Then, she decides to try inventing a new mode of transportation: the motorcycle.  The first iteration proves a disappointment with the motor being way too weak.  The next iteration proves unsatisfactory when she goes flying along the tracks—so fast, in fact, that the movie’s CGI renderer can’t even keep up with her.  (Perhaps that was the intended effect to show just how fast she was going, you see.)

But why was she doing all of this inventing at night?

Then, it was discovered that Keon Park wasn’t historically a main part of the Epping line. It used to be a goods dock located to the north of the main line (because magically the Epping line ran from west to east now) with an extra line tacked onto the east side (which was originally a terminus) to allow through passenger trains.

And then Reservoir was redeveloped into two different stations—one in Bundoora, perhaps?  And some massive residential building had its ground floor gutted to make room for the station concourse.  Classy.

What does it all mean, Basil?  Why can’t my dreams just make sense?

Our first assignment for this subject required us to use Perl to build an online job agency (the original specification in Word format is available).  I had an absolute ball working on this, and the appreciation that I developed for Perl is why I sought employment at realestate.com.au for my internship—which was ultimately life-changing.

After this assignment was finished I left it online, and eventually it got spidered by Google.  Some time later I received a cease-and-desist order from the owner of the (now defunct) JobSurge.com service.  Evidently he was concerned about me being a professional contender or something.  I didn’t know whether to be extraordinarily flattered or question the guy’s sanity.

Online demo

Bash the demo around as much as you like.  You are more than welcome to create accounts, but some username/password pairs already exist if you’re lazy:

• centrelink/alexpeters (company)
• zikaiq/123456 (company)
• apeters/alexpeters (job seeker)
• sipsas/123456 (job seeker)

Source code

Download a ZIP of the source code if you’re interested, but heed the following warnings:

• This is not how I would do it now. I wrote this code in 2005 as a first-year uni student.  I’ve been a full-time Perl programmer since the end of 2006.  I post the code here for nostalgia and not as a demonstration of my professional abilities.
• This is not how you should do it now. Most Perl web applications born before 2006 probably look like this (which might be why Perl got dumped for PHP in future incarnations of this subject).  These days frameworks like Catalyst, Template Toolkit and DBIx::Class exist to make things a lot more manageable.  My code will teach you Perl syntax, but that’s about it.  Good Perl programmers don’t mix HTML and application logic, write data to flat files or directly manipulate cookies!

I’m actually half-tempted to re-write this as a Catalyst application just to observe the difference.  I’d be much less averse to that being used as a learning example.

I built this using OpenOffice.org Draw.  Lost Property Woman™ is a randomly generated face from monoface.  I wanted something attention-getting enough that people would notice it stuck to the wall rather than just write it off as one more meaningless poster out the corner of their eye.

They seem to be working too—people are coming to collect their lost property.

The people in the Design labs (who also seem to be the source of most of our lost property) seemed to be the most interested by the posters as I was putting them up.  They were all rather bubbly and excited as they gathered around the pile, which amused me quite a bit.  Apparently the posters in those labs have since been defaced and had to be pulled down.  Oh, those crazy Design students.

• Highly recommended reading on the JCF

—and if you love Perl’s arrays and hashes (or Python’s lists and dictionaries) as much as I do, you’ll surely fall hard for the JCF like I did.  One thing that I wish I realised earlier though: TreeSets can’t contain two items where item1.compareTo(item2) == 0, even if !item1.equals(item2).  So watch out there or you’ll be chasing your tail for hours like I was.

I’ve also discovered that I really like Java GUI programming.  Our Software Engineering 1B assignment requires us to code a decent batch of GUIs and custom controls:

Screen shot of one dialogue from our Software Engineering 1B assignment

It seems that GUIs can get much prettier and much more functional once you understand how to use GridBagLayouts; if you’re stuck doing Java GUIs then learning to use them is probably quite worth the effort.  More functional? Yes indeed—a fully resizable dialogue is much more functional than one with a hard-coded size, and GridBagLayout seems to support this quite nicely.

I also finally sat down and worked out how to use Java’s serialisation.  How I wish I took the time to do this earlier, especially before this semester started—coding your own data loading and saving routines is so mundane (and evidently completely unnecessary).  Oh well.

Anyway, I’m now convinced that when I get around to working on some of the extracurricular projects that I have in mind (if ever), Java will be the perfect weapon of choice.

• Download (768KB Ogg Vorbis)

It’s nowhere near complete (but then I never complete any of these).  It needs another track on top of what’s already there I think, but I can’t decide on a melody or an instrument and I really, really need to get to bed.

Now imagine my relief when I found out for sure that I did manage to just pass that hurdle.  Looks like I’ll be sticking around as a Software Engineer after all.

Things in general are slowly starting to look up again.  I finally got all of my new equipment today, so I can finally start fiddling around seriously with it.  To my delight I found that I can assemble stuff on the synth itself—which led to this:

• Download (512KB Ogg Vorbis)

As unpolished as it is right now, I’m particularly proud of this small piece because I actually had to—and actually managed to—play all the notes myself (as opposed to typing or clicking them into software, which is all I’ve been able to do up to this point).  On the other hand, if I were to transfer this to the computer and further manipulate it there, I could fix up the volume levels a bit and do some other mastering…