Bypassing the hatred I feel on calling the film by its name (it will always be Northern Lights to me). The annoyance I felt about this article is summed up by the following quote:

The three-part series culminates in an epic battle in which God dies - at the hand of a child.

Not true. Just not true in the least bit. Yes God dies, but not at the hands of our heroine, more in the arms of our heroine. She is helping him, and doesn’t even know that this angel, is actually God.

Little by little I have noticed the standards of BBC news (especially their website falling), sentences that don’t make sense, spelling mistakes, inaccuracies, were they always this bad? or do I compare the BBC to a rose-tinted version of the BBC, that they never were?

There is also the changes to the performance of the drawing code - thanks to Mats.

Thanks to all that have been using it so far, and helping me make it better!!

Laurenxx

Why do I have to test all of the JButton size methods .setSize() .setMinimumSize() .setMaximumSize() to find out that the only one that makes any difference to the actual visual size of the JButton is .setPrefferedSize()? Is it just me or does having preferred in the method title not suggest that this value may or may not be used, it certainly gives me no inclination that this is the only method which will make my button visible.

My second gripe with the defaults was actually caused by defaults set by the Apple Look & Feel. I noticed by pure chance when debugging that my paint method in ButtonUI was getting called, like, all the time.

Thanks to Apple, and in a way I am actually being non-sarcastic, their L&F gives a “default capable” button periodic events to repaint. In this way you get calls which allow you to create a button that pulsates. It’s fantastic that Apple has given this capability for free, saving anyone who wants a pulsating button from spawning another thread to send the periodic repaint messages, and all the joys that come with handling your own threads in Java.

However how often does one actually want a pulsating button?

I put it to you that it is way more probable that someone wants to create a button that does very little by the way of custom drawing, and actually just wants button functionality that doesn’t hideously cripple any application that uses it.

So fantastic functionality, but can anyone tell me why setDefaultCapable() isn’t set false by default?

Here you can see the difference between JTunesTable and JTable, maybe I’m biased - but mine looks so much better!

If you find this source code useful or have any hints on how to make it better feel free to leave me a comment.

You can download JTunesTable from here or look at my other source code.

Happy SWINGing
Lauren

UPDATE: I have now updated the JTunesTable classes, to fix rendering issues when repainting on Windows. It should now rendering just as well, in appearance at least, on Windows and MacOSX.

UPDATE: For those wishing to know how to use a jar in Eclipse. Right click on your current project, select “Build Path…” from the menu, then select “Add External Archives…”. You should then be given a file browser, browse to the jar you wish to add and select it. Press Ok. Hey presto you should get the shiny goodness of JTunesTable on ctrl+space!!

The progress I’ve had is really quite amazing for my first project, however my main sticking point has been the ui. I won’t lie, I did a massive refactoring of my code just so I could feel like I had made some progress after weeks of trying to get a JTree to display the way I wanted it to.

My problem being that after working on a Mac for the past 6 months and creating an app based on iTunes data, Java’s user interface just didn’t look as good as I wanted it to. So I decided to write my own Java table view to fix this problem, unsurprisingly named JTunesTable.

Finally I’ve turned a corner with Java SWING. I’ve made it do something pretty and I’m dead proud of it

So in true Matt Gemmell stylee I am going to release the source for all to take a look at, use and comment on, some time in the next week or so.

In the mean time here’s a screenshot of
JTunesTable.

Also just remembered went to the last McFly concert last week through in Glasgow, which was also not as good as previous concerts, but good all the same. Watch out for “Star Girl” it unfortunately gets stuck in your head!!!

Anyway back to my lack of things to do, because I am working but still have a fair amount of time on my hands has really given me time to think about the sort of stuff I want to develop for myself. Its something I have never spent time on myself, I have never written a piece of code that wasn’t for an assignment, for a grade on a piece of paper. Although I don’t think is particularly a problem for me, how much could it hurt to try? I spent a bit of time thinking about what I could do.

