The Traveling Computer Scientist

ICS 691 Computers in Medicine: Lecture 2D

2012-02-12T22:40:00.000-10:00

Part 4/4 of Lecture 2. I will post more lectures this weekend. Enjoy!

Day 43: Our School's E.T.

2012-02-12T18:31:00.001-10:00

The second Korean movie I watched today was Our School's E.T., another comedy movie but this time taking place in modern-day Seoul:

High school gym teacher Kim Seong-Keun finds out that his school's new policy to boost English education puts his position at stake, so he decides that teaching English is his only hope to remain at the school and be with his students whom he cares about a lot. Thus, the simpleton's rigorous training to exercise his brain muscles and to master and teach English begins.

I really liked this movie. It's a beautiful film depicting one man's determination to change with the times and do what it takes to keep his job as he really loves his students a whole lot. Like Radio Dayz, Our School's E.T. does not have any romance, but it does contain action and some sports scenes, which I think you would enjoy.

You can buy the Malay version of the movie with English subtitles on DVD from YesAsia.com here.

Day 43: Radio Dayz

2012-02-12T18:00:00.006-10:00

I watched two Korean movies today. The first was Radio Dayz, a comedy movie set in the 1930s:

In April 1933, Korea's Japanese occupiers launched the country's first radio station, JODK. It broadcasts propaganda so as to better brainwash the Korean people into becoming loyal Japanese citizens. In need of a Korean producer for a radio drama about the greatness of Japan's empire, they appoint Lloyd Park, a young man who has only joined the radio station through his father's connections.

Lloyd, who is more interested in womanizing than working, has no intention of producing the propaganda program until he is introduced to beautiful jazz singer Mary. Because she wants a boyfriend with a respectable job, Lloyd changes his mind. They are joined by alcoholic announcer Man-chul, gisaeng Myung-wol, errand girl Soon-duk, and vulgar novelist No Bong-al.

As expected, the drama, called "The Flame of Love", is a mess from the very beginning. Believing that the drama needs realistic sounds effects, Lloyd hires a man known as K who, during his spare time, works for the anti-Japanese resistance. Thanks to K’s outstanding contribution, the drama becomes popular among the growing number of radio owners. But as the drama comes to its much anticipated conclusion, the Japanese occupiers want to intervene to give it the appropriate ending.

Radio Dayz is purely a comedy movie; there is hardly any romance or action in the film, but I thought it was good, nonetheless. I wanted to watch it because of the historical setting, and I was quite pleased with how it turned out. It was fun to watch.

YesAsia.com has a Taiwanese version of the movie with English subtitles on DVD here.

ICS 691 Computers in Medicine: Lecture 2C

2012-02-12T17:36:00.002-10:00

Part 3/4 of Lecture 2. Enjoy!

ICS 691 Computers in Medicine: Lecture 2B

2012-02-12T14:35:00.003-10:00

Part 2/4 of Lecture 2. Enjoy!

Day 42: Sad News

2012-02-11T22:20:00.003-10:00

On Monday this week, I received the following e-mail message from Mayu:

As my English skill is low, it is hard to explain what I want to say. I think you should take advantages of many chances around you. Perhaps you just don't notice a lot of chances even if there are many possibilities available near you. Please consider calmly with a broad outlook. You will find better options which were out of your view. Please don't be too emotional and think about what other better choices are remained. It is not too late to see more chances because you are still young and have enough time.

Mayu

In other words, she turned me down gently, which means I won't be going to Japan this March. But I have a friend in Washington State who wants to go to Japan with me this August after he comes back from basic training and Officer Candidate School (OCS) for the Army National Guard. By the time he returns from training and school, I will save up more than two weeks worth of PTO, which I could use for the trip. I think staying in Japan for two weeks will be worth it. As of right now, I have 36.7 hours of PTO.

My father left for a conference on the Mainland today, so I will be taking the family car to work this week. I'll ask EM Club to set me up on more dates with Japanese women starting next week after my father returns.

Tomorrow, I'm going to watch a Korean movie, so stay tuned!

ICS 691 Computers in Medicine: Lecture 2A

2012-02-11T21:38:00.003-10:00

Part 1/4 of Lecture 2. Enjoy!

ICS 691 Computers in Medicine: Lecture 1D

2012-02-11T21:27:00.003-10:00

Part 4/4 of Lecture 1. Enjoy!

ICS 691 Computers in Medicine: Lecture 1C

2012-02-11T15:27:00.001-10:00

Part 3/4 of Lecture 1. Enjoy!

ICS 691 Computers in Medicine: Lecture 1B

2012-02-11T14:21:00.001-10:00

Part 2/4 of Lecture 1. Enjoy!

ICS 691 Computers in Medicine: Lecture 1A

2012-02-11T09:48:00.003-10:00

Occasionally, I'll be posting lectures from Julia Patriarche's ICS 691 Computers in Medicine class for your entertainment. I found them interesting, to say the least. If you have any questions about the lectures, you can contact Julia via e-mail at julia4@hawaii.edu or julia@chalkdust.net, or by phone at 808-294-5335.

Part 1/4 of Lecture 1. Enjoy!

Day 41: Sprinting to the Finish Line

2012-02-10T21:46:00.000-10:00

At 3:00 PM today, I demonstrated my widgets to the QA team who will begin testing this feature starting next week now that I am finished with it. I spent probably about half an hour explaining the ins and outs, and asked them to concentrate on performance and also to check to see if there are any memory issues. Overall, I am satisfied with how the widgets turned out. Today marks the end of our 2-week sprint, and I'm glad I finished the widgets just in time to start on the next feature next week, which will be similar to the Flow Dashboard feature that is currently in LiveAction version 2.3.

Day 40: A Tale of Two Tables

2012-02-09T22:04:00.002-10:00

At work, I needed to add a table that shows total bandwidth information below the table that shows bandwidth information for each interface that is connected to a destination in the destination bandwidth widget. However, you cannot add two tables to a JScrollPane, so I came up with this idea:

Create a JPanel and set its layout to BorderLayout.
Add the table showing bandwidth information for each interface to a JScrollPane, and put the JScrollPane in the center of the JPanel.
Add the table showing total bandwidth information to the bottom of the JPanel.

I created a sample program that implements my idea. Here is how my tables look like:

I added the same number of columns to the bottom table so that the total information lines up perfectly. If you resized the JFrame above and made it smaller, a vertical scrollbar will appear to the right of the top table, and you will be able to scroll up and down through it.

Before I came up with my idea, I tried using JIDE Software's JideScollPane and TableScrollPane but with no success. I think I spent an hour or so trying to get it to work before I gave up as it was taking too much effort to put everything in place and modify my existing table models. But it was this answer on Stack Overflow that really helped.

I will upload the code for my sample program to my Github account momentarily. Stay tuned!

Day 39: Turning JComboBoxes into JideSplitButtons

2012-02-08T21:35:00.001-10:00

I found out this morning that some of my fixes from yesterday hosed my service that is responsible for saving widget settings. The problem was in the saveDashboard method of my service: if the XML file containing widget settings did not contain users' information, an IOException would be thrown, but instead of catching it and creating a new PropNode object representing the user whose settings we need to save, I surrounded the entire code in the method with a try-catch statement, and the method would return after printing an error message to the log file instead of saving the user's settings using the new PropNode object. I just reverted my changes to where I left off before the code review to fix this bug. I think at that time, I was implementing some of the developers' suggestions regarding exception handling (the general rule of thumb is: "use exceptions in exceptional cases"), which could explain why I took out the small try-catch statement that was in the larger one.

I got some things done at work today:

In the widgets, I removed all JComboBoxes and used JideSplitButtons instead. The UI of the widgets looks ugly with big gray selectors in the middle of a light blue menu bar. I can't make them transparent to blend in with the background of the menu bar. Robert, the technical lead, suggested that I make the menu bar look good and consistent across the three widgets that I have by using JideSplitButtons. But simply switching out JComboBoxes with JideSplitButtons wasn't trivial. It took quite a while to do and to get right.
I implemented listeners for two of the three widgets (one that displays NetFlow data and another that displays QoS data) so that if a user adds a new device to LiveAction, the menu in the JideSplitButton for devices would be updated and contain the new device. If a user deletes a device, it would be removed as well.

I still got some work to do for the widgets: among other things, I need to add a row that displays the total bandwidth information for all of the interfaces that are connected to a destination in the table in the destination bandwidth widget.

Day 38: Widgets Under Review

2012-02-07T23:19:00.001-10:00

This afternoon, I had my second code review. Robert and two software engineers on the LiveAction team, plus a co-worker who is a software engineer on another team (and who is also a fellow blogger), were in attendance. Here are a few important things that they mentioned:

Throw exceptions or return valid but empty objects instead of returning null. Otherwise, clients would have to deal with null values when the method returns.
The data transfer object (DTO) that I am using to store widget settings should not contain a PropNode object, which is used to store any kind of information that will be written to, or was read from, an XML file, because anyone could store any kind of PropNode object in the DTO, which would not necessarily have widget settings. Rather, I should create a custom object that is specific to the widgets instead and store it in the DTO.
Robert brought up an issue where a user who is logged on to two clients could have his or her settings incorrectly saved to or read from an XML file due to a concurrency bug.

I left my notes from the code review at my office, so I will post more issues that came up, if any, in tomorrow's blog post.

Day 37: Detour

2012-02-06T19:59:00.000-10:00

Not much happened at work today. I was assigned to wrap up some tasks for another project, so I was away for most of the day from LiveAction. But I managed to complete them this afternoon. Tomorrow, I'll concentrate on finishing what I was doing for LiveAction before our daily scrum, and I have my code review at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. I only sent three files to the team for them to review, so tomorrow's code review should run shorter than the last one, which took about 1.5 hours.

