So Christmas has once again been and gone, leaving credit debt at an all new high, etc etc. This year we celebrated with dinner at Michele's sisters on Christmas eve, and then lunch on Christmas day at my mum's house. A quiet one, for a change.

I spent this afternoon setting up and beautifying Gallery to give me somewhere convenient to shove photos. I did have an old piece of code that I used to use, but there was a large effort factor in getting things to show in the desired order (due to the nature of where it was derived from). It's pretty neat. Check it out.

It's that time of year again - Annual Leave! In this case it's forced leave, as Curtin closes over the Christmas break, but at least it makes up for the lack of public holidays.

Ironically, I've done more programming so while on leave than I have while working at Curtin - as a Systems Programmer no less. That's a very sad state of affairs :P I decided that it might be an idea to brush up on Java, especially as I've never formally learnt it. So, using a really cool site that Michele found as inspiration (as well as algorithm source), I decided to try and reimplement some of the nifty patterns in Java. The results aren't too bad:

(Click on the image to see a working demo!)

Okay, so I might not actually have a clue how the algorithm that draws the pretty pattern works, but that wasn't really the object of the excercise. It was to implement something in Java, and maybe learn how to solve a few problems (eg: flickering, solved with double buffering; save window state to allow progressive [incremental] animation without sufferring from window damage), and learn some new stuff (eg: threading in Java; basic animation). So sure, it's prety rudimentary stuff, but given that I know bugger all Java, and even less Graphics programming, let alone graphics programming in Java, and that I achieved all this in one afternoon/evenning, I think I did pretty good.

For the curious, the code is available in the jar file along with the compiled byte-code. It runs standalone too (ie: "java Blargh" or "java -classpath 20041222.jar Blargh" should work). Please excuse the mess, lack of commenting, and the slightly dodgy stuff that's going on there. A whole lot of it could be implemented a whole lot better, but it's not bad for a learning excercise, I think.

After months of waiting, it's finally here:

It came last Monday, but unfortunately I was away down south in Pemberton with a group of friends (I suppose I should write something about that sometime), so I could only get it this morning. It's certainly a lot longer than what I'm used to using (coming in at 2-5-5, instead of the 2-4-5 or 2-4-0 that I'm used to using) but it definately feels a lot better than the bokken or sensei's training spares. So I used it for this morning's grading:

This is the second grading that I've attempted (and passed) for Iaido and Jodo. That makes me gokyu in Iaido (5th Kyu), and sankyu in Jodo (3rd Kyu). We got presented with our certificates, which included the certificates from the last grading. Apparently there aren't any certificates for 4th Kyu Jodo.