The Misadventures of Dan
Peer into the mind of Dan as he tries to build an MP3 Player for his PDA and searches for the next thing in his life be it an electrical engineering job or graduate school.
Thursday, March 18, 2004
.:11:14:28 PM:.
Messenger Alternatives...
Lets say (hypothetically) you're in an environment that doesn't allow you to install programs (i.e. say some campus computer). Lets say the computers you have access to do not have MSN or Yahoo installed. Lets further suppose that you need to use MSN or Yahoo! really badly. What do you do? What do you do?
Last year I would have suggested to use Trillian and there would be nothing wrong with that. All you would have to do is unzip the file into some directory (say on the desktop) and away you go! The only bug I had with Trillian was that each time you uncompressed it, it would ask for statistics and all this stuff that was within reason to ask but tedious to fill out over and over again. Buying the Pro version doesn't help you anymore since you'll still be uncompressing each time you need to use it.
Enter Easy Message. Easy Message is free and is extremely small. If what you need to do is to fire off a few instant messages to people this would definitely be the program for you. You should know that neither Trillian nor Easy Message allows you to play any of the games or environments in MSN or Yahoo. It seems to be built purely for speed but give it a whirl. :)
Wednesday, March 17, 2004
.:11:22:09 PM:.
Java Tutorial...
I'm helping a friend of mine understand what Java is all about. So I might as well share... Please note that this is NOT a direct allegory/metaphor for Object Oriented Programming in Java. This is merely to help my friend get started to understand what's going on.
Introduction to Classes/Object Oriented Thinking
- Java is composed of what we call 'classes'.
- Think of a class as like 'Race' in an RPG game (e.g. Dwarf, Elf, Human, etc.).
- Each race has different functions, some are similar like every race can eat, they can sleep. Some have different functions like a Dwarf is can fight whereas an Elf can cast spells (just go along with this).
- We call these functions/abilities METHODS
- We can also differentiate each member of the class/race from each other by using something called ATTRIBUTES
- For example, Dwarf #1 is called 'BobFromTurkey' and is 4 feet tall.
- Dwarf #2 is called 'CallMeFrank' and is 5 feet tall
- Both Bob and Frank are both dwarves but they're different. The things that make them different are called ATTRIBUTES.
As you can see from Bob and Frank we have two different attributes. One is the name (a string of CHARacters) and the other is a number. Numbers come in two types... FLOATing points which have a decimal or point, and INTegers which do not have a decimal or point).
In Java, it's important to know that each class has to be in a separate file and has to be prefixed with the word 'class'. We build a class/race like this:
class DWARFCLASS {
char name;
int height;
}
You can build races based on other existing races. For example lets say a human can fight AND cast spells. For all intents and purposes you can make a human inherit the METHODS of the dwarf (meaning it can fight) and you can inherit the METHODS of an elf (meaning it can cast spells).
To do this we'll use the word "extends"
class HUMANCLASS extends DWARFCLASS {
}
Our human can now fight. :)What if we wanted to add a method to the human... let's say we want to make the human dance :D
class HUMANCLASS extends DWARFCLASS {
char name;
int height;
int shoesize;
dance( );
}
This concludes our first lesson :) Questions?
.:5:01:21 PM:.
Internet Explorer Misbehavin'
By default, whenever you come across a non-existent page (or a bad link) Internet Explorer should show you the typical page indicating a 404 Error. However, some people will get this page (http://real-yellow-page.com/index.php?aid=20038) instead. THIS IS NOT RIGHT. Anytime your computer starts doing stuff that you never told it to do (like going to pages you didn't tell it to, running programs that offer you a million dollars, etc. even popup windows-you should have the right and ability to not accept it. After all, whose computer is it? Theirs or yours?
This is not to say that you have to know everything going on in your computer at any given second but the basics should be covered. Like surfing and e-mailing. You don't expect your computer to send out spam or viruses on your behalf.
In order to fix the problem on my friend's computer who was running a Windows XP we had to download a program called Kill Box and delete a file (c:\windows\system32\log.dll ) in her computer. You do this by copying the file location into the appropriate box in Kill Box and pushed the button with the green arrow, then the button labeled 'Add File' and then the button that says 'Remove on Reboot'. Different OS (like Windows 2000 I think?) have different variations one such one was c:\winnt\system32\d3dm.dll .
