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yoinked from CNet: The World Map of Happiness. apparently denmark is the place to be, followed by switzerland and austria.
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so i spent a few hours this morning adding a feature to XNJB so that i could export a list of music currently on my zen micro. now i can figure out which music i've deleted off my micro because it sucked too much, and update my laptop collection accordingly.
anyway, the main point is that it was my first time programming in objective-c using xcode. it's not something i'm looking forward to doing again. i don't particularly like the smalltalk-ish syntax of objective-c, and although xcode is nice in terms of features, i don't like the multiple code windows floating all over the place. i also don't like the way the code windows scroll - when you reach the bottom/top of the visible area, it'll scroll by half a page. sounds normal, but for some reason it confuses me in practice and i keep losing my cursor. it also took me a while to figure out how the GUI editor worked, although once i figured it out, using it was pretty painless.
if i do program specifically for the mac later on, it'll definitely be in java, using the java-cocoa bindings. unfortunately, since apple has deprecated these bindings in leopard onwards, that just restricts options even further. i guess i'll stick to non-platform-specific java :)
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so i expanded my search for courses to take in the winter to include courses at laurier, and that still didn't help. there was only one course that i kind of felt like taking, but that's offered in the fall, not the winter. arrggh. i think i'm down to hopping through ratemyprofessors.com to find a good professor and then find a course they're teaching in the winter, and then selecting the ones with the least workloads of those. hm.. this sounds like it could be automated. well, the first part, anyway. :)
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for those of you into ebooks, the world eBook fair has free downloads of their entire collection until august 4. check it out at http://worldebookfair.com/.
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so, another term is coming to a close. classes are over, exams are next week. my last exam is on the 10th, and then i'll be done 4A (assuming i pass). w00t! i'm trying to find courses for next term, which is turning out to be harder than i expected. as previously mentioned, i'm planning on taking real-time and compilers along with the core SE3 course.
seeing as both real-time and compilers are full-time courses, and i need to take at least 5 courses to remain enrolled in engineering, i need to find to the easiest two courses at UW to fill those last two slots. by "easiest", of course, i mean "least time-consuming". i've already taken econ 101 and 102, as well as sci 206, so those are all ruled out. anybody have any other ideas? i was poking around the course descriptions and noticed some really odd courses, such as Ireland Before the Famine, which of course would not be complete without Ireland After the Famine. does anybody actually take these courses?
anyway, in other news, slipstream (where i'll be co-op'ing in the fall) got bought out by RIM a few weeks ago, which is pretty exciting. slipstream is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of RIM, so i'm not exactly sure how that's going to change operating procedures. anyway, i was pretty happy at RIM for my first two co-op work terms, so i figure i won't really have a problem regardless of which company's culture dominates. looking forward to next term.. :)
also, i finally managed to find housing for next term. yay for having a place to live.. although it's kind of far from where i'll be working so i'll probably end up getting a bike.
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a humourous article on silver bullets, or lack thereof:
Software Development Amidst the Whiz of Silver Bullets...
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something that's annoyed for a few years now is HTML. HTML has been obsolete for a while, but nobody's bothered to put it out of it's misery. XHTML doesn't really improve the situation, since even though it's now a subset of XML, it still doesn't address the fundamental problem of HTML: content is mixed with layout, making it near-impossible to deal with programatically. in it's current form, XHTML relies entirely on web developers to separate the content from the layout information using CSS.. the problem is that most web developers don't do this. projects like the semantic web are helping, but they're not addressing this problem either. the semantic web is mostly going for the data-and-only-data approach, which will eventually co-exist with the current disaster that is HTML.
what i'd like to have is a language that allows the description of the content of web pages, but does not allow any layout information whatsoever. it would still have things like images and links and (data) tables, but instead of prescribing layout information, the language would allow you to express the semantic relationship between the items, and it would be up to the browser to render the page according to the user's preferences. There might be an optional layout recommendation attached to the page (in a separate file altogether), but the browser would not be required to follow that. this would have the additional advantage of working on any device - for example, cellphones could render the page in a way that would be easy for mobile users. while it would look completely different from a desktop rendering of the page, it would still be fully compliant with the language specification.
does anybody know of a project out there that's working on something like this? there's some other things i'd like the language to be able to do as well, but i'll save those for later..
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so i was looking at the new stuff in mustang (java 6.0), which is currently in beta 2 and is supposedly going to be released this fall. a lot of it seems geared towards web services stuff, which is kind of cool, i guess. it makes it really easy to distribute applications geographically, since you can turn blocks of code into web services pretty much trivially, and then have other blocks of code running on different machines use those services. nifty.
the other thing that i think is cool is that javaDB (based on apache derby, based on ibm's cloudscape) is going to come as part of the SDK, so you have access to a lightweight database without having to set up mysql or some other database. what's really stupid is that apparently it's not included in the JRE, so it's gonna make deployment of javaDB-dependent apps more messy. bah.
the only other thing on the top-10 new features list that i care about is the scripting framework. from what i understand, this allows you to write code in some scripting language (python, ruby, etc.) and mix it in with the java code. i'm not fully clear on the details of this, but from what i gather, it's basically targeted at J2EE webapps, so you can mix your servlets with PHP (or other) code. it could be useful if done properly, but i'm concerned that they're trying to do too much with this. ah well.
other stuff in mustang is all the expected stuff: improved UI with better swing widgets and OS integration, better compiler and debug support (surprisingly, even java 5 comes with a whole set of monitoring tools that i had no idea about), and better security.
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for those of you in waterloo, an inconvenient truth is playing at the princess cinema now, so go see it. for those of you not in waterloo, find someplace it's playing and go see it. seeing as how even the national research council has recently admitted that human activity has caused the earth to heat up a bunch, there's gotta be something to global warming.
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opera 9's out now, so all you non-opera users should give it a shot.. even eWeek liked it, and that's gotta be worth something.. maybe.
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