Utinni, utinni!

Friday, November 06, 2009

Lab 5, this is the final lab in the WJ-2752-SE6 course. We are in the home stretch now. After this the decision: Do I proceed forward and take the WJ-2753 course, or do I get side-tracked with these other courses that judging by the numbers (WJ-1XXX) in the series I should’ve taken first,… or do I go over the courses I have taken thus far with the intent of turning my blog posts into something that doesn’t infringe any copyrights but nonetheless clearly demonstrates the technical acumen I demonstrated in completing these courses on level one, save for one lazy exercise in lab 4 where I peeked (just peeked) at level two. I really wouldn’t have peeked if I hadn’t gotten the notion of overloaded constructors in my head. I really thought that lab was implying their use. I think this lab will use them. I really should make a habit of doing the lab after the section it applies to instead of doing them all at the end of the course.

Sorry about the wait. I just discovered Lexulous on Facebook. Oh, how I miss playing Scrabble with the Mensans and the Facists. This game is based on Scrabulous which had to change its name after being sued for copyright infringement. Of the many projects I have started for fun and never quite finished my Scrabble database was, while I was playing scrabble the most fun. I think I am going to revisit it in Java, or at least revisit Scrabble as an inspiration for fun little hobby projects. I think Lexulous has its levels arranged like those of these WJ course labs, in that they are ranked by accomplishment decrementing to number one rather than incrementing by difficulty to most hard. Wait, how did I lose to level 1 and 10 but not 6? I get it Lexulous gets to make up words like howf, and miggles.
Ok, that’s enough of a diversion for now. Let’s get back to the project at hand. In lab 5 exercise 1 we are going to modify the Bank Project we have been working on throughout this course, again. I think this is some sort of heuristic to drive home the notion of the reusability and maintainability of code afforded by the object oriented approach. Either that or that was the excuse given for not creating a wider variety of labs for this course. I would personally like to see a Scrabble based lab, perhaps where we create and instantiate tiles from the tile class, and then call the methods like getAdjacentTiles(), getSquareMult() or calcTileOnSquare(), getWordsWithTiles(), or… but I digress.

In this exercise we are going to modify the Bank class. In order to do this I am going to need to copy the project into Eclipse. So far I have made a separate package for each lab and exercise. This allows me to go over them as each lab that reused parts of a previous one had me modifying or deleting something or another. The advantage of keeping them separate is that with each lab when I go to edit the gibberish I have been blogging thus far, I can read the lab and look at the finished code and even look at the project prior to it. If I had used NetBeans and simply worked in the same project and package as instructed in the lab I would have to do each lab over again from the beginning, sure I would probably burn the lessons deeper into my brain, but, as we have see thus far doing each lab from the beginning has had the effect of me blogging gibberish. It is therefore the case that using NetBeans would make me blog gibberish… again, iteratively, and then I would give up on Java, and that would be a shame because I like it… again.

A little Eclipse tip for you: If like me you find yourself naming packages according to the implicit requirements of some Sun CBT, say WJ-2752-6E, and you are ending up with names like lab5.exercise1, lab5.exercise1.domain, and lab5.exercise1.etc. Make sure to put a class in lab5.exercise1 before any other package or else Eclipse will be sneaky and hide your empty top level packages while your off making waffles or a tuna sandwich, as the case may be.

A Jawa programmer? But this R2 unit has a bad motivator. Enough! Pay attention, sit up straight and for the love of all that is good and decent try and look like you’re trying.