Lost

For the last three days, I have been in the world of lost souls; the Dantesque

universe of hopelessly confused developers. How to get an embedded 

database going in NetBeans. Terribly confusing.

https://platform.netbeans.org/tutorials/nbm-10-top-apis.html

LaceOnLace

Elegant_E

 

Looking to rhe next holiday event - Valentine's - some might feel

the need to bring a slight correction to their weigth. I, for one, own a

uper-end glass scale that gives readings in metric, with one decimal.

Which is all very fine to follow day-to day progress, but my inner knowledge of

what weight means is in pounds. It could be the diffrence between

jeans or sweat pants, what bra is more comfortable, general sweater

morphology: knowledge is power!   Having downloaded NetBeans for java

yesterday, my first project will be the creation of a simple kilos to pounds

converter widget, for morning use.

For the record, Windows 8.1 offers a super converter as part of calculator

functionality. Below is yesterday's reading, in elephant weight. I get it,

Microsoft, working on those thunder thighs is a good thing! ( I will be using

1 kilo = 2.2046 pounds).

 

  

 

 

 

https://netbeans.org/kb/docs/java/quickstart-gui.html

NetLogo(Wilensky)

I’m not sure what to make of this; it is the NetLogo modelling tool

from NorthWestern University, and I am running the Party example.

I get to set the number of people, the number of groups, and the tolerance of individuals

of each sex for the presence of the other sex in their group. If that tolerance

level is exceeded on any turn, the individuals affected change groups on the next turn.

After a time, same sex groups may form. 

 

One very striking aspect of the exercise is that - for all initial descriptions I tested - the
40% model quickly jammed in a same-sex groups pattern. Because the instructions are to
move when tolerance is exceeded, we know that the simulation had ended.
What if there had been a portion of individuals seeking out the opposite sex at the
same time; that would have been an entirely different story.

This points to an obvious feature of modelling: the computer
is doing tedious calculations in a chiffy, but no more. It is the conditions that rule.

So the first aspect to look at in dealing with a model is being clear on the conditions.
In a complex model, the length of a run can be primordial: who knows when something
minor can kick in. Nothing less than the beginning of the universe is at issue here. Pretty
awesome...

 

Little App

Needs more functionality!

T or F

The example below shows - in a very graphic fashion - the use of the
new word in OOP. The truth value being tested is not the sameness of the
character strings, but the equivalence in memory allocation. Our string friend
Hello with the new designation resides in a different place in memory.

source: Développez.com

Bing

Having worked hard on something makes it difficult to give up.

I am  afraid that this is what poor Windows 8 is up against. The all-knowing

power user - and after x yearsof struggle on the computer, I count myself among these -

comes to cherish his own hard-won little service world. Anything new seems to be trying to

sell one one's own product. A case in point, weather information.

I happen to live in a climatically diverse area, where the winters can be brutal and the

summers treacherous. I have developed routines for following snow storms and cold snaps

from California and the Artic, and hurricanes from Florida and Africa. I use the weather

services of Canada, the US and various European countries, not to mention historical

statistics, hourly changes and satellite maps. I am a weather taxi driver.

If I look at that limp tile on the Windows 8.1 desktop of my non-touch screen computer,

telling the temp in Montreal while I live 20 miles south in an entirely different hydraulic

system, well la-di-da. I had a small widget on my Windows 7 desktop that also showed me

Montreal - which is useful because that is where my child lives and I worry, and I might want

to go there on occasion - but hey, I also had the Weather Channel widget to St-Jean, with

hourly, 5 day, 14 day and a link to the site. Which I was hesitating to set up again because it

blocks Adobe updates and needs to be uninstalled, reinstalled...A power user, as I said. But

at least, that was morning coffee weather.

So putting pride aside, I decided this morning to see what Bing Weather could do for me

which I was pretty sure - once I had clawed my way up the learning curve - would be

awesomely complete. I wasn't disappointed. Now can Bing weather keep my feet dry? C'est à

voir!

 

SameOld

http://www.java-made-easy.com/

 

I just add another class from src, making sure to include a main method.

I also import a scanner by right clic, source, organize imports when I want

user input.

Java One

Ran my first Java program. The Java environment is modular; that is the whole secret.
I should speed along once I get the hang of it. A long day ahead!

China

Le Monde has been telling the story: the Chinese economy is growing by leaps and bounds,
apparently impervious to the problems of the world economy. Not to be overlooked: the
so-called demographic dividend. While the population is aging in the developed world, that of China is increasing for the labour force. China is expected to become the leading world economic power in 2016.

Below, IMF numbers for growth.

Hangover 3

Watched Hangover 3 last night. Loved it; I didn’t laugh, I howled. «I am also

dyslexic’; funny stuff.

Why am I in the minority, here. The folks at Rotten Tomatoes canned it: 19 out of 100.

Those who did like it praised the daring foray into dark territory. WTF are they talking

about.

Younger critics get tangled in the plot line, which seems less clean than a bachelor party

and wedding reception gone unhinged. In point of fact - and the New Yorker magazine have 

writen about this - the fact that marriage as an institution is loosing ground is an upset for literature, 

exploring since Jane Austen  people making good or bad marriages. This episode as well ends 

in a marriage and it is the glaring discrepancy between this and the cool tone of the action that 

preceeded that is jarring and ironic. This crazy act needs to be explained.

The plot line does center on Allan, off his meds. But that is the central conceit of the whole trilogy: 

Allan’s ability to say the precise contrary to what the others expect or

believe is what drives the action and rights the world. It is the language of childhood,

and he marries babyhood. The plot on his story runs backwards.

John Goodman is a wonderful old-school vilain. He could have been better served with less 

plot-explanatory lines. The Chow character is from another timeline: he gets to go

to the wedding, something of an extra Muskateer. ‘I could be a good wife to you.’ Funny!

So I loved it, down to Bradley Cooper who has the most seductive voice in media and

runs like a dancer. Even the soundtrack was sick, tunes from 2009, year of the initial installement. 

Family fun for everybody except the children.

Almodovar

Can't find the movie, but the trailer is OK.

Mouvement

This lovely image - an objet trouvé on the Web -  is of the underside of a bridge in Texas, obviously taken in summertime. Sometimes this kind of dreaming is more powerful than looking at beaches in the Pacific - where I am not going - but

whose feeling tone I will visit again next summer. In any event, it is the new wallpaper on my laptop.

Indeed, couldn’t even make it to Tim’s for coffee, this morning. It wasn’t brutally cold out, a modest -16 C, but windy enough to make me feel like taking chances, and running across that boulevard I have to cross perhaps prematurely. The ice is invisible, and the road maintenance unsure at this point. 

I did make a new year’s resolution this year: I am not weighing myself till February.There’s one I am going to stick with. I took a long walk last Sunday morning in that interregnum of thaw we enjoyed and remembered just how wonderful moving about 

and breathing fresh air can make one feel. Surely this is one of the mechanisms at work in the onset of the more extreme forms of obesity: the human animal, deprived of the pleasures of roaming for whatever reason, goes for the daily dose of feel-good substances from brain party food. And ends up incapacitated. 

Bottom line: no more preachy exercise for weight control. That is a  syllogism.

Mouvement is pleasure.

Polar Vortex

http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2014/jan/06/polar-vortex-record-low-interactive

Choices