Programming

Finally done with all the 100 problems listed on 4clojure.com so far :-). When new problems appears there, I will probably do them when I have some time to kill, but I will not post my solutions here any more. If I found interesting programming exercises, I may submit to 4clojure as well. Continue reading »

For someone without previous Lisp experience, the hardest part of learning Clojure programming seems to be the functional way of doing things. It is like math, one really needs to do some exercises in order to master it. At this point, 4clojure.com seems to be the best place for getting such exercises. It has a lot of problems for new clojurians to solve. These problems ask one to fill in the blank __ so the given expressions are true. To give a little challenge, some clojure built-in functions are forbidden to use for some problems. New problems are added from time to time on the site, so it surely can keep me entertained for a while. Continue reading »

I recently started to learn clojure programming. It is an interesting experience. Ever since I learned computer programming almost 20 years ago, in Pascal, on a VAX minicomputer terminal, I have not experienced this newbie sensation with a computer language. The sense of excitement and novelty is high, and the eagerness to put the language to use is higher still. So for my new project at work, I am doing it with clojure.

This is a visual analytics project, and the visual part will be on the Web. It amazes me how much work has already been done for the Web using this 3 years old language. So it should be easy for me to get started. Here's what I have so far.

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I hate xml configuation files. They look awful. As a result, they can be very time-consuming to write, and are very error-prone. There's no type-safty checking whatsoever. I would rather keep configurations within my Java source code. After all, we programmers are the only people looking at these configurations, why create trouble for ourselves? Luckily, with annotation support in Java, we can now completely do away with xml files for developing Web applications. Here is my recent experience integrating Spring framework with DWR on a Jetty sever.

Spring Continue reading »

Modularized software system design is often a good idea. Maven is the new software build system that is purported to be better than ant. For my new project, I want to create a maven build consisting of multiple modules. To do this, and let Eclipse treats these modules as parts of a single Eclipse project, I used the following procedure.

First create the top level maven project, which will be the container of the modules. Our top level maven project is called "cool".

I am writing a Java program to run psychology experiments. Since this is a generic program that may be configured for running some reaction time (RT) experiments, I am worried about the time resolution of Java. It turns out that I don't need to worry too much, except on Windows. On Linux, one millisecond time resolution can be consistently achieved using either System.currentTimeMillis() or System.nanoTime() call. Continue reading »

These day I write Java programs on my local machine and then move them to a Linux server to run experiments. This routine works fine so far. However, when I ran one of the progams, which involves coping one file from one directory to another, I kept on the following error message:

Some people may wonder why would anyone want to do this? Continue reading »

I have been using Borland programming environment since 1994, beginning with its Turbo C 2.0, then Borland C++, and now JBuilder. This company has always produced programmer friendly products. Comparing with other products, Borland's offering are always the most natural, and the easiest to get the job done. At least to me. Well, I mostly do Java programming these days. I have used all sorts of Java IDEs over the years. VisualCafe, VisualAge, NetBean, Eclipse, and so on. At the end, I still decided to settle on the tried -and-true Borland product: JBuilder.