Day 36: Clearing Minefields

2012-02-05T23:18:00.002-10:00

After Mass and grocery shopping, I went to Best Buy with my father and bought a 42-inch flat-screen TV for my parents' bedroom. I bought the LG 42LV4400 for US$529.99. I also bought a 2-year Best Buy warranty for an extra US$69.99. My parents took the flat-screen TV that was in their bedroom and put it downstairs in the kitchen so that they could watch Korean drama while they're cooking and eating. Not a bad idea.

After I came home from Best Buy, I worked on one more kata for the weekend: Minesweepers. Here's how a sample input file for this program looks like:

4 4
* . . .
. . * .
. * . .
. . . *

The first two numbers represent the number of rows and columns in the grid, respectively. The asterisks represent squares that contain a mine whereas the dots represent those that do not contain any mines.

Basically, given the input file above, my program will display hint numbers in place of the dots to represent the number of mines that a square is next to. So if you ran that input file through my program, you would get the following results:

I wrote JUnit tests as I developed my program, and they really helped as I was able to solve bugs along the way and also very quickly determine whether certain pieces of my code functioned correctly. Test-driven development is definitely the way to go.

After I was finished with development and testing, I ran my program through Checkstyle, PMD, and FindBugs before I uploaded my code to my Github account. Checkstyle and PMD found no problems, but FindBugs found one. MinesweeperSquare, which is a subclass of Point, contains an overridden equals method similar to the one in its superclass, and I used the instanceof operator in both equals methods. FindBugs complained that because I used that operator, the equals method in MinesweeperSquare was not symmetric. The definition of symmetry is as follows:

 
a.equals(b) == b.equals(a)

In short, the problem was that a MinesweeperSquare is always a Point, but a Point may not always be a MinesweeperSquare, so the definition above may not always be true. I posted a question about this problem on Stack Overflow here, and this answer led me to update my question and post my solution. So instead of using instanceof in the equals method in subclasses, use the following:

if (o == null || this.getClass() != o.getClass()) {
  return false;
}

Interestingly, whenever FindBugs encountered any problems with my code, it would output error messages that stated that it could not load any of my source files, which was strange. But after I looked at the findbugs.xml file and solved the problems that it found, those error messages would go away. I don't know why they appeared in the first place, though.

Day 35: A Productive Saturday

2012-02-04T21:13:00.001-10:00

I finished adding checkboxes to the table in the destination bandwidth widget for LiveAction this morning. Now, a user can uncheck a checkbox to hide a series in the destination bandwidth chart and then recheck it to display the same series again. I also made the columns in the table rearrangeable, including the first column that contains the checkboxes.

Then I moved on to another kata, which I call the Linear Equation Solver. Given a list of linear equations with only one variable, x, my program will solve for x. My strategy was basically the same rules for elementary algebra:

Sum all of the variables on the left-hand side.
Sum all of the constants on the left-hand side as well.
Repeat steps 1 and 2 for the right-hand side.
Subtract from both sides.
Divide both sides by the sum from step 1.

For example, given 10x + 7 + 12 + 7x - 3x - 5 = -4 + 6 + 4x - 13x + 5x + 5 - 2:

10x + 7x - 3x = 14x
7 + 12 - 5 = 14
4x - 13x + 5x = -4x
-4 + 6 + 5 - 2 = 5
14x + 4x = -14 + 5
x = -9 / 18

At first, I committed my code to my Github account without creating any JUnit tests. But after I wrote some tests, I noticed some problems with my program. For example, a NumberFormatException was thrown when trying to parse the string "+5". I didn't get that exception when I was developing in Eclipse, though, which was weird. There were also some logical errors that I fixed as well. The morale of this quick story is that you should always write JUnit tests as there could be some problems that you never encountered during development.

Out of curiosity, I wondered why System.err statements were printed first sometimes before System.out statements, so I posted a question about it this afternoon on Stack Overflow here.

By the way, I want to go to Japan and visit Mayu from March 27 through April 2. My birthday is on March 31, and I thought it would be nice to drop by and see her on my birthday. As of today, it costs US$1,050 for a round-trip ticket from Honolulu to Tokyo-Narita and back. But before I buy a plane ticket and book a hotel, I'm going to ask her if those dates work well for her first. I e-mailed her just now and will let you know what she says as soon as possible.

Day 34: Improving User Interfaces

2012-02-03T21:30:00.001-10:00

Today, I spent most of my time improving the UI of my widgets. After lunch, I showed Robert, the team leader of the LiveAction development team, what I've been working on so far, and he suggested the following improvements:

All of the widgets should be the same size.
In the table in the destination bandwidth widget, there should be checkboxes next to the interface names so that a user can select which bandwidth data to see in the chart.
The background color should be white in all of the widgets.
The look-and-feel should be consistent throughout. For example, all of the drop-down selectors should be left-aligned, and the Y-axis label in the destination bandwidth chart should be to the right of it, similar to the Y-axis labels in the other charts.

As I am typing this blog post right now, I am working on adding checkboxes to the table in the destination bandwidth widget. Programming is fun, and I don't mind programming tonight for work.

Day 33: Back to Work

2012-02-02T22:01:00.000-10:00

Today, I scheduled a code review for next Tuesday, the 7th of February, at 2:00 PM. I asked the LiveAction development team to review a remote service and a server-side-only (non-remote) service. In short, the former is responsible for figuring out which user made a request and forwarding that user's information to the server-side-only service, which then reads that user's settings from an XML file and finally returns them to the remote service, which forwards the information to the client. Initially, I created only one service that handled everything, but then one of the senior software engineers asked me to write two services instead. The main reason is that my code would only work if a client requested information, but it would not work if another server-side-only service used my service because no users are involved. Basically, my code was tightly coupled to the client-server model and depended on users requesting information, but the senior software engineer said that I should write my code so that anyone could use it. Good idea. I took his advice and made the necessary changes before e-mailing the team about my upcoming code review.

Mayu e-mailed me tonight, and I replied to her just now. I sent her links to Day 30 and Day 31, and also pictures of us at the Yard House in Waikiki and her in the garden at Kapiolani Park. I really like the one with her in the garden. It is my favorite picture.

Day 32: Reminiscence

2012-02-01T20:08:00.003-10:00

Mayu left this morning to return to Japan, and I decided to work today rather than use my floating holiday. Although I feel sad because she is gone, I am still very happy that she was able to meet me and hang out with me even for a couple of days. She really likes Hawaii, and she really enjoyed herself while she was here. But she stayed only for three days, which is too short to enjoy Hawaii. She should stay for a week next time. I want to return the favor and visit her in Japan, possibly in June. As of today, I accrued about one week of paid time off (PTO). By June, I might have close to two weeks of PTO, half of which I could use for my trip.

I really like Mayu. At first, she was shy while we ate lunch at Taormina Sicilian Cuisine—I felt shy too—but eventually, we talked freely once we started walking around Waikiki later that day and the next. She is a tall, beautiful girl. There are many things that I like about her that I will always remember. I hope she visits Hawaii again very soon. She told me that she would like to visit Maui, Kauai, or the Big Island of Hawaii next. I recommended Maui and told her that if she decides to visit any of those islands, I would really like to come with her. I have never been to Kauai nor the Big Island before. We could rent a car and get lost together.

I sincerely look forward to the day she visits me again here in beautiful Hawaii. Mayu-san, if you're reading this blog post, I hope you enjoyed your flight and are staying warm in Japan.

Day 31: Our Last Adventures

2012-01-31T23:29:00.008-10:00

My day started when I dropped off my father at his workplace between 6:30 and 7:00 in the morning. Then I drove all the way back home to pick up a cooler full of iced water and a couple of beach towels as Mayu and I planned on heading to the beach near Magic Island later that day. I left the house at 7:30 but did not arrive at her hotel until nine o'clock sharp (1.5 hours of traffic, which is unbelievable). I picked her up, and we headed to Diamond Head where we hiked all the way to the top. When we got there, we took two individual pictures and one with both of us in it. We talked for a while, and I showed her where UH Manoa was and also where I used to live when I used to live with roommates in Palolo Valley a couple of years ago. We descended from Diamond Head at around 10:30 and then drove to UH Manoa. The H1 freeway going westbound was nearly empty, surprisingly, unlike this morning's traffic, which was hardly moving.

When we arrived at UH Manoa, I found out that the parking fee was raised to US$5 and also that the main parking garage was full, so we had to park in the parking garage next to the Hawaiian Studies building. I showed her around the ICS department on the third floor of the POST building. I also pointed out a picture of Julia Patriarche, my former graduate advisor. I wanted to introduce Mayu to her, but unfortunately, the door leading to her office was closed, so I wasn't able to go inside and knock on her door. After showing her where my cubicle was, Mayu and I ate lunch at the Campus Center. Mayu liked my alma mater; she said it was more beautiful than the university she went to in the East Coast for two years as an exchange student. Before leaving campus, I bought a pair of board shorts at the UH Bookstore as I didn't bring any with me to change into for the beach. We left the university and stopped by her hotel to change our clothes before heading to Magic Island.

When we arrived at the beach, we did not see that many tourists, and there were very few locals, too. The water was not that cold, and we saw many small fishes swimming around. Some places underneath the water had course sand, which hurt our feet a little, but overall, we had a good time wading through the water knee-high.

For dinner, we decided to eat some local Hawaiian food, so we decided on L&L Hawaiian Barbecue inside the Wal-Mart at Kapiolani Boulevard. I bought a regular-sized chicken katsu plate with mac salad and white rice, and we shared the meal. She enjoyed everything on the plate, and it was a good idea that we decided to share the food as we both felt full after eating it; and there was still some leftovers. After dinner, we wanted to end the night with some alcohol, so we went to the Yard House. I had a glass of Salmon Creek Chardonnay, and Mayu wanted something local, so she drank a glass of Kona Brewing Company's Wailua Wheat Ale. It was not that crowded at the Yard House, and we enjoyed ourselves sitting at the bar watching some sports on TV.

Sadly, Mayu had to return to Japan the next day, so we walked together to the parking structure across from her hotel, and we hugged and bid each other farewell. Her last words to me as I drove away were, "Bye bye, BJ-san!" I will always remember how she said those words.

Day 30: My Waikiki Adventure

2012-01-30T23:00:00.003-10:00

I had arrived at the DFS Galleria building at around 11 o'clock this morning. Mayu and I met at noon, and we went to have lunch at Taormina Sicilian Cuisine before her meeting with EM Club staff at 2 PM. It was a very expensive lunch, but we had a good time! Then she headed to her meeting. I told her to meet me back at the same spot where we first met after she was done. When she returned, we walked about two miles from the DFS Galleria building to Kapiolani Park and back. We talked the whole way about all kinds of things. I really enjoyed it. We laughed every time we saw an ABC Stores. They're everywhere, almost at every block. These "tourist stores" sell very expensive merchandise, and I usually go there just to buy a drink and maybe a snack.

After walking around for nearly the entire afternoon (on the beach, in Kapiolani Park, and all along Kalakaua Avenue), we felt thirsty, so we went to Starbucks and bought some iced passion tea. As we were sitting down on a bench near the Yard House, Mayu asked me if I ate at Menchies before, which I did several weeks ago with my family and relatives. I asked her if she wanted to have dessert there after dinner, and she enthusiastically said she wanted to, so we hopped in my car and drove 2.5 miles to Dave & Buster's. We decided to have a light dinner there because we still felt a bit full from lunch and also we wanted to save room for dessert, so she ordered a small soup and I ate four mini-hamburgers (also known as bar burgers).

At Menchies, we had some yummy ice cream with sprinkles and diced almonds.

Lemon Tart and Hawaiian Delight, and Irish Mint

I dropped off Mayu at her hotel afterwards and then returned home around 8:30 PM. Today was fun. Tomorrow will be even more fun!

Day 30: The First Date

2012-01-30T14:16:00.005-10:00

I just had lunch with Mayu. We are going to stroll down Waikiki in a few minutes after she comes back from her meeting with EM Club staff. We are going to have dinner together tonight and check out some places tomorrow.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location: Kalakaua Ave, Honolulu, United States

Day 29: On the Eve of the Big Day...

2012-01-29T18:54:00.002-10:00

I spent most of today fixing the Squares kata because I found out late last night that the sample input file in the writeup didn't work. The kata was harder than I thought but not impossible. But my solution works now, and as usual, I pushed my fixes to my Github account.

This morning, at around 10:30, I saw a Japan Airlines plane flying over Ewa Beach as my parents and I were driving home on Fort Weaver Road from Mass in Mililani. Japan Airlines operates daily flights between Japan and Hawaii, so I thought that Mayu might be on that flight. I'll ask her when I meet her tomorrow. It would be so cool if she were!

[Updated 02/01/2012] She wasn't on that flight. She flew in at around 7:00 AM.

That's all for now, folks. Wish me luck tomorrow!

[Updated 9:39 PM] I felt like doing one more kata before heading to bed. This one is called Bangla Numbers. Check out my solution here.

Day 28: Counting Squares

2012-01-28T23:47:00.002-10:00

The first kata of the new year: Squares.

This kata nearly took me all day, but it was worth the effort. Basically, given start points for either horizontal or vertical lines, my program will calculate the end points for those lines and then determine whether one or more groups of lines form squares. A square can stand all by itself or be within another larger square. To determine whether a group forms a square, I took two lines, one horizontal and one vertical, both of which start at the same point, and followed the end points until they reach the same end point. For example, given the following start points for horizontal lines:

(1, 1) (2, 1) (3, 1) (1, 4) (2, 4) (3, 4)

And the following for vertical lines:

(1, 1) (1, 2) (1, 3) (4, 1) (4, 2) (4, 3)

Let's start with the first horizontal line. The end point for this line is (2, 1), which is the start point for the next line whose end point is (3, 1), the start point for the line ending at (4, 1). The line that contains (4, 1) as its start point is the first vertical line in the second group above. Following the same steps we used for the horizontal lines, we end up at (4, 4). We follow the same procedure for the vertical lines as well, starting from the first vertical line, and we also end up at (4, 4); and because both end points are the same, we found a square.

You can check out my solution to this kata here.

On a different note, Mayu is flying in from Japan tomorrow morning. I've decided to take her to Doraku Sushi for lunch. The reviews for the other restaurants near the DFS Galleria building are not great, which is why I decided to take her there. Of course, I'm flexible; if she has a particular restaurant she wants to go to instead, I'll be happy with her decision.

I'll postpone my discussion about work until next week.

Day 27: A Brief Summary of What Happened Today

2012-01-27T23:37:00.003-10:00

This morning, I fixed an OutOfMemoryError that I saw happen before I left work yesterday. I'll talk more about it in tomorrow's blog post. Then this afternoon, I created a service that will allow the server to save the layout of a frame that contains widgets, as well as the settings for the widgets that are open and in the frame, to a file. The client would be responsible for sending the data that needs to be written to the server. I still have more work to do for this service, and I will talk more about it tomorrow as well.

After work, I went to the Yard House in Waikiki to have dinner with my co-workers. One of them, a fellow software engineer, will be leaving the company next week, so we had a farewell dinner for him tonight.

Mayu e-mailed me today, and I will be meeting up with her this Monday at noon in Waikiki for lunch. I'm very happy that I finally get to meet her!

Day 26: Freedom Forever!

2012-01-26T21:20:00.005-10:00

HB2288 is a bill that was proposed by a few people in the Hawaii state legislature. I received an e-mail message about it from a HI Capacity member today. The gist of it is that if it becomes law, it would require Hawaii-based ISPs to keep logs of what websites their customers visit for no less than two years. That's a definite privacy issue right there. Would you feel comfortable knowing that someone knows what websites you visited and when you visited them? I think it's similar to someone having access to your e-mail account and reading your e-mail messages. Another issue is that if someone were to get a hold of the logs, that person could use your information against you. For example, you could get spammed based on the websites you visited if your information was given (sold) to other companies. Even worse, it could lead to ISPs blocking access to certain websites if they don't like you visiting them for some reason, much like how the Chinese government blocks these websites today with its Great Firewall. It could happen, and this bill would be the first step towards Big Brother watching over our shoulders.

According to the Hawaii state government website, the bill is deferred for now. "Deferred" does not mean "killed", in my opinion, as I think someone could re-introduce it. I hope it doesn't happen. Any politician who supports this bill should be voted out of office.

On a completely different note, before I left work, I wrote some client-side code to persist the layout of widgets that I created and are displayed in a frame. I also persisted the settings for some of them, so if you closed a frame that had two configured widgets on it and then re-opened the frame, the same two widgets with your configurations would be displayed, and they would be arranged in the same order they appeared before you closed the frame. Right now, I persisted the layout and settings to a separate file, which is written by the client, but my next task is to have the server save them to the server's configuration file. The goal is to allow a user to customize the widgets and the frame itself, so the layout and settings would be tied to each user of LiveAction. To realize this goal, I would have to implement another service that would send the data that needs to be written from the client to the server. I don't think this task would be hard to accomplish as I had already written a service before.

Finally, I had a doctor's appointment in the afternoon, and I will be going to see the doctor again on February 14, which is Valentine's Day. At the LiveAction dinner party last night, I told one of the program managers that I was going to see the doctor today about my heart. This morning, he came up to me while I was working and asked if I could join him in prayer as he prayed to God for me to receive good news from the doctor, so I prayed along with him. I thanked him afterwards for inviting me to prayer, and I felt happy knowing that someone cares about me. It was a good way to start the workday.

Day 25: LiveAction Dinner Party

2012-01-25T23:27:00.002-10:00

I went to a dinner party tonight in celebration of our LiveAction 2.3 product release. It was held at 1289 Moanalualani Place in Moanalua, not too far from work. Everyone from the LiveAction team was present, as well as a couple of sales engineers who work off-site on the East Coast. The food was great. I had brown rice, mashed potatoes, smoked salmon, chicken, and beef. There was a 10-question trivia game after dinner, and I won a Sports Authority gift certificate worth US$25 for answering one question. The question was: what is at least one new feature in LiveAction 2.3? My answer was the Flow Dashboard, which allows a user to view the top ten NetFlow data in various tables.

I had fun. I really enjoyed chilling out with co-workers this evening.

Java Tip of the Day #12: Tips on Tables

2012-01-24T22:46:00.006-10:00

Sorting Rows
To sort a row in a JTable, you must first override the getColumnClass method in your table model and make it return the appropriate class for the column you wish to sort the rows by. For example, if you want to sort the numbers in the first column numerically, write the following:

public class MyTableModel extends DefaultTableModel {
  /** {@inheritDoc} */
  @Override
  public Class<?> getColumnClass(int col) {
    switch (col) {
      case 0:
        return Number.class;
      case 1:
        return String.class;
      // etc.
      default:
        throw new IllegalArgumentException("Invalid column index: " + col);
    }
  }
}

Then set the row sorter:

MyTableModel model = new MyTableModel();
JTable table = new JTable(model);
RowSorter<TableModel> sorter = new TableRowSorter<TableModel>(model);
table.setRowSorter(sorter)

Updating the Table Model
If your table model uses a list that is updated regularly, don't blow away the table model and then recreate it when new or updated data arrives. Instead, add a method to your table model that will clear the list and add the data to it. You can then call the fireTableDataChanged method to update the table from the same method. One reason why you shouldn't blow away your table model is that if you did, and if I scroll to the bottom of the table and then the table refreshes, I would find myself back at the top of the table instead of the rows that I was looking at before the update. Furthermore, if the user sorts the table and then the table refreshes, and if the table model isn't destroyed and recreated during the update process, the rows would remain in their positions and not return to their original ones when the table was first created.

Day 24: More Fun with JFreeChart

2012-01-24T21:06:00.000-10:00

I wrote too soon yesterday evening when I mentioned that I hammered out all of the bugs in my interpolation code as there was one more issue that I overlooked: what happens if more than one data point is missing between two endpoints? The solution to this problem is simple: if the right endpoint does not have any data, iterate through the list of data points until the first non-interpolated data point is found. When it is found, interpolate all missing data points between the two endpoints in the current iteration of the loop. The result should look like the left graph below. The graph on the right is how the latter would look like if it were a stacked area chart instead.

Note that in the right graph, all but the aqua data are extrapolated towards the end. In the left graph, the green and yellow series are extrapolated.

Here is another graph with more series and even more interpolated data:

If you look closely at the two line graphs, you would see that the interpolated data points in each series sit on a straight line, which is how linear interpolation is supposed to work.

As usual, I uploaded my fix to my Github account. I also added a demo program called StackedAreaChartDemo that shows a possible rendering issue when using a stacked area chart. I started a new thread on the support forum here that describes the issue. I also posted a link to a zip file that contains screenshots showing the problem in that same thread.

Day 23: Interpolation Gone Bad

2012-01-23T23:30:00.000-10:00

The senior software engineer on the LiveAction team at my company pointed out a flaw with my interpolation when I showed him a graph of bandwidth data for interfaces that are connected to a destination. He noticed many jagged lines going up and down between points for which there was data for an interface. He noted that there should be a straight line between two non-interpolated data points, and any interpolated data points in between the two should be on that line; and the line shouldn't curve. So it was back to the drawing board for me.

At home, I installed the 64-bit edition of Eclipse and the Java 7 SDK on my Windows 7 partition on my iMac and began hacking away. After several minutes of using JFreeChart to plot two series of data, I figured out the problem: after combining all of the timestamps from both series into one list for one of the series, I noticed that interpolation started at the very beginning of the list. But it should start at the first non-interpolated data point in the list, which is not necessarily at the beginning, because if there were some missing data points there, the value of the first non-interpolated data point would be extrapolated towards the beginning of the list. So I modified the extrapolateEndpoints method to return the index at which the first non-interpolated data point is located, which is then passed to the interpolateDataPoints method.

But there was one more issue: after interpolating the data at index i + 1, where i and i + 2 are indices at which a non-interpolated data point is located, I incremented i by one. It should have been two instead. The reason is that the right endpoint should become the new left endpoint in the next interpolation.

After fixing these two bugs, I created a simple Java GUI program to see if my fixes work. The program is simply called Chart, and it displays a JFreeChart with one or two series depending on the command-line argument. Here is a screenshot:

The series in the middle chart corresponds to the blue series in the left chart, and the series in the right chart corresponds to the red series in the left chart. Note that the data point at (350, 300) in the blue series is interpolated, and the line connecting the data points at (300, 400) and (400, 200) is straight, similar to the line connecting the same two data points in the middle chart.

I uploaded my fixes and updated JUnit tests to my Github account. Interpolator should be solid now. Be sure to download the latest Ant build files and run ant -f verify.build.xml to download and install the JAR files for JFreeChart. Enjoy!

Day 22: An Idea Reborn

2012-01-22T18:37:00.007-10:00

I didn't get a chance to go to Waikiki today, but I definitely will next weekend before Mayu comes.

After my family's usual Sunday routine (going to the 9:00 A.M. Mass in Mililani and grocery shopping at the Pearl Harbor Commissary afterwards), I thought of an idea that I can probably implement sometime later this year. Here it is: I want to recreate Language Learners and make it a small Java client-server application instead of a Ruby on Rails web application. The server would be responsible for storing and querying data in a database, and a student or learner would use the client to add new words to the database using buttons and other GUI elements. The server could be installed on a small school network, and the client could be installed on multiple machines within the same network or on a different one. Several weeks ago, a senior software engineer at my company gave me a rundown on ActiveMQ, Camel, JMS, and how a client-server model works, and I'd like to learn more about those technologies and put them into practice in a side project during my free time. I think I will do it.

I might use NoSQL instead of a traditional relational database. In that case, I might have to read up on Cassandra as well.

Day 21: Movie Day: Couples

2012-01-21T18:31:00.007-10:00

All I did today was relax at home and watch one movie, Couples. Later tonight, I will continue reading Java Concurrency in Practice.

Couples is a funny Korean romantic comedy starring Lee Si-Young (Meet the In-Laws) and Kim Ju-Hyeok (In Love and the War).

Yoo-Suk receives a phone call from his friend Bok-Nam who tells him to come over quickly to the restaurant where is he at because he found Yoo-Suk's estranged girlfriend Na-Ri. Yoo-Suk leaves his house immediately and goes to the restaurant but forgets to bring his wallet with him.

Na-Ri had disappeared two months earlier. Yoo-Suk had asked Bok-Nam to help him find her. At the restaurant, Bok-Nam tells Yoo-Suk to forget about Na-Ri as she's not a good person and, furthermore, she is going to marry another man soon. Then Bok-Nam gets up and goes to the bathroom but never comes back. Yoo-Suk starts to feel uncomfortable because he didn't bring his wallet. He then sees police officer Ae-Yeon whom he had met earlier that day at a bank sitting alone at a nearby table.

Ae-Yeon came to the restaurant to meet her friend, but her friend had stood her up. Ae-Yeon is also in an uncomfortable bind because she realizes that her purse was stolen out of her handbag and she doesn't have any money to pay for her order.

Finally, Yoo-Suk walks over to her table and talks to Ae-Yeon. They both gladly welcome each other and think that the other person will be nice enough to pick up the tab. After leaving the restaurant, they agree to meet each other again the next day. But later that evening, Na-Ri makes a sudden appearance at Yoo-Suk's house...

The movie was fun to watch. Although I personally don't like women whose primary interests in relationships are their men's bank accounts rather than their men themselves, I liked Li-Young's character, Na-Ri, as her role, as well as those of the couples featured at different parts of the movie, helped move the plot along.

Couples is a very recent film as it was shot last year from May 8 to June 27. It's now available on DVD with English subtitles on YesAsia.com here.

Day 20: Aloha Friday!

2012-01-20T20:56:00.002-10:00

One of the senior software engineers told me that regarding JUnit tests, a developer should be more concerned with functionality than with performance. He saw my code and noticed that I was resetting a couple of lists instead of simply creating new instances of them. I see his point: there could be a chance that you could introduce a bug in your JUnit tests by doing unnecessary optimizations, and I agree. Just keep your code simple in your JUnit tests and don't worry about optimizing your code, unless, for example, your setup code for your database tests takes 3-5 seconds per test and you have 50+ tests, in which case you should drop and re-add your tables instead of re-creating the entire database each time to increase performance.

Speaking of JUnit tests, I added JUnit tests for the Interpolator class and uploaded them to my Github account. All ten tests pass, so the code should be solid now. I also upgraded the following Java QA tools:

Checkstyle (from version 5.3 to version 5.5)
JUnit (from version 4.5 to version 4.9)
FindBugs (from version 1.3.8 to version 1.3.9)

If you run ant -f verify.build.xml, Ivy will download the updated versions for you.

I'm glad the weekend is finally here. I feel like watching at least one movie this weekend, so be sure to stick around and see what I watched. On Sunday, I'm planning to go to Waikiki and just cruise around the area, and possibly also eat at a restaurant near the DFS Galleria building on Kalakaua Avenue where EM Club is located.

Day 19: Another Busy Day

2012-01-19T20:08:00.003-10:00

Although I was busy coding today, there's not much to report. I fixed a couple of bugs in the Interpolator class and pushed my fixes to my Github account just now. I am using the same class in LiveAction, and I found the bugs later this afternoon at work. I'm going to write JUnit tests for the class tomorrow, and I will upload them to Github when I come home.

I'm close to finishing one of my tasks for this sprint. I should be done before Noon tomorrow. I need to do some testing first and then merge what I developed so far into the trunk so Yoichi who is doing QA testing can start testing my widgets after he installs the latest executable file next week.

Finally, I have some good news! I'm meeting Mayu the following Monday, the 30th of January. I can't wait to see her!

Day 18: It's All Good Now

2012-01-18T21:34:00.008-10:00

Last night, I logged on to my work computer from home, but I didn't log out after I was finished. Rather, I just closed the CoRD window and disconnected from the company VPN. Then when I came to work this morning, I tried to log on to my computer, but unfortunately, I was locked out of my domain account, and there was nothing I could do about it until someone from IT showed up a couple of hours later as I had arrived at work at my usual time (between 6:00 and 7:00). Suddenly, I remembered that I still have local administrator access to my computer. After several minutes of trying different username and password combinations, I logged on and was able to get some work done. I was worried I was going to waste a couple of hours doing nothing. Finally, someone from IT unlocked my domain account later this morning.

I was busy all day writing GUI code. I'm almost done implementing a widget, which is one of the two tasks that I need to accomplish for this sprint.

At four o'clock this afternoon, I attended our monthly team meeting, and I demonstrated what I've been working on to higher-ups, including the CEO. But as soon as I started, I ran into a problem. What happened was that I was still logged on locally, not on the domain, so after I logged on using my domain credentials via Remote Desktop, I opened Eclipse, and it displayed an error message informing me that the workspace could not be used as someone else was still using it. So I let another software engineer go first and demo his work while I rebooted my computer and re-opened Eclipse. Fortunately, I was still able to demo my work, and Robert was pleased with what he saw, so in the end, it was all good.

Day 17: How to Interpolate Data Points on a JFreeChart

2012-01-17T21:58:00.001-10:00

At work today, I found out that the JFreeChart API doesn't support interpolation. I found out after I tried to use an XYItemRenderer to render a series of lines on a line chart. Basically, all series must have the same range (Y-axis) values; if at least one series doesn't, the chart will look like a bunch of line segments, not continuous lines. If you tried to use a stacked area chart instead, the missing y-values will interpolate to zero, which doesn't make sense if you were to graph bandwidth data for different interfaces or devices, for example.

To solve this issue, I had no choice but to implement the following linear interpolation formula:

x0 and y0 represent the x- and y-values for the left data point, respectively, and x1 and y1 represent the x- and y-values for the right data point, respectively. In my case, x represents the timestamp for the missing y-value, which I had to solve. Solving for y gave me the interpolated value at x.

I uploaded two classes, one called Interpolator and another called Point, to my Github account. There, you will find my overall strategy for plotting series with different timestamps on a JFreeChart (see the interpolate method). Hopefully, my comments are self-explanatory.

Day 16: Working on a Holiday

2012-01-16T18:58:00.002-10:00

I arrived at work at 5:50 AM today. There were few cars on the road, mainly because today is a federal holiday (Martin Luther King Jr. Day). It was pretty much green lights all along Ft. Weaver Road, and I was probably cruising at around 55-60 MPH on the H1 freeway the entire time. I rode by myself because my father had a day off, and I decided to go to work and save my floating holiday until Mayu comes. She'll be here in a couple of weeks.

I met with team leader Robert after lunch today, and he gave me and the senior software engineer a rundown on what needs to be done before the next version of LiveAction is released at the end of March this year. It looks like I'll be working mostly on the client-side from now until then.

I left work at 3:45 PM, and again, there were few cars on the road. It took me about 20-30 minutes to go home, and I was driving at roughly the same speed on the H1 freeway. Ewa Beach is a bit far from where I work.

I'm thinking about going to Japan during Golden Week this year (April 29 - May 5), and this morning, I was looking at hotels near Kanagawa Prefecture and found one that is very cheap. The hotel is called Hotel New Koyo, and the address is 2-26-13 Nihonzutumi Taitou-ku, Tokyo. A single room costs ¥2,500, which is around US$32. It sounds like a sweet deal to me, considering that the hotel is in Tokyo, a very expensive city.

I'll update you on my future vacation plans from time to time, but for now, I just want to give you a heads up that I'll be going somewhere this year.

Day 15: Overnight Stay

2012-01-15T16:09:00.008-10:00

Yesterday, my cousin Mike stopped by Hawaii while he was on his way back to Guam. He had a 19-hour layover here in Hawaii, so my parents picked him up from the airport and he stayed at our house last night.

This morning, all of us attended the 9:00 Mass in Mililani. After Mass, we visited the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific (locally also known as Punchbowl) to take some pictures of the view of Honolulu. Here are a few of me and Mike:

We left Punchbowl at Noon and bought lunch from Chow Mein Express in the food court at the Pearl Harbor Navy Exchange. Then we dropped off Mike at the airport afterwards and went home.

I had fun while my cousin was here. We had a chance to catch up last night as I hadn't seen him for several years. I hope he stops by this summer and stays longer next time. I'm really looking forward to seeing Mike again soon.

Day 14: CCNA ICND1 640-822 - Chapters 2 and 3

2012-01-14T23:06:00.000-10:00

After watching Love Fight, I began reading the CCENT/CCNA ICND1 640-822 Official Cert Guide. I read Chapters 2 and 3 today, and skipped Chapter 1 because I already have some prior experience with computer networking. Chapter 2 discussed the TCP/IP networking model, and Chapter 3 discussed some fundamentals of LANs. I understood the topics well and took the "Do I Know This Already?" Quizzes after (not before) reading each chapter. I know that I need a refresher on this material as it had been seven years since I last took the CCNA exam, which I failed. I never got a CCNA certification.

My plan is to read at least one chapter a week from this book while reading Java Concurrency in Practice at the same time until I finish the latter. I'm still on Chapter 7 in that book. I think this plan would work even with a 40-plus-hour work week.

Love Fight

2012-01-14T20:22:00.000-10:00

It's been a while since I watched a Japanese movie, and today was the first time I watched one since last year. This morning, I watched Love Fight, a romantic comedy about a high school boy who always gets bullied by others and whose childhood friend, a girl, always comes to his rescue:

Minoru and Aki have grown up together from a young age. Contrary to wimpish Minoru, Aki, who normally looks ladylike, is very strong at fighting. Hence, Aki has always protected Minoru from being bullied. Their dynamics remain the same during their high school years. Wanting to break out of this situation, Minoru starts going to a boxing gym run by Oki, whom he met by chance. However, Aki gets wind of it and is fascinated with boxing as well, and she also joins the same boxing club. Minoru feels depressed as he is again unable to break free of Aki’s influence. Through boxing, however, Minoru realizes that he has been running away from Aki and not facing her properly until now.

You can buy the premium edition of Love Fight on DVD from YesAsia.com here, and you don't have to be into boxing to watch this film. I think you would like it regardless, especially the scenes where Aki displays her fighting skills.

Day 13: Early Birds

2012-01-13T19:32:00.007-10:00

As you can see from the first couple of pictures below, I arrived at work early this morning at around 6:30, and it looked like the Skymark Airlines plane was getting ready to return to Japan not long after I arrived as the ground personnel backed up the plane and positioned it behind the Malaysia Airlines plane. I was hoping that both planes wouldn't leave before the sun rose, so I decided to come back an hour later to take some pictures. Fortunately, they didn't.

Both planes departed when I returned to eat lunch before Noon, though.

During lunch, I was treated to a free air show: several F-22 Raptors were taking off Runway 4 behind the Castle & Cooke Aviation building, and I shot some video of a pair of these very expensive fighters, which you can watch below. These planes are very loud, and I could hear them taking off from the Reef Runway (Runway 8) that my office window faces while I'm working.

This afternoon, my team leader talked to me and the senior software engineer who helped me review my code this week about what we should work on next. We didn't really hammer things out during our meeting, though, so he told us to think about a strategy for development this weekend. I then left work early at 4:00.

Mayu e-mailed me this morning, and I'm going to reply to her e-mail right now. See you later!

Day 12: Parallelizing Queries and Spotting Planes

2012-01-12T19:49:00.005-10:00

After making the necessary changes to my code, I sent it back to the same senior software engineer for another code review. This time, he just checked to make sure that there were no potential concurrency issues of which there were none. We then proceeded to optimize and parallelize my back-end database queries. One of them took three seconds on average, so a user would be staring at a blank JPanel for that long while it was processing. (After it is finished, the JPanel would then display a JTable containing NBAR information.)

To begin, we stored the keys that we needed in memory instead of fetching them from the database each time we queried it. Doing so reduced the run-time by a half, so now it took a query between 1.5 and 1.8 seconds to complete. Then we parallelized the query by creating an ExecutorService and assigning 100 threads to it. Because the database stored each NBAR protocol in separate nodes, I had to iterate through each node and query the information stored there. Instead of having one thread iterate through each node, I assigned one thread in the ExecutorService each to a protocol and had multiple threads performing queries all at the same time. This one-task-per-thread approach led to another speedup, and this time, the average run-time was between 0.5 and 0.7 seconds—6 times faster than the original run-time. As far as the other queries are concerned, I didn't notice much of a difference, although I did use the same technique to query other device and interface information. All in all, I think it was not bad for a day's work. Now, I'm back to working on cleaning up code, mostly GUI code, until Robert gives me my next task for the upcoming sprint.

After all of that hard work, I went to the Sunset Lounge sometime after 4:00 this afternoon to grab a snack, and I saw two Boeing 737's parked next to the building. One belonged to Malaysia Airlines (I couldn't see the tail number), and another belonged to Skymark Airlines, which I have never seen before. The plane in the picture below (which I found on Flickr) is the exact same one I saw. The tail number is JA73NK.

I'll bring my digital camera tomorrow and take some pictures of both planes if they are still there.

I'm glad tomorrow is Aloha Friday.

Java Tip of the Day #11: Blocking Instead of Looping

2012-01-11T21:18:00.000-10:00

Avoid writing this kind of code:

while (someList.isEmpty()) {
  try {
    Thread.currentThread().sleep(100);
  }
  catch (InterruptedException e) {}
}

First, why 100? Why not 10 or 1000? The less time the thread sleeps, the more CPU cycles are burned. On the other hand, the more time the thread sleeps, the longer the application has to wait for the thread to wake up. Picking an arbitrary number of seconds for the thread to sleep is not good practice. These are good reasons why you should not write the code above.

The solution? Have the thread block and wait to be notified somehow when the list is no longer empty. You could use Java's BlockingQueue, for example, to help you out in this situation.

Finally, one of the software engineers recommended that no one should use the wait() or notify() methods as they are hard to implement correctly. Instead, use Java's built-in concurrency tools such as BlockingQueue that are introduced in Java 1.5.

Here is my question titled "Why blocking instead of looping?" on Stack Overflow.

Day 11: Back to the Drawing Board

2012-01-11T19:26:00.002-10:00

I was working on making my back-end code for LiveAction more thread-safe and readable today. After working nearly the entire day on it, I pushed my changes to our remote repository and told one of the senior software engineers that it was ready for him to code review as he wants to review my changes first before we start working on optimizing it for faster performance. So he reviewed my code this afternoon and handed his comments back to me before I left work for the day. There are still some issues I need to address, so I will be working on them tomorrow.

Today was my colleague Yoichi's birthday, and seven of us went to the food court at the Pearl Harbor Navy Exchange to celebrate. I bought my food from Chow Mein Express (honey chicken and orange chicken with brown rice for US$10.34) while the others bought theirs from Charlie's Grilled Subs, I Love Country Cafe Express, India Cafe, and Subway. Although I brought food from home, I decided to tag along with my teammates since it was a special occasion. I'm surprised that the food court was not really busy today, even though we went there at around Noon. I'd expect a lot of military and DoD employees eating there at that time. On the other hand, it's quite busy on the weekends, which is when I usually go there with my parents.

