The Matt Faus Blog

Over the past few days I have been enjoying a collection of essay by Fredrick P. Brooks, Jr. on Software Engineering and the software development field in general. The book, The Mythical Man-Month, is assigned reading for my Software Engineering class and I have been thoroughly enjoying it. The book presents a rather high-level and philosophical view of my craft and it has been wonderful to see how well I can relate with others of the same passion. From the first chapter, I leave you this quote on the joys of programming:

Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.

Although I have been using the Collections arrays in Java for quite some time, I am reminded every time I use them of the cumbersome nature of primitive arrays that I first learned when I started programming. Not only do the Collections make arrays much easier to work with, they also perform much better than primitive arrays. Most significantly, the Collections arrays use dynamic sizing to conserve memory. This feature is very necessary when writing programs that are meant to be used in diverse situations. Also, the ArrayList provided in Java has the very useful feature of holding items that are of the Object class, which serves as the parent class to every class created in the Java language. With this generic storage facility you can easily “throw” anything you want into an ArrayList for easy storage and retrieval.

Another thing that I really like about Java is how easy it is to create advanced GUI. I never really tired to make GUI programs with C++, but everyone I talked to has said that it is rather difficult. For me, making a GUI in Java is very similar to constructing a web page, which comes very natural to me.

(This is Post #1 for my Advanced Java class)

I went out to my car to grab something today and saw something I thought was quite hilarious. The landscaping crew had their backpack-sized leaf blowers and were trying to get the leaves to go East, but the wind was blowing West at about 20 mph.

“Oh! Landscapers pull a sly trick as they form a triangular position in hopes to wedge the leaves with their MPX3000 blowers. It’s going to be a close one, Bob.”
“I’m not so sure, Larry, I just received word that Wind is pulling in it’s reserves, and Oh! the Moon is even circling back around to contribute a bit of extra gravitational force to obtain increased velocity!”

What a battle.

With the first week of classes coming to an end, I am really glad to be back at it again. Both Advanced Java and Intro to Unix are going to have me writing quite a few programs (in Java and PERL, respectively), and I am really looking forward to it. Last semester I didn’t really have a chance to program much, and it really started getting on my nerves. Coming up with a program from scratch and following it all the way through gives me such a feeling of satisfaction – I love it! One other class that might give me a few programming projects is Data Structures and Algorithms, however these programs will usually be rather small to simply test an implementation of stuff we learn in class.

Other than school, life is treating me pretty well. I’ve been working quite a bit with Autonomy Systems, and that is very exciting. Next week I have a meeting scheduled with a client in Seattle that needs some help with an InfoPath form she is creating. I’m going to use Microsoft Live Meeting and help her figure out her questions.

After a great weekend of back-to-school partying, classes for Spring Semester 2006 have started. I went to all of my Monday classes today and it was pretty boring. Mondays are going to be pretty hectic for me with classes from 1:00-9:00pm. There is a one hour break and a couple thirty minute breaks, but it’ll be pretty much going from one class to the next, ugh. One thing that surprised me about today was my Physics lab class not only met on the first week but actually worked through a lab, which is fairly surprising as we hadn’t learned anything to experiment about yet. Also, only two people in the room of 25 had their lab manuals. I was not one of them, so I guess it’s better luck next time.

Overall, I’m pretty excited about this semester. I’ll get to do some really cool and in-depth Java programming in CS4336 Advanced Java, some new and exciting stuff with Perl and Unix in CS3375 Principles of Unix, and I got Farage (my favorite professor at UTD) for CS3354 Data Structures and Algorithms. CS3345 Software Engineering might get annoying, but it should be a good break from all the code-writing I’ll be doing. Also, my Physics professor seems really cool and it sounds like the grading scheme and assignments are going to be considerably easier than Physics 1.

One last thing I ought to mention is that I will soon be posting in a new category named “Java” to fulfill a 5% grade requirement for my Advanced Java class. These postings will be observations and musings about programs that I write for the class.

Last night was a lovely evening up until I was blindly robbed in a Lewisville parking lot. I came out from the Dollar movies and noticed that my rear window (I have a vinyl convertible top - kind of like a Jeep) had been sliced open and someone had removed my rather expensive in-dash receiver. Isn’t that annoying? Two other cars in the parking lot were burglarized and one of them had a window shattered. I don’t know exactly what the thieves were thinking in that case - they broke the window and stole the faceplate for the girl’s receiver. What good is just a faceplate? None. The funny thing was that the girl who had her window shattered was worried more about the CD that she had been playing in the receiver than the actual unit, which was pretty dumb. Anyway, an officer showed up about 20 minutes after I called it in and a report was filed. Hopefully I’ll get some kind of compensation from insurance, I would think they could do something about my shredded window at the least, but we will have to wait and see.

Well, we made it through 2005. It was a good year for me, and I am very much looking forward to what 2006 has to offer. The break from school has been nice, but it should be good to get back into the swing of things. Classes start January 9, a week from today, and I still haven’t gotten my books. I guess I should drop by the book store and pick up the book list today.

One great thing about the holidays is the leftovers! I opened my refrigerator today and was greeted with an almost overflowing assortment of food from mine and Travis’ family, which means no cooking for a while!