Tuesday, October 30, 2012

I Can Really Shake 'Em Now

Ok, I'm back, at least.  Still working on the Twist coding.

I took a little hiatus to deal with massive changes at my day job.  I'm picking up again with the Software Testing course on Udacity and trying (again) with Codecademy.  (I'm hopeful that finishing Douglas Crockford's book will help me avoid the wacko problems I was having on that site.)

More will follow soon - back to the keyboard!

Friday, June 1, 2012

Python Learning Links (Brief - It's Finals Time)

Someone on Udacity posted a link for a great website for debugging python code.  :D

MIT's Python Tutorial De-bugger

In related news, Udacity has also posted their course listing for the next hexemester.  Wow - talk about self-editing!  It's going to be tough to choose just one!

Udacity's Courses Starting June 25th

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

r"[a-z]+(?:-[a-z]+)?"

Wow!

I didn't have enough to study (ha!) so I started two courses on Udacity.com.  We're working on regular expressions, a topic I have heard a lot about but never really learned before.  Wow!!  I don't want to waste any more time posting, so I'll get back to studying.

Wow!

Friday, April 13, 2012

The Wonders of Modern (?) Technology

I've already complained a bit about Wally, my ancient little G4 iBook with half the keys missing.  It makes working on the projects on CodeYear more than a little challenging, so I decided today to try spending a little time on the site at our local libarary.  My local library is absolutely awesome: great collection, great inter-library borrowing and holds system, tons of fairly good computers.

Computers that only run IE 8, which won't run CodeYear.

sigh...

Friday, March 30, 2012

Intuitive(?) User Interfaces and Windows 8

According a recent article over at Ars Technica, the new "hot corners" design is so confusing to us ancient mouse-and-keyboard users (hang on, gotta get the phone, the tape on my answering machine is full) that a tutorial will automatically load the first time the OS is started.

How is that an intuitive UI?

I Did It!

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
namespace Exercise_7_4
{
    class Point
    {
        public int x;
        public int y;
        public Point(int x, int y)
        {
            this.x = x;
            this.y = y;
        }
        public void DisplayPoint()
        {
            Console.WriteLine("In DisplayPoint()");
            Console.WriteLine("Point at ({0},{1})", x, y);
        }
    }
    class Square
    {
        Point topLeft;
        Point topRight;
        Point bottomLeft;
        Point bottomRight;
        public Square(Point startingPoint, int sideLength)
        {
            this.topLeft = new Point(startingPoint.x, startingPoint.y);
            this.topRight = new Point(startingPoint.x + sideLength, startingPoint.y);
            this.bottomLeft = new Point(startingPoint.x, startingPoint.y - sideLength);
            this.bottomRight = new Point(startingPoint.x + sideLength, startingPoint.y - sideLength);
        }
        public void DisplaySquare()
        {
            Console.WriteLine("In DisplaySquare()");
            topLeft.DisplayPoint();
            topRight.DisplayPoint();
            bottomLeft.DisplayPoint();
            bottomRight.DisplayPoint();
        }
    }
   
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Point myPoint = new Point(3, 4);
            myPoint.DisplayPoint();
            Square mySquare = new Square(myPoint, 5);
            mySquare.DisplaySquare();
            //to keep console window open to view output
            Console.ReadLine();
        }
    }
}

Output:  (really basic, I know...)
In DisplayPoint()
Point at (3,4)
In DisplaySquare()
In DisplayPoint()
Point at (3,4)
In DisplayPoint()
Point at (8,4)
In DisplayPoint()
Point at (3, -1)
In DisplayPoint()
Point at (8, -1)

There are a ton of things I want to refactor (including the order in which the points are "drawn"), but I'm just so happy I got it!  :D