both IDEs and command-line environments, and I have taught programming using both types of environments. Based on my experience, I recommend a command line environment for beginning programmers. IDEs can simplify the management of large numbers of files in a complex project, but they are themselves complex programs that add another level of complications to the already difficult task of learning the fundamentals of programming.

Notepad is a basic text editor that you can use to create simple documents.
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Because Notepad supports only very basic formatting, you cannot accidentally save special formatting in documents that need to remain pure text.

jEdit is a mature and well-designed programmer’s text editor.
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Plugins can turn jEdit into a full-fledged IDE, with compiler, code completion, context-sensitive help, debugging, visual diff, and much more.

The aim of BlueJ is to provide an easy-to-use teaching environment for the Java language that facilitates the teaching of Java to first year students. Special emphasis has been placed on visualisation and interaction techniques to create a highly interactive environment that encourages experimentation and exploration.

The JDT project contributes a set of plug-ins that add the capabilities of a full-featured Java IDE to the Eclipse platform. The JDT plugins provide APIs so that they can themselves be further extended by other tool builders.

Some of you might know that I am more an Eclipse guy than a Netbeans one. In particular, I do enjoy developping for the Eclipse platform, i.e., Eclipse-based tools. I had never been a particular fan of Netbeans, which I always found to be heavy, unfriendly and slightly behind what Eclipse can offer.

However one would be blind not to recognize the tremendous amount of efforts of Sun toward making Netbeans a better IDE.
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Part of my job is to teach, and I have decided that my students will do their J2EE duties with Netbeans.

Software development has become more complex than ever ~ Borland JBuilder 2006, the market-leading Java IDE, helps development teams manage this complexity and deliver standards-compliant enterprise-class applications faster.
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Foundation Edition provides you with the basics for speed coding and debugging with an integrated, powerful source code editor, graphical debugger, compiler, tutorials, and sample applications. ~ Best of all, it’s free – even for commercial use.

retrievr is an experimental service which lets you search and explore in a selection of Flickr images by drawing a rough sketch.
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Personally, I see retrievr more as an “exploration” tool than as a “search” tool, and it seems to work very well for that.

The above sketch found this:

Compiler vs. Interpreter

Compiler – Checks syntax.
Interpreter – Checks syntax.

Compiler – Generates machine-code instructions. Running the program is a separate step.
Interpreter – Executes the program statements as it converts them to machine-code.

Compiler – Is not needed to run the executable program.
Interpreter – Must remain installed while program is run.

Compiler – Runs faster.
Interpreter – Is slower.

Generally, when you compile a program, you’re creating machine language for a specific platform. For example, you might compile a program to run on a Windows 2000 platform. If you want to run the same program on an Apple computer, you can use a compiler that creates machine language for a Mac OS X platform.

When you compile a Java program, it doesn’t create machine language, it creates bytecode. To run a Java program, the computer running the program needs a Java Virtual Machine to convert the bytecode into machine language. This arrangement allows you to write once, then run anywhere that has a Java Virtual Machine.

Java programs can be written in any text editor, such as Microsoft Notepad. When you save a Java program, you should save it with a .java extension. For example, if you were to create a program that writes the famous phrase “Hello world“, you might save it as HelloWorld.java.

In addition to using the .java extension, you should use UpperCamelCase for the program name. CamelCase is the practice of writing compound words or phrases where the words are joined without spaces or dashes or underscores, and each new word is capitalized. The name comes from the camel-like “bumps” in the middle of the compound word that are created by the uppercase letters. When you name something in CamelCase that starts with a lower case letter, it’s referred to as lowerCamelCase. In Java, there’s a convention that you should use lowerCamelCase for variable names. On the other hand, names starting with an upper case letter are referred to as UpperCamelCase. The compiler, however, doesn’t care which case you use for any of these names, as long as you are consistent.

To compile Java programs using the Standard Edition 5.0 of the Java 2 platform, you need to download JDK 5.0 Update 6.

To compile HelloWorld.java, you type in javac HelloWorld.java at the MS-DOS Prompt (in Windows 95/98) or Command Prompt (in Windows NT/XP). This will create bytecode in HelloWorld.class.

To run HelloWorld.class, you type java HelloWorld.class.

A HelloWorld program could look like this:

class HelloWorld
{
    public static void main(String[] args) 
    {
        System.out.println("Hello World");
    }
}

The first line starts with the word class. This is just a reserved word that tells java that we’re building a new class. The other word on the first line is HelloWorld. This is the name that we have chosen for this class, and it MUST match the program name. By convention, all class names should be UpperCamelCase so programmers will recognize that it is a class name, not a variable name. The entire first line is a class header.

The second line of the program is an opening curly brace. This defines the beginning of the class body. The last line of our program is a closing curly brace. This indicates the end of our class. Everything between these two curly braces is part of class HelloWorld.

The HelloWorld class contains one method. Method is just another name for something that is called a function, procedure, paragraph, or subroutine in other languages. It’s a block of code that can be called from another location. In this case, it’s called from the run statement. All java applications start at a method named main().

The third line is a method header for the main() method. It’s followed by curly braces that define the body of the method and enclose a println statement that sends the literal “Hello World” to the screen.

This particular method starts with the word public. Public is an access modifier. It lets Java know who’s allowed to call this method. Public is the least restrictive access modifier.

The next word is static. Static changes main() from an instance method to a class method. Yes, I understand that you don’t know what this means yet.

Static is followed by the word void, which indicates that the main method doesn’t send a value back to the place that called it. If it did return a value, we would replace the word void with the data type of the returned value.

The method body contains a single statement:
System.out.println(“Hello World”);
It ends with a semicolon. All statements end with a semicolon. Class headers and method headers are not statements.

The word System is a class. It starts with an uppercase letter.
The word out is an object.
The word println() is a method.
The statement System.out.println(); is a method call.
The statement System.out.println(“Hello World”); is a method call that passes a literal argument to the method.

If you’ld like to try it for yourself, here are some good instructions and a closer look at a Hello World program from the folks at Sun.

A good learning path would be to continue writing Applications.

Once you have a good foundation writing applications, you can start learning about Applets.

Applets
Building Applets

At some point, you may want to start using an Integrated Development Environment.

Here are some Java Tips.

Step by Step Programming.

AWT Swing1 Swing2

Free University of Bolzano/Bozen.

Prepare to take an entertaining and informative journey on the Mighty Mississippi at the National Mississippi River Museum & Aquarium. Enjoy dynamic aquariums, historical exhibits and a stroll through the wetlands and boatyard. Each visit is a truly interactive experience where visitors can get “up close and personal” with live critters, become barge pilots, and control locks and dams.

The National Mississippi River Museum’s photo exhibit The Invisible Industry is currently on display at the Smithsonian Institution.