Donnie’s Blog

During the last two weeks I have been on a very exhausting and frustrating journey through the world of Java web and persistence frameworks. I have been looking at a lot of different platforms, libraries, and APIs, and the reality is, it’s hard to get all of these beasts to play together well. These frameworks are simply not very composable, and the Java platform in general doesn’t provide the kinds of mechanisms to make disparate systems easy to snap together. Of course, such language features aren’t very appealing to work on, so they tend to get short shrift anyway, but the cost in development effort is very large.

The interesting thing is that Java does have the potential to provide snap-together capabilities, because of its binary portability, powerful class-loading abstractions, and the ability to create well-described modules (i.e. the whole JAR format). But it just hasn’t happened, and now everybody is just kind of used to manually working out all of these issues. People grumble a lot, but we’re all used to it by now.

Anyway, that is a big topic, and one that would require a great deal of thought and effort to devise an appropriate solution to. But with the explosion of containers, and persistence mechanisms, and web-service frameworks, and so forth, the need for something to make it easier to compose these systems is only going to increase. Even if it’s just something akin to a thread analyzer, like a classloader/dependency analyzer that will monitor your system and tell you exactly what is messing everything up.

As for me, I’m going to go with something much easier to get working, because I have a deadline!

OK, so since it’s summer I have been doing a few fun things. Like catching up on all the mindless games at the PopCap Games website. That site is the kind of thing you keep away from the students, so they actually have a chance of graduating.

Anyway, I have been playing the web-version of the game Heavy Weapon, and I finally passed the “Mission” level. Yay for me.

I haven’t posted any updates to my web-log lately, mainly because I just don’t have anything to say. I have been having fun fighting with the following software and libraries:

• FreeSOLID
• Hibernate
• JavaServer Faces
• LightWave
• Postgres
• XDoclet

“Having fun” is a bit of an exaggeration; it is really wearing me out. But I am making progress, which is good. Many days I feel like launching into a tirade about one or more of these piles of code, but generally I don’t feel like I know enough to go beyond random spluttering.

At least the 4th of July is right around the corner. That should be a refreshing break.

Ah, summer. Nothing to do, nowhere to go…

Eh, who am I kidding? There’s a ton of stuff to get done this summer. Of course I’m starting with a plan, since I don’t think there’s any chance of me getting through everything before the fall term pounces on us again.

One of the big things I am looking at this summer is course management software. Anything that can help manage the publishing and distribution of course notes and assignments, and the process of assignment-submission and grading, is going to be a huge boon during the year. I discovered very quickly last year how inefficiencies in that process can really add up, and that is one thing I want to address over the summer.

Moodle and Sakai are the two big online course management web-apps that I have found so far. Moodle is used by a lot of people, including quite a few courses here in the CS department, so I am already somewhat aware of its capabilities. Sakai is also quite popular, but I haven’t heard as much about it. I hope to set up each of these and see if they will serve our needs.

Right now we have this custom-built tool called cs1man, and it is a bit notorious with everybody that deals with it, but it does the trick. Maybe it will be replaced with one of these other tools if they can do what we need, but if not, at least we already have something in place.

Lately on KING FM, they have been announcing concerts featuring a trumpet-player named “Lung Lung.” It just seems appropriate for a trumpet-player to be named Lung Lung, doesn’t it?

Last Friday was commencement at Caltech. It was interesting; I got to teach a lot of the students that graduated, and it was really fun to see how excited they were to graduate. And, unlike my graduation, the skies didn’t open up and pour down rain on the ceremony, even though it threatened to for much of the morning.

Commencement also marks the day that I started this job; my first day of work was the Monday after commencement last year. So, now I have gotten one year under my belt!

People are always curious what I am going to do for the summer, and the answer is simply “More work!” I am a full-time staff employee, and there is a lot of work to do to prepare for next year, both on the coursework and on various other infrastructure-type tasks. So certainly I will have my hands full over the summer.

But boy it’ll be nice to have a normal five-day work week, with 8 hour days instead of 12 hour days. That I am looking forward to. No 10PM lectures or weekend grading for three months!

I’ve needed a good watch for a long time. It seems that I have never needed it quite badly enough to actually go buy one, but now I’m at the point where my entire life is driven by scheduling. When does class start, when does it end, am I late for a meeting, blah blah blah.

Of course, I don’t like to buy anything without doing some research, so of course I am doing some window-shopping right now. Last night I got onto amazon.com to look at their watch section, and that was a pretty interesting experience, let me tell you.

(more…)

To break up the monotony of grading for hours on end, I’ve been sneaking out in the early afternoons to take pictures of the interesting plants and animals in Baxter pond. It has been a lot of fun, and quite refreshing!

Today I brought in my macro lens from home, so that I could get closer photos of the things I saw, and that turned out great. I still have to upload these photos to my photo-gallery, but here is a sneak peek: