Micah Alpern: The life and times of CS211

Wed, 11 Dec 2002 16:52:30 GMT

When to use Affect vs Effect

I quick google search didn’t produce the answer so I thought I’d post it:

Affect is a verb

e.g. What you eat affects how much you weigh.

Effect is a noun

e.g. The effect of putting your hand through a window is your hand will be cut.

For the grammatically challenged, if you can replace the word with result and it still makes sense your using it as a noun so say effect.

~~What you eat result how much you weigh.~~ - use affect

The result of putting your hand through a window is your hand will be cut. - use effect

share and enjoy

searching far and wide

Fri, 04 Oct 2002 00:12:02 GMT

We talked about search engines in CS211 today. Got me thinking about some other good things I should read:

Wed, 04 Sep 2002 22:01:54 GMT

Some new things in Java 1.4 I need to look into: using the split method in the String class instead of StringTokenizer or using regular expressions.

Mon, 02 Sep 2002 18:13:32 GMT

As I posted before, I'm struggling to get CVS (concurrent version control) to work with Forte. Forte is Sun's free integrated development enviorment. Netbeans is Forte's open source cousin. Here's an update and some info for anyone else whose stuck on a similar problem.

CVS Server
I have the CVS server running as a service under XP. Here's the windows installer and step-by-step install docs. (a big thank you to Bo Berglund for writting the docs)

Stand Alone CVS Client
While you can access CVS repositories from within Forte you should also download the standalone windows client WinCVS in case you need to do something fancy. If you want to script WinCVS you also need to download Python .

Forte's Built-in CVS Support
For detailed directions on configuring Forte to talk to your CVS server read Jeff Skubick's excellent How-To: "The NetBeans/Forte CVS Tutorial", parts 1 & 2 (part 3 is about CVS and TagLibs and is optional). You can supliment that by refering to "NetBeans: The Definitive Guide" which is a new book by O'Reilly, the draft version of which you can currently (9/2/02) read online for free.

Here are two places I got stuck while setting things up and the solutions:

1) when adding the CVS repository in Forte, I was using a different name than the "/cvs" used in the tutorial example and forgot to include the "/". I was unable to login until I noticed the problem.

2) adding binary files: The tutorial talks about selecting Binary from the add dialog box but Forte 4 has the CVS Client Settings: User Interface Mode set to "Only Default Switches" by default and so I didn't see the option until I went into options and changed this setting to "GUI Style" I found the directions in the draft PDF of "NetBeans: A definitive guide book"

CVS
Now I just need to read more about CVS itself:

I'm going to review the free CVS book at redbean. Still digging.

Sun, 01 Sep 2002 00:28:42 GMT

just in case you didn't know...

rm -r

is not your friend. Anyone know how to redefine cygwin so it just moves stuff to the Recycling Bin? Until I get CVS working I'm going to be REALLY careful.

jar file incantations

Sat, 31 Aug 2002 23:13:08 GMT

expanding jar files

jar -xf foo.jar

creating jar files

You can create the hw0.jar file by using the following command:

prompt> jar cf hw0.jar Hello.java Exclamation.java

The "jar" program is a utility that creates and unpacks Java archive files. The "c" option indicates that we want to create a new Java archive. The "f" option specifies that we want the Java archive to be created into the file named "hw0.jar". The remaining arguments on the command line give the names of the source files to put into the archive.

One very common error is to do the following: Try typing in the following command (but don't do it if you haven't already created hw0.jar using the command above first):

prompt> jar cf Hello.java Exclamation.java

What has happened here is that the Java archive file has been created and put into a file named Hello.java. This effectively has deleted your Hello.java file!. As you can see, the first parameter to the jar command is the name of the jar file, and the remaining parameters are the files to put in it. You must be very very very careful when creating your Java archive file, because if you accidentally delete one of your java files, it's impossible to get it back.

Luckily, in this case we have already created a good archive in hw0.jar, so we can restore our Hello.java file simply by unpacking the archive:

prompt> jar xf hw0.jar

More Detailed notes on using JAR

Fri, 30 Aug 2002 18:54:26 GMT

I'm showing my friend Kevin how radio userland works.

The problem with HelloWord

Wed, 28 Aug 2002 05:55:00 GMT

"there are many reasons to view HelloWorld as the worst possible way to begin a course in object-oriented programming. At its core, an object-oriented program should consist of highly-cohesive objects sending and receiving messages to other objects."

[onjava.com]

New catagory: The life and times of CS211

Tue, 27 Aug 2002 19:50:20 GMT

This fall I'm taking CS211 here at CMU. I'm making a new sub-site to post things tips and tricks I've learned. First up on my agenda of things to figure out:

what's the best version of Emacs on Windows?
- I generally preffer using Forte but I guess I better at least try to learn this famous editor
Unit Testing
- What's the best, simple way to do it? I've done some basic test harnesses before but what does a tool like JUnit have to add?
Version Control
- I need a simple solid solution. If I end up using Forte I'll probably try to use the built in CVS support if I can get help installing it.

Oh another tip for anyone else who might be reading this (I've already done this step, but maybe I should see if a new version has been released) is to install Cygwin which provides Unix shell and command line tools in Windows.