Java Threading

This weekend I decided to clean up some of my threading skills in java. I bought the O'Reilly book, Java Threads, which has been a good read. I always find the O'Reilly books very insightful. Anyway I went ahead a wrote a small Reader/Writer program using threads. It follows a simple algorithm using a basic FIFO policy with the exception of reads, if a read has 10 "time units" left and a second read comes that only needs 5, that read is allowed to take place at the same time. Here is the applet, with the code in the base dir.

http://wwwcsif.cs.ucdavis.edu/~merz/RW.html

Finished ...

I finished. Well not completely, still one more quarter of school. But with the end of this last quarter I have finished my final Computer Science/Engineering class. My final project was for ECS 152b (computer networks B) for which I wrote a Bulletin Board and Chat Client/Server. It was written in C. We had to create the client and the server from the socket level up. This became interesting when I implemented the second connection for file transfer. See you need to be able to chat and send/receive files at the same time (Which makes since). I used pthreads on the server side and fork client side. Disconnect was my favorite part since the file client and the chat client are two different processes at that point and time did not permit for a nice pipe implementation to be used. Instead the user chat client sent a kill command to the chat server for that clients connection, which sent a kill to the clients file server, who then intern sent a kill to his file server connection. Once the 2 processes and two threads were all ready, they all shut down.

Anyway now that I am done I am putting the final touches on my resume before I send it out. I am excited to finally get to use some of the stuff I have been learning over the last five years. I am going to be a little sad to move out of Davis, but as Steve Zissou says in The Life Aquatic “This is an adventure.”

Feedlounge Review

Well after a week of using feedlounge’s public release I must write something about it. First and foremost you must remind yourself that this is not a desktop application. Which is hard to do with the amazing UI that feedlounge implements. Not only does feedlounge excel at being ‘easy on the eyes’ so to speak, but I think it is part of a large milestone for the internet. In today’s world of wireless synchronization is key. The problem with that, synchronization is time consuming, and annoying. I believe feedlounge shows us the way the true American solution to synchronization… have someone else do it for you. Centralized web apps are just the way to accomplish this. With the all the backend benefits of the web and a front end that looks like _____ (insert your favorite car here) it is hard to go wrong.
Now not everything in life is perfect and I know many have been upset that feedlounge has become a paid service. And at first I had the same thought as you, damn. Though with further thought into the matter I have gotten past this slight dilemma. Mainly it came down to the fact that I can’t even eat lunch at taco bell for under $5 anymore. Carl’s Jr. is almost a sure $7, and mocha’s are creeping up on that same marker. And when I thought about comparing feedlounge to that of eating the low grade beef from taco bell, I am upset that I even thought about making such a comparison. The other solution of course (and I believe feedlounge has flirted with) is adds. Now I don’t know about you but I am getting a little sick of the fact that ever time I turn around there is somebody trying to sell me something. No I don’t need a new mop, no I don’t have erectile disjunction, no I don’t need to lose weight with your miracle bottle of legalized crack. I just want to read my flippin friends blog.
Anyway enough said, feedlounge, in my humbled opinion is superb reader. And I am excited that this door has now been opened for everyone to walk through. Let the evolution of the internet continue.

JR

So I have been away from this thing lately. Between running/playing on the UC Davis Mens Club Water Polo team and school, I have been very busy. One of my class's ecs140b - programming languages (part 2), I have been doing some work in JR. JR is an extended java that has all sorts of commands built into it for parallel process operations. I must say at first my lack of knowledge on how multiple process sync together made me struggle with the language. But once I got over that hurtle, I must say JR has some very nice features. Creating new process's on remote hosts can be done in two lines of JR code. I am looking forward to writing a pong - win brick hybrid game in JR for my final project in the class.

Ethics of Online Gambling

So I was 'googling' my name the other day and found that a paper I wrote was one of the first links that came up. It is a paper on the ethics of online gambling for the class computer ethics in the information age. I then proceeded to google 'Ethics of Online Gambling' and my paper was FIRST on google, and that is out of 227,000 results. Ha, I have made it to the top. Not bad for a guy who has only taken 2 English class's in college.

Maven plugin for gump

I have almost completed the parsing of the maven descriptor file for all the information that gump needs. I have gone ahead and built the plug-in for gump that will allow gump to build maven projects when the --do-build command is run. The command line call still needs a little fine tuning but things are looking good. So far the only additions one must add for gump to run maven is in the module tag a type="maven" and a optional goal=" mavengoal" may be added.

ex:
〈 project href="jakarta-turbine-2/project.xml" type="maven" goal="jar"/

Finally a id config file has been added to gump/util to allow updates of known id mismatches between gump and maven.

Round and round

I am starting to round a first corner where I think I am ready to start testing my first test case. Well test one of my first test case ... failed! :( Well at least gump is listening (It was a gump error not a gump crash). Time to build up some debug code and get test underway.

Maven I read you - gump

Well after a couple hundred print statements I think I have figured out the Gump3 process for parsing workspaces. I have inserted a check for a new maven flag into the gump module file/descriptor that allows maven files to be transformed in gump project files (which I actually create). I have made a skeleton output that gump will run, although many dependences are still waiting to be identified and transposed.

All connected guess I have to work now

Like any good CS nerd I needed more. Well more for less that is. Cause like any CS student I have no money. So how do you accomplish more for less you ask (in the computing world). Well hold on i am getting there. Its simple

1) borrow
2) borrow (kinda like the first and second rules of fight club but now really)
3) synergy
4) VNC
Alright the quick rundown, I had a 1.3GHz vaio (ya I know ... I was high when I bought it) then borrowed a half working shuttle w/ an AMD 64 bit processor (and got it working) and a half working IBM thinkpad (works most of the time). Then hooked the shuttle (running fedora) to the thinkpad (running XP) over synergy. Next connected the shuttle to the vaio (running XP) over VNC. Hey 3 computers, 2 monitors, and one mouse and keyboard, I am excited. Well i got it working guess I will do some work now.

Hey look ... a blog ... quick honey grab the shotgun

Wow, can you believe it, I have been a CSE major for going on 5 years now and this is my first blog/blog post. No wonder I am taking 5 years to get out of school. Anyway I have been and will be, busy at work this summer working on my summer of code project. I am making Gump3 run maven projects! Easy now don't get that excited try and contain yourself.

_ Apache_ GUMP
~ v. 3.0-alpha-3 ~

Anyway after only working on my first open source project for about a week and a half I can say that academia has got some explaining to do. In the thousands of hours of lecture and programs I have done/sat through, academia forgot the lesson plan titled "K, all that crap aside, this is what you are really going to be doing." For which I only have never ending thanks to google for paying me to learn this valued lesson. And people say nothing is free ... hell this one is not only free but I'm gettin paid bitches! (that wasn't directed at anyone cool enough to actually read this). Well I don't want to say everything at once, don't want my first blog post to be my last, so I will go retire now to and run and then maybe a beer.