Tag: java

Contracting Job at Mercury

In February I was contacted by Mercury, a company that I worked for five years ago, about helping them with a project. The contract would last three months and offered good pay. They caught me at a good time and I agreed to take the job, starting right after we got back from PAX East.

Beyond saying that it was not a government contract and involved writing a distributed message processing system in Java, I don’t really have anything interesting to say about the job itself. It was better than many jobs that I have had (except for the commute).

I was surprised by how easily I switched back into the work routine. It made me notice some of the things that are “hard” about being retired. Not that I am complaining about being retired – it is truly a luxury. Continue reading “Contracting Job at Mercury”

Fair Dice Roller

I have finished an HTML/javascript version of the fair dice roller. The fair die roller makes a die or dice less random by tweaking the probability of each roll so that the rolls come up in the correct ratios sooner. Check it out here. Or look here for a lot more detail about what this app does.

Continue reading “Fair Dice Roller”

Practice Log – Android version

I have been using the PracticeLog for a little over a year now and have found it to be very useful. However, there are several features that I never use:

  1. The list of pieces that I am practicing. This would be nice to keep up to date, but even with the “Same as Yesterday” button, I just don’t have the motivation to keep entering the data.
  2. The stopwatch and countdown. I haven’t been practicing in the same room as the computer, so it is not handy to have to turn on the computer both before and after practice time. Instead I have been using a stopwatch on my phone, or just my watch to time the practice and then separately enter the time.

I would like to use my Android phone, which I usually have on me, to record the practice time. To do that, I am going to create a web database and php accessors so that I can load and update practice time from the phone or computer. While doing this conversion, I am going to make a few changes:

  1. Remove the list of pieces practiced per day. It would make the database more complex and I never use the feature.
  2. Make the database multi-user. This will allow me to publish the application and Android app. I am not sure if that will ever happen, but the software has been useful for me, so it might be appreciated by others too.

This will be the first time I have made a multi-user web database, so I am debating how to handle security. I want each user to only have access to their own data, but don’t want the overhead of encrypting all the data.

After my experience with the DurationAlarm application, I suspect that the Android app will take most of the time. But all of the GUI elements that I will need are built in.

Duration Alarm

I have had an Android phone for a while now, and one of the reasons that I picked that particular phone was so that I could create my own applications without going through a central marketplace. Until now, I have never actually done it. The Android marketplace has had all the utilities and apps that I have wanted. But I’ve decided that I want to learn how to write software for Android and there is an app that I have always vaguely wanted and haven’t found.

The app is a duration based alarm. This is a common way to set an alarm for a nap, but I would like to use the same system for an over-night alarm. Since I don’t have a day job, I don’t have to get up at any particular time, but I’d like to limit my sleep to the amount of time I need.

The application is simple enough to be a good problem to learn Android development with.

I have had bad experiences with Java and eclipse in the past, so I’ve decided to do all my Android development in a virtual machine. I used Oracle’s Virtual Box and an old copy of windows XP. While the Virtual Box software is nice (especially since it is free), this took a lot longer than I had expected. I had forgotten how old windows XP is and I spent hours installing updates. Installing eclipse and the android SDK went fairly smoothly and once installed, I was able to hook up my phone and run a sample app through the VM.

The Android SDK documentation is good, and the sample apps provide a lot of examples to follow and I was able to make quick progress on my program. The GUI builder is not bad, but I spent half the time editing the XML directly anyway. The hardest part was the lifecycle. It takes a while to get used to the idea that your program can be killed and re-started with very little notification.

The app took about three days of me working on and off. I was impressed by the Intent system which allowed me to easily use the built in alarm software to handle the alarm part while my app just does alarm scheduling. I was least impressed with the resource ID system and java in general. I have always disliked java and this project reminded me of all the ways that java makes my code ugly and my coding sloppy. There may be a better way to do this, but the default mode for the resource ID system makes all the GUI elements into global variables.

I used the local database to save off the user’s last alarm duration. Once I got used to it, that is a very convenient system. Much like what is built into C#.

I have no plans to put the completed app on the Android Market. It works fine, but I have no desire to test it on other phone models.