• I could spend the time improving this website, but what for? I barely ever write posts! As you may have noticed…
• I could do nothing in particular but write code that helps me learn the new technologies at work

But all that to me sounds a little pointless, I know I would never do something unless I had something personal invested in it. I finally started with an idea I’ve had since I first got my iBook back in May.

When I converted to the Mac I lost a few things that I do actually miss, the biggest of which being my iTunes play count.

I guess this will need some explaining, ever since I have had a digital music player, the first being Windows Media Player. I have always been a big fan of keeping track of what my fave tunes were, based on the undisputable facts of a play count. I used to spend hours (this is unfortunately true) rearranging the tracks in my fave playlists manually so that the tracks were in order of highest play count.

One of the main reasons I switched to iTunes was the fact that by a single click I could reorder any playlist by play count order. However by switching my digital music player to iTunes on Windows I lost all that precious play count information - years of work!!!!

In May when I transferred my music collection from iTunes (Windows) to iTunes (Mac) I was dismayed that again I had lost all this information. It seems to me that this problem doesn’t need to be a problem at all, as I can write code that solves this myself!

It is this problem that I aim to solve. The ability to transfer play count data between the two platforms of iTunes.

If there is an already an easy way to solve this then feel free to post a comment and let me know, but to me this is a great project that I will work on irregardless. Making a wee bit of progress each day makes me feel, so far, that I haven’t wasted my non working hours.

Maybe one day when I finish this project I’ll put up and let folks look at it. Decided that the nature of the idea, being a port of content between Windows and Mac, that I would do it in Java and make it a bit more generic.

See you around folks, for once I make no apologies about the geek content of my post…

Lauren xx

Up until recently I have never owned a gaming console, either hand-held or otherwise. The little gaming I have done has been limited to PC Games, The Sims and Age of Empires (2 & 3).

However my life has now been completely taken over by “Animal Crossing : Wild World” for the Nintendo DS. It’s amazing, Matt and I both play and discuss strategies regularly. It has even taken over my study breaks, I don’t even tend to watch Neighbours at lunch time anymore….

It is a truly amazing game though, the picures below show me and Matt in Matt’s town (unsurprisingly called “Aceville”) in his house.

and again at a different angle….

The sunglasses and hat Matt is wearing are presents from me, although I never suggested he wore them at the same time, as that just looks plain stupid And yes even coming from me with pink hair I think that is fair.

It’s amazing how obsessed we have both become with this game in such a short period of time! Unfortunately this new craze had to begin the week before my first final exam (3/5/2006 - Enterprise Computing - arrgh)!

Till next time,

Lauren (from CuteTown) xxx

On other updates, I have finished my fourth year project. The Dynamic Graphing System is called LDG (Lauren’s Dynamic Graphing System) because it was the placeholder name used in the report, and I never got round to changing it.

I have been offered some summer work at the University, depending on funding, to try and fix the (minor) bugs in LDG so it can be released for research purposes, maybe I’ll change the name to something more interesting then.

Apart from that I have no other firm updates to make, apart from the fact that you can tell it is now officially exam time, as the sun is shining in Glasgow - bloody typical!!

Laurenxxx

At the moment I am calling Lauren’s Dynamic Graphing System, but I really need a good name, a well worded acronym would be cool but I just can’t come up with anything.

So if you’ve got any good ideas they would be very much appreciated, in comments please.

Lauren xxx

After trying to pull, cut and bash them apart, I thought we should just defrost all the pieces and leave it at that, but Matt unable to let the frozen chicken beat him, tried some more, and increasingly wacky, ideas.

• Hitting the frozen chicken with a hammer.
• Trying to warm it up enough to allow him to pull it apart - but not with the microwave, as any sane person would, but with my hairdryer.

Never a dull day in the life of Lauren and Matt (and an extra special treat cause today it’s our 15 month anniversary, love you honey ), and by the way over 45 minutes later he’s still angry with that chicken.

Till next time,

Lauren xxx