MarbleMice.com

I finally got round to hooking in the up my parser into SpiderSynth. The equation it uses is currently hard coded so I  have quite a bit of work to do on the infrastructure to actually get it hooked in. Then I really have to go to work on the UI. I think I am procrastinating on this a little bit as I am not exactly sure on how to lay this out. Either way it is quite a few week off before I get an sample release out to people who use it.

Well I will worry about the UI once I get there for now i have to think about the infrastructure and probably refactor parts of it until it is easy to add the code I want.

So I am coding away in Scala writing a few example programs to help develop my understanding and it occurs to me that Scala is a much nicer language than Java. Ignore all the functional side of things and treat it as a object orientated language and you still have a nice language to code in. Given it can use all java libraries you loose practically nothing and gain so much. Once you start to factor in the functional stuff things start to get better, although that is the area I am still getting my head round. Well the whole formulating things with map and filter is where I come unstuck.

Ok no-one is going to do a large job in Scala until the tooling is there, plugins for IDEs and so on, but once they get up to a certain standard then Scala could just be treated as a nicer java. Traits really appeal to me as it solves an annoyance I had with Java that C++ did not have.

Just a thinking out loud post.

Just a quick update on what I have been working on. The expression parser is fully working and tested ready to generate the values for any function i care to create. I developed it as a separate project but decide for ease i would just move it into the SpiderSynth code base.

Next task it to hook it up to the wave forms so i can use a custom wave form. After that the tricky part will be building an easy to use UI for this thing. I really don’t want to have people typing in equations something much more visual is needed.

I flipped back to using Windows Live writer for my blogging. The latest version seems to be a litle faster on my laptop. The speed was the one of putting thing about Live Writer, previously it could not keep up with my typing and I am not exactly a fast at typing.

This is a book about why we run – you might have been able to get that from the title! Bernd Hienrich has created an easy to read book that takes the approach of looking at various animals and how they have evolved to be either endurance runners/flyers or sprinters. He makes continuous references to humans to help keep it in context. While discussing these fascinating animal adaptations to their environment he explores his own desire to run, his personal history, along with his training to run his first ultra-marathon.

It is not as motivational as say survival of the fittest by Mike Stroud but it is a very enjoyable read, I certainly had not appreciated how in tune camels are with their environment.

Well worth reading.

I am not sure my brain was working when I first wanted to create a multidimensional array in Scala. I looked at all Array java docs and say there were some constructors that let you set the size of each dimension. The code would just not compile. Eventually it clicked what I needed to do. To create a 2 dimensional array in Scala you do this

val array = new Array[Array[Int]](10,10)

I was not putting the nested Array in some reason, moment of idiotic confusion or something. Oh this code create a two dimensional array of ints with each dimension containing 10 Ints if you see what I mean.

Anyway I am happy to blog about my stupidity just so it can be picked up by search engines and perhaps help someone else out with this problem.