Tuesday, February 17, 2009

SwingWorker

While researching my first algorithm I came across SwingWorker which is my first step I've taken into threaded applications.

A summary of SwingWorker:
SwingWorker is designed for situations where you need to have a long running task run in the background thread and provide updates to the User Interface when done, or still processing.

Any subclass of SwingWorker must implement the doInBackground() method to perform the background computation.

The workflow of SwingWorker:
1. Current thread
The Execute() method is called on this thread.
(schedules the SwingWorker on the worker thread)
2. Worker Thread
The doInBackground() method is called.
3. Event Dispatch Thread
Invokes the process() and done() methods here and notifies and PorpertyChangeListeners on this thread.

Use at work:
We are using the SwingWorker to make a calculation that deals with the rendering of the graphics which does take some time, so that is why SwingWorker was used in this case.

Just something I learned.
Here is the javadoc
https://swingworker.dev.java.net/nonav/javadoc/index.html

Thursday, February 12, 2009

New Task

So my boss is letting me try a different type of work...

Recently at work I've been "hacking" so they call it, just writing code to do a certain thing (which I still need work on). But now I am going to start looking into algorithms and analyzing outputs from different types of algorithms.  I got an "A" in my data structures and algorithms class so maybe algorithms is what I might be interested in.

My approach is going to be research the two data sets first, before even looking at the algorithms, then look at the implementations.

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Just passing...

I noticed when i submitted my code the other day that my habits from school carried over to my work. In school it was always, "just get it working." Now at work it's not to just get your program working, it's catching every little thing that could possibly be wrong.  You have to test everything to make sure that your code is functional.  I have to try break this habit of just getting my programs to work.  It should be simple but it just something i learned about real life application versus classroom applications.

Monday, February 2, 2009

Anything

My life is slowly moving from reality to living on the net...
I began to realize this when I noticed that I am on my computer for pretty much as long as I am awake during the day. I wonder where it'll take me?

I recently hit another block in my work.
I was trying to reuse a previous algorithm that I had used before and it had failed. Using my resources I found an alternative way to do the task that I had wanted. I think that using your resources is a key point in learning new things as well as recognizing your flaws.
In this case I learned something new about dealing with views of applications.  I was trying to modify a screen position and the only way was to change it and convert it back using the view. This did not work teaching me about the view of an application.

Another thing is that we are beginning to work on a unix environment at school.  The problems that I had last month with my previous blog (class path) are helping me with the unix environment.  Work and school are currently working together to constantly teach me new things.

Work at restaurant...Over it.