Yummy Japanese Snacks

2012-01-10T20:55:00.002-10:00

Someone at work brought a box full of Japanese crackers like these today:

The crackers in the purple bag contain peanuts and sesame seeds, and the ones in the orange bag contain pumpkin seeds and almonds. I tried the ones in the purple bag and really enjoyed them; I have yet to try the other crackers.

I'm saving the two purple bags until Mayu arrives.

What do the writings on the bags say? If you know, please translate them for me in the comments below.

Day 10: Tips on Refactoring Code

2012-01-10T20:38:00.011-10:00

Today, I spent time fixing some of the issues that I mentioned in Day 9. Here are some tips that I came up with as I was refactoring my code.

If you are using Eclipse and don't see any blue words (i.e. member variables) in your methods, then those methods should really be static methods, as long as the parameters (if there are any) are primitive types, or (in the case of object references) are immutable and/or thread-safe. Remember, static methods are not tied to any instances of a class. I posted a question regarding static methods on Stack Overflow here.
Here's how to write a generic method, in case you don't know the syntax:
```
// This method will concatenate a list of Number objects.
public <T extends Number> List<T> concat(List<T> list1, List<T> list2) {

   List<T> list = new ArrayList<T>();
   list.addAll(list1);
   list.addAll(list2);
   return list;

}
```
The <T extends Number> declares the generic type T, and T could be a Number or any object that is a subtype of Number. Note that this code comes before the return type, which is List<T>.
Always code defensively! Check if an int is 0 before using it in the denominator of a division operation; check if an object is null first before using it; check if the size of a list is within bounds before using a subset of the list, etc.
Use composition instead of inheritance whenever possible, and avoid making one class dependent on another whenever possible as well.
If you want a class to be a listener for some type of event but a lot of people are using that class for other purposes, avoid making the class itself a listener and instead create a private class inside it that will be the listener, and add an instance of the inner class as a listener. When an event occurs, the private class would have access to the member variables of the outer class, and you could do whatever it is you needed the outer class to do just as easily from within the former. This way, other developers who are using the outer class would not inadvertently use it the way you never intended, thus preventing bugs from occurring.

Day 9: D-Day at Work

2012-01-09T20:12:00.009-10:00

Today, I held my first code review at work from 2:00 to 3:30 in the afternoon. Aaron, Robert, and three other software engineers were present. Some of the issues we discussed included:

Naming conventions
Member variables not being guarded by locks
Ambiguous method names
Potential race conditions
Duplicate code

Code that could make another software engineer confused. For example:

class SomeData {
   float inputData, outputData;
}

List<SomeData> listOfOutputData = new ArrayList<>();
List<SomeData> listOfInputData = new ArrayList<>();

// Populate lots of SomeData objects with input and output data.
// Populate listOfInputData with the same SomeData objects.

listOfOutputData.addAll(listOfInputData); // This line can be confusing.
// Why?

// Someone might ask, "Why would you add all of the objects in
// listOfInputData to listOfOutputData?" It would be best to sort by
// input data and then put the top 10 input data into a list. Then sort
// by output data and finally put the top 10 output data into another
// list. That same person would understand better what I am trying to
// do with this approach instead.

Overflowing an int by subtracting two floats and returning the casted result. Here is a question regarding this issue that I posted on Stack Overflow.

Code that could hide the developer's intentions. Here's an example:

Collections.sort(listOfInputData);
Collections.sort(listOfOutputData, new Comparator<SomeData>() {
   // Sort by output data in descending order.
});

// Instead of implementing Comparable<SomeData>, it was suggested that I
// just use Comparator<SomeData> and sort listOfInputData that way. The
// code on line 1 above would make another developer assume that the list
// was being sorted in descending order by input data, but it's not 100%
// clear just by looking at the code.

Some variables are not checked whether they are null first
Tearing down JComponents and rebuilding them instead of just updating them

It's hard to think about what others would think about your code without putting your code through a code review. Today's code review was an eye-opener and made me more aware of the issues that I never found in my code during development. Code reviews shouldn't be intimidating—today's wasn't even close, even though I felt a bit nervous several minutes before we started. They are an excellent learning experience for software developers of all levels, both for the person whose code is being reviewed and the reviewers.

My goal is to hold at least six code reviews between now and December 31st. One down, five more to go!

Day 8: Out of the Woods

2012-01-08T16:39:00.001-10:00

I am no longer sick and feel much better today.

My family and I went to the 12 o'clock Mass in Mililani because my parents felt tired and woke up late. The celebrant today was Father Cletus Mooya who was originally from Zambia and is currently assigned to the St. John Apostle and Evangelist Parish. I like Father Cletus' homilies because they are very short and to the point.

After Mass, we went to the Pearl Harbor Navy Exchange and picked up a blender and a toaster. My parents then went to the Pearl Harbor Commissary to do some grocery shopping while I waited in the mall as I cannot follow them into the commissary. On December 8, 2008, the Pearl Harbor Commissary implemented a "No Guest Policy", which means that only military ID card holders are allowed inside and cannot bring visitors.

Before we went to Mass, I bought Stickystudy's Japanese flashcards for my iPad 2 because I figured I should start studying Japanese again. The program comes with tons of flash cards and examples that should help me master Kanji.

Finally, I started reading Chapter 7 in Java Concurrency in Practice, but I think I will watch an Asian movie tonight and take a break from reading, so I probably won't finish it until tomorrow. It's been a while since I watched a good flick.

Day 7: Sick Today

2012-01-07T19:29:00.004-10:00

Today, I woke up feeling sick in my stomach. I think it was something I ate last night at Big City Diner. I told my mother about it, and she said that when we ordered our food, the waitress brought them out quickly, which I noticed too. Hopefully, our food was made to order and was not sitting out at room temperature, which would be perfect for bacteria to grow. I feel a little better now, and I hope to make a 100% recovery by Monday. I don't want to miss work.

While lying in bed, I started reading Chapter 6 in Java Concurrency in Practice. This chapter talks about task execution and the Executor framework, which I am using for the back-end of LiveAction (see Day 5). Concurrency in Java is not a difficult topic for me, because I have already been exposed to multi-threaded Java programming when I was an undergraduate several years ago.

My brother just left for the airport right now. He's going back to San Francisco. Hopefully, he'll move here next month or the summer and find a job with a local movie production company. It's expensive living over there in San Francisco, and I think he could save a lot of money by living with me and my parents, and would be better off here.

Day 6: Same Names but Different Cases

2012-01-06T23:40:00.002-10:00

Today, one of the senior software engineers showed me how to publish a third-party library that I am using to our local Ivy repository. Then while he was about to read my code in preparation for my code review next week, we found a problem: when I committed and pushed some files to our remote Git repository, Git did not recognize the ones that I renamed. Initially, I changed one letter in four file names from uppercase to lowercase, but Windows, the platform on which I am developing, is case-insensitive when it comes to file names, unlike Linux. To fix this issue, my colleague and I used the git mv -f command because renaming the files in Windows Explorer would not work. But then we encountered another problem where, after we committed and merged the fixes into my remote branch, the Git-renamed files couldn't be read. This problem was the result of using Windows: because the OS recognizes File.java and file.java, for example, as one file, not two separate ones, Git merged the file with itself and then deleted it, instead of merging the former with the latter and then deleting the former. That sucked. The merge succeeded, though, so all we had to do was reset the head back one commit, and we were good to go.

Earlier this morning, my team leader told me to start working on the look and feel of the JPanels that I created (the same ones that I mentioned in Day 5), so I'll be concentrating on the front-end for a while.

Tonight, my parents, my brother, and I ate dinner with my aunt and cousins at Big City Diner at Ward Warehouse in downtown Honolulu. We ordered so many pupus (Hawaiian for appetizers) that we couldn't finish our entrees. We ordered buffalo wings, fried calamari sticks, garlic bread with cheese, nachos, and spicy poke. As for entrees, I ordered the Big Burger, my brother ordered a BBQ meatloaf burger, cousin Savannah ordered Kim Chee fried rice, and cousin Eric ordered loco moco with brown rice. I'm not sure what my parents and aunt ordered. We stayed at Big City Diner until around 10:45, and then we headed over to Munchie's Frozen Yogurt for dessert. I had the Irish mint frozen yogurt with M&M's sprinkled on top. The frozen yogurt tasted more or less like ice cream, and it was delicious. The reason why all of us got together tonight was that my brother is leaving tomorrow back to San Francisco. We all enjoyed ourselves. It was very fun seeing and talking to my cousins again.

Before we left to Big City Diner, I snapped the following pictures. The sunset behind our house was beautiful tonight, and I never get tired of taking pictures of it. Enjoy!

Day 5: Fatality on Fort Weaver Road

2012-01-05T20:12:00.007-10:00

Sadly, there was a fatal motorcycle accident this morning on Fort Weaver Road. Here is the news story, courtesy of the Star Advertiser. My father and I were riding together, and we had to detour by taking Exit 5 to Waipahu. But I still arrived at work early. Personally, I don't really like motorcycles. I just feel that they're not as safe as cars because if a car touches you while you're riding one, you could easily flip over and get injured, or killed, even if you're wearing a helmet. I don't want my father nor my children to ride one.

At work, I was still writing code for the backend of LiveAction. I am using a ScheduledExecutorService to query data from a database every N seconds, and I solved an issue where the threads from the thread pool don't stop executing tasks when the JFrame closes or the last listener is removed.

Inside a JFrame, there can be one or more JPanels. If the user closes one, it would be removed from a list of listeners. But when there are still some inside the JFrame and the latter is closed, the JPanels would not be removed from the list, which was another issue. In both cases, the threads that belong to the ScheduledExecutorService would still be executing tasks.

To solve these two problems, all I did was create a custom dispose() method for the JFrame that would iterate through all of its children and remove each JPanel from the list of listeners. Then once the last listener is removed, I called the ScheduledExecutorService's cancel() method to prevent threads from executing any future tasks.

