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April 26, 2005
Java games and field trips
I've been taking CSC 143, which is the second Java course in the CS foundation courses required for transfer to UW. It is pretty fun, our first two assignments covered writing Tetris, mostly from scratch. We were given some scaffolding and swing stubs for drawing the squares and grid, and then we had to implement the shapes, the row removal and the rotation.
It was pretty enlightening, since the rules of the assignment weren't exactly how Tetris itself played back in the day. I must have eliminated a thousand rows while play testing the solution, and after a while, my brain adjusted and it was as if Tetris had always behaved that way. Two of the big differences were the initial starting orientations of the pieces when they dropped through the top of the screen, and the logic requirements for determining when it was safe to rotate a piece.
I'm glad there was some differences, though, since it made the project more challenging. The newest one is a historical stock graph that shows daily prices (with high/low/closing prices marked) and quarterly earnings and their trends over time. This is pretty similar to the Cocoa code I wrote for graphing audio samples, except there are never any negative values. I've written the model and controller classes and have implemented most of the text view, so now I have a week to write the graphical view that does the pretty graphs. Here is an example of what we're shooting for, although our graphs won't be quite as complex.
This is the third of eight projects for the quarter, so I'm excited to see what's coming down the road. Last quarter, we did an adjustable LED clock, implemented a PhotoShop-like app with convolution filters for different image manipulations, and created a pinball game, among other things.
The image app was my favorite, which probably isn't a surprise to people who know me, since I used to work on image software quite a bit.
I've been pretty busy with school and interviews, I've got an interesting possibility in the pipeline right now, but I'm not going to talk about it until I know it's a sure thing. It's been a long time since I was on the receiving side of an interview, so that was a real eye opener. I went to the Bay Area last week, and on the flight back, I saw several people I knew from Amazon. A couple of DBAs who had since left the company and were down there for a MySQL conference, and two people from the tech leadership of A9.com, Amazon's search spinoff that's located near Palo Alto. And a couple other people on the flight looked familiar, but I wasn't sure if I knew them or not. Turns out the Thursday night flight to Seattle is always packed, since a lot of people are flying home for the weekend. There wasn't an empty seat on the plane.
It actually ended up being cooler in the Bay Area than it was up in Seattle, it's been roasting up here lately. Summer in Seattle can be hit or miss. If it gets really hot, people aren't really prepared mentally for it, and they start doing crazy things. It's the only time of year that Seattle drivers forget their normal, sedate, friendly driving routine and start driving like the rest of the world.
It has yet to be determined whether this is good or bad.
Posted by djb at April 26, 2005 12:47 PM