On a completely different note, someone from New Wave Kitchen stopped by the front desk at work before 10:00 A.M. and sold some bento boxes. I bought beef sukiyaki for US$6, and it was very good. I took a picture of it with my iPad 2, but it didn't look great. I'll take a picture of it next week if I bring my digital camera.

Day 4: Some Tips

2012-01-04T19:22:00.010-10:00

This morning, I tried to create a JAR file manually by following the instructions on Oracle's website, but I failed to include all of the third-party libraries that I needed as ClassDefNotFoundError kept being thrown every time I tried to execute the JAR file. I spent maybe an hour or so trying to get it to work. Then I turned to YouTube and found a video showing someone creating a JAR file using Eclipse. Without watching the video, I turned to Eclipse and let the IDE do the work for me in a few simple clicks. Lesson learned: see if your IDE can do the work for you first before doing it yourself. IDEs are smart and can figure things out like what resources need to be in a JAR file.

Here's another tip: avoid storing calculated values in objects if your objects have to be sent across the network. The less you store, the more network bandwidth you save. As long as the calculations are simple and not time-consuming (for example, figuring out the ratio of two numbers), in a client-server situation, you could always perform them on the client-side. Moreover, you shouldn't let the server send a ton of data across the network and let the client perform some long-running calculation when all the latter really needs are a few results. For example, don't send a list containing thousands of time series data when just the average is needed. It would be a total waste of bandwidth. Let the server do the calculation, and let the server send the results to the client.

Day 3: Back to Work

2012-01-03T19:31:00.002-10:00

I arrived at work at 6:10 this morning. Traffic was heavier today than last week. I guess people are back from their Christmas vacation now, including my team leader and the rest of the developers on my team.

I usually work between 9 and 10 hours a day, starting between 6:00 and 7:00, and ending sometime after 5:00 in the afternoon. Last week, I left early everyday because nearly half of the team went on vacation.

Today, I continued working on the backend of my company's product, LiveAction. I got a chance to demo what I implemented so far to my team leader Robert, and he was impressed. He was also glad to know that I am reading Java Concurrency in Practice. Several weeks ago, I met with my supervisor Aaron, and we went over some goals and objectives for me for this year. One of the goals is to read at least two books, and my team leader chose Effective Java for me. I didn't have a second book in mind at that time, but I think it will have to be Java Concurrency in Practice.

I ordered CCNA 640-802 Official Cert Library back in December, and I hope it will arrive within a couple of weeks. After I finish reading Effective Java, and after I pass the Oracle Certified Java SE 7 Programmer II exam, I will then turn my attention to getting my CCNA certification. Right now, I am scheduled to take the Java SE 6 version of the exam on February 25, but I will cancel my registration as soon as the beta exam for Java SE 7 becomes available. I postponed this exam twice already, once back in September and again in December. I think I will settle with taking the beta exam instead of waiting for the final version to be released, which could be much later this year.

Fun fact: I found out that there are many Todai restaurants in South Korea, but there are none in Japan, yet Todai is an all-you-care-to-eat Japanese sushi and seafood restaurant. Check out these locations.

Day 2: New Year's Day Holiday

2012-01-02T17:50:00.015-10:00

Today, I didn't go to work because yesterday was a holiday. If a holiday falls on a Sunday, I will have a day off on Monday. Likewise, if a holiday falls on a Saturday, I will have a day off on Friday.

I stayed home today with my brother while my parents went shopping. I exercised earlier this morning and e-mailed Mayu too. I asked her how her New Year's Day was and told her that my family and I went to Todai last night for dinner with relatives. Last week, I received an e-card from her wishing me and my family a Happy New Year, which was nice of her. I sent an e-card to her for Christmas a couple of weeks ago, and she really liked it too. I can't wait to meet her soon!

I'm still reading Java Concurrency in Practice, and it looks like I might finish Chapter 5 tonight. My goal is to finish reading that book before Mayu comes.

Earlier today, I found the song below, called I'm Not Worthy and sung by Jay Chou, on YouTube. I thought it was pretty good. You should listen to it too. Here are the Chinese and English lyrics. Enjoy!

My Life in 366 Days

2012-01-01T23:52:00.015-10:00

I'm going to start a project on this blog called "My Life in 366 Days", and what I will do is blog daily this year, starting today until December 31, and keep a detailed record of everything that's happening in my life. Sounds good? Here we go!

Today, my parents, brother, and I went to Mass at 9 o'clock this morning in Mililani. After Mass, we headed home, and I continued reading Java Concurrency in Practice, which I started reading yesterday for work. Right now, I'm on Chapter 5: Building Blocks. At around 4 o'clock this afternoon, my family and I went to Todai in Waikiki and ate dinner there with my relatives. I ate tons of sushi, some shrimp tempura, steak teppanyaki, and some vanilla ice cream dipped in chocolate from the chocolate fountain. It was a great way to end the day.


Sushi	Shrimp tempura and more sushi

Steak teppanyaki	Last serving of sushi

Reflections on 2011 and Plans for 2012

2011-12-31T23:21:00.006-10:00

There were many accomplishments this year:

I graduated with a master's degree in computer science from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in May.
I got hired as a software engineer by Referentia Systems Incorporated in August.
I became a member of EM Club in September and met a nice Japanese woman named Mayu online, whom I will be meeting for the first time here in Hawaii at the end of January 2012.

I have many goals for the new year:

Take the Oracle Certified Java 7 Professional and Cisco Certified Network Associate exams.
If things work out between me and Mayu, fly to Japan in late March or early April and visit her in Kanagawa Prefecture, located just south of Tokyo.
Buy my first car.
Become a professional photographer. Begin taking pictures with my Nikon D7000 (which hasn't come in as of today) and start my own photography website. Phootopia is one example of a professional photography website.

I want to wish you and your family and friends a happy and prosperous new year. Thanks for stopping by, and I hope to see you again next year!

Early Morning Sunrise

2011-12-28T20:45:00.001-10:00

This morning, the sunrise was coming up over Diamond Head, and I wanted to capture it because it was very beautiful, so I took the following pictures across the street in front of my workplace very close to the shoreline around 7 o'clock. Enjoy!

EIB One in Hawaii

2011-12-28T20:39:00.002-10:00

As I was eating lunch with my co-workers last week, someone mentioned to me that the plane parked behind my workplace belonged to Rush Limbaugh. I looked up the tail number (N1EB) and found this website. I forgot to bring my digital camera last week, but it was a good thing that Mr. Limbaugh is still in Hawaii this week as I was finally able to take some pictures of his Gulfstream Aerospace GV-SP G550 plane named EIB One.

December Updates

2011-12-25T13:18:00.002-10:00

I canceled my Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) account today. The free tier that I signed up for last year while I was developing Language Learners will expire on December 31, 2011, and I have no use for Amazon S3 for now. I will sign up for a paid service sometime in the future when I need it. In the meantime, I will be using my UH account to host files and my Flickr account to host images.
This past Friday, I finally bought the Nikon D7000 DSLR with 18-105mm DX VR lens on Ritz Camera.

Age Doesn't Matter

2011-12-19T20:18:00.006-10:00

I came across the following post while I was surfing the Love and Relations forum on Japan Guide at work today during lunch, and I thought it was a good read, so I wanted to share it with you here. The person who wrote it is Dutch (i.e. from Holland, a.k.a. the Netherlands) and goes by the handle Dutchman. Here is his story:

In Love with a Japanese Woman 7 Years Older

I will now give a full summary of my situation to make it most clear to readers what position I am in at the moment.

This winter, I fell in love once again. Only this time, the girl I fell in love with was Japanese. Well, I saw her on the train. I thought she was very attractive and decided to talk to her. We ended up spending three days together in Holland. As time passed, I started liking her more and more, but I didn't make any moves just yet, for a few reasons:
She is 26, whereas I am only 19.
At that time, she had a relationship, even though she was travelling alone. But her boyfriend couldn't come along because of work.
I didn't have the guts.
The thing is, she looked hardly older than 20. I am probably more than 15 cm (6 in) taller than her.

After three days, she continued her trip to Belgium. I could not come along because of school and part-time job obligations. So this meant goodbye. It was a very intimate goodbye where both people don't really know how to walk away from one another. We did not kiss or anything, though. She did give me a little souvenir to remember her.

The following days were the most depressing of my life. I was so angry at myself for not telling her how I felt. Fortunately, I had one more chance to meet her. She would be back in Holland the following week to take the plane to Lisbon (Portugal) in the afternoon. I decided to give her a surprise visit and tell her how I really felt.

When I met her at the airport, she was stunned. She was so happy to see me. She even became quite emotional because she thought it was so sweet of me to say goodbye to her. That's when I told her I liked her. It was hard to make it clear to her, mainly because of my nerves. I finally said, "I think I like you more than just a friend, and even though it is impossible for us, I wanted you to know."

She did not become angry or embarassed. She said she was happy to hear it. But nothing more. When we finally said goodbye, she told me that I could sleep at her place (she lives with her parents) if I come to visit her in Japan one day.

Months passed. She continued her journey through Europe. She did send me some postcards, by the way. I requested her to do this since she had no cell phone with her, and I would be worried about her.

When she was back in Tokyo, she almost immediately sent me an e-mail (we had swapped addresses). We mailed each other for a while. Meanwhile, I checked my finances and concluded that I had enough money to go to Tokyo this year already! A dream come true, in so many ways.

There have been some major developments in the last weeks. We now have webcam chat sessions on Skype. She bought a webcam so she could chat with me better. Also, brace yourselves, she's single again! She told me after I had asked her about what was going on in her life ever since she returned. During the same conversation, I asked her if she would like to go on a date with me when I was in Tokyo. She said she would like that. Also, she said that we would have, and I quote, "much time to talk because you will stay in my house."

When I chat with her, I feel like she really does like me in THAT way. She keeps on smiling (such a pretty smile) the entire time, and she stays up very late to be able to chat with me even though I offered many times to come online on times that are easier for her.

So far goes our history. Still here? I hope you are, because I have a few questions about how to make this situation end in the way I would want it to end (which is a relationship with her).
After reading all this, do you think I am wrong for assuming she has more than a general interest in me?
Do you think she will be in for a long distance relationship? (It is an 11-hour flight from Amsterdam to Tokyo, and vice versa.)
Do you think she would mind the age difference? Are Japanese women in general interested in dating people younger than themselves?
If I were to go on a real date with her, what advice could you give me? Where do I take her? What can I do and not do when it comes to flirting? How do I notice that she likes me "in that way"?
I am sorry for this long text. I wanted to give a detailed view of my situation so you could give me clear answers. I hope someone will take the time to read this and give me some (or all) answers because I really want to make this work. I'd hate to screw things up because of cultural ignorance.

High Kick Girl!

2011-12-10T20:02:00.002-10:00

High Kick Girl! is a Japanese martial arts movie. I have never watched a modern martial arts movie before, and today, I had a chance to watch this film. Basically, it's about a girl named Kei who wants a black belt, so she decides to fight others with black belts so that she can get it. Not surprisingly, there are lots of fight scenes, and there is also a good amount of slow motion replays of those scenes. If you like martial arts movies, consider watching High Kick Girl!, which you can buy on Amazon.

Patisserie Coin de rue

2011-12-10T19:15:00.004-10:00

Take out the romance in Eternal First Love, add in the theme from Swing Girls, and then mix the two together; and you will come up with a movie called Patisserie Coin de rue, a Japanese drama film that I watched last night that revolves around two people: a girl who wants to become the best pâtissier, and a legendary pâtissier who stopped making pastries and became a critic in the pastry business:

Tomura was once widely lauded as a legendary pâtissier, but some eight years earlier, he inexplicably left the field. Since that time, Tomura lectures at culinary schools and writes guidebooks for pastry critics.

Natsume is a young woman who travels from Kagoshima to Tokyo to find her boyfriend. She finds a job at "Patisserie Coin de rue", a pastry shop run by husband and wife tandem Yuriko and Julian. At "Patisserie Coin de rue", Natsume works with talented pâtissier Mariko and her fascinating creations.

Meanwhile, Tomura is now a regular at "Patisserie Coin de rue", and his encounters with Natsume bring about changes in both of their lives.

I think the audience will admire Natsume's perseverance to become the best pâtissier as she put her whole heart into improving her pastry skills, never quitting and never backing down even in the face of criticism.

If you enjoy movies about life, you will definitely like Patisserie Coin de rue, available on YesAsia.com.


Japanese poster	Korean poster

EM Club Videos

2011-12-08T19:56:00.003-10:00

I found these videos on EM Club's mobile website last night, and I wanted to share them with you, so I uploaded them to my YouTube account. (Click here to check out the English-language website.) My Japanese is poor, so you may want to ask someone who is fluent in Japanese to translate the videos for you. In short, the videos show Japanese women being set up on dates with American men here in Hawaii by EM Club. Enjoy!

I Give My First Love to You

2011-12-04T17:05:00.010-10:00

Another Japanese movie based on a manga with the same name, I Give My First Love to You will definitely touch your heart:

Mayu, whose father is a doctor, meets Takuma who is hospitalized in her father’s workplace. The 8-year-old kids develop feelings for each other, but Mayu learns of Takuma’s grave illness and that he will die before he turns twenty. The distraught children make a promise for an uncertain future.

Time passes, and the children become young adults. Mayu continues to support and love Takuma. On the other hand, Takuma, who knows his days are numbered, pushes away his feelings for Mayu and distances himself from her. He cannot stand to see her cry or hurt her more than he already has.

What will become of their love while Takuma’s life wanes away?

Mao Inoue, who played the role of Mayu, starred as Chieko Aono in Oba: The Last Samurai.

I really liked the movie because I could easily relate to Takuma. If I pass away one day because of my health condition, I would also want my loved ones to be happy that I lived a good life, and I would also do what I can to make sure they don't cry for me for the rest of their lives. However, I don't think distancing oneself from loved ones is the way to do it.

The music at the end of the trailer below is titled Boku wa Kimi ni Koi wo Suru (translation: I Will Love You) and is sung by Ken Hirai. I Give My First Love to You was the highest grossing film in Japan when it was released in October 2009. You can buy your copy on Blu-Ray here.


Japanese poster	Korean poster

Meet the In-Laws

2011-12-03T21:41:00.003-10:00

Those of you who are getting married soon should watch Meet the In-Laws:

Hyun-Joon is a comic book artist from the Jeolla-do region, now working in the capital city of Seoul. One day, he meets Da-Hong who is from the port city of Busan. The couple's relationship has progressed to the point where they are now thinking about marriage. The only problem is that Da-Hong's father has a severe prejudice of people from the Jeolla-do region. Making the couple's possible marriage even more unlikely, Hyun-Joon's father wants his son to marry a local girl from the Jeolla-do region.

Hyun-Joon's character is played by Song Sae-Byeok, who also appeared in Cyrano Agency.

The prejudice between Jeolla-do and Gyeongsang-do (Busan) has the potential to break the couple apart—in real life, if one's parents don't like their potential son- or daughter-in-law, it could be a show-stopper. I wonder, though, if this kind of prejudice really does exist in South Korea today.

Meet the In-Laws was a fun romantic comedy. It had situations that couples on the verge of getting married could relate to; and I had some good laughs today while watching the film. The movie can be bought here on YesAsia.com.

Shotgun Love

2011-12-03T19:38:00.010-10:00

Shotgun Love is a Korean movie with quite a bit of drama:

Sang-Yeol works as a model for a home shopping channel, specifically for food products, and has a crush on another model, So-Yeon, who also works for the same home shopping channel. Unfortunately, So-Yeon dislikes Sang-Yeol.

One rainy night, So-Yeon calls Sang-Yeol to meet for drinks. The next morning, Sang-Yeol finds himself naked in a motel room. Although Sang-Yeol can't remember what happened the night before, he assumes that he slept with So-Yeon.

Meanwhile, So-Yeon finds herself pregnant, and her boyfriend pushes her to have an abortion. But So-Yeon wants to have the baby, so she tells naive Sang-Yeol that she is pregnant with his baby.

The movie stars Lim Chang-Jung, who played as the detective in Romantic Debtors.

I watched the movie today, and I have to say that the actors' acting (So-Yeon's fear of giving birth alone, her boyfriend's selfishness, and Sang-Yeol's naiveté) all came together to make a good film. I think fans of Lim Chang-Jung and romantic comedies will also enjoy Shotgun Love.

YesAsia.com has DVD copies of the movie for sale here. Pick up yours now, and enjoy!

The Lion Strikes Back

2011-12-02T22:23:00.005-10:00

I was fortunate enough to bring my Canon PowerShot A3100 IS today and take high-quality pictures of the third Lion Air Boeing 737 (tail number: PK-LJH) that I saw show up here in Honolulu. The other two that I documented were PK-LJF and PK-LJG.

Click on a photo below to enlarge.

As I was riding home with my father later this afternoon, I snapped the following sunset photos with the same camera while we were driving on Farrington Highway. Enjoy!

Tip of the Day: Making Checkstyle Ignore Lines of Code

2011-12-01T19:54:00.001-10:00

Today, at work, I had to force Checkstyle to ignore an error relating to Java naming conventions. The code in question involved a method in a subclass, and the method that one of the engineers overwrote did not belong to us, so there was no way for me to change the name of the method in the superclass so that it conforms to our naming conventions. Therefore, I had to modify the Checkstyle build file and add the following:

<module name="Checker">
   <module name="SuppressionCommentFilter"/> // Add this line.
   <!-- Checks that all packages have package documentation -->
   <module name="TreeWalker">
      ...
      <module name="FileContentsHolder"/> // Add this line.
   </module>
</module>

To make Checkstyle ignore certain lines of code, add the following to your source code:

@Override
// CHECKSTYLE:OFF
public fj.data.List<Band<Float>> _1() { ... } // Method names should not begin with an _
// CHECKSTYLE:ON

Make sure you insert the last comment. Otherwise, Checkstyle will not check the rest of the file for errors.

Romantic Island

2011-11-30T22:54:00.001-10:00

The last romantic comedy for the month of November that I watched tonight is Romantic Island, starring Lee Sun-Gyun who also appeared in Petty Romance. The movie revolves around three couples, all of whom take a trip to the Philippines:

The first couple is a middle-aged husband and wife who are taking their very first trip overseas. The husband, Joong-Sik, has never taken his wife anywhere before, but he has reasons for taking her on their first trip.

Convenience store clerk Jung-Hwan is offered a free ticket to the Philippines by a friend. Although he is broke, he is more than happy to go. At the Manila airport, Jung-Hwan is stunned when famous Korean pop singer Yu Ga-Young approaches him to use his cellphone. For Ga-Young, going to the Philippines was a spur of the moment decision.

Soo-Jin uses her entire savings to go to the Philippines. Her home life is a mess, and she is in part running away from her family. At her hotel in Manila, she encounters a fellow Korean named Jae-Hyuk, a successful businessman who came to the Philippines for family matters.

The movie was fun to watch. It was like three shorts wrapped up into one, and the Philippine setting reminded me of Love You You and Summer Love. I really liked the island scenery in the film.

Here is the link to buy Romantic Island on DVD.

Romantic Debtors

2011-11-27T13:43:00.003-10:00

Guys, don't get caught up in debt, lest there is a chance that one day, a cute debt collector will bug you every 30 minutes everyday until you pay up. Romantic Debtors is a Korean rom-com (romantic comedy) about one such guy:

Detective Bang Keuk-Hyun goes into debt after a loan he guaranteed for a friend becomes delinquent. Kim Mu-Ryeong works as a customer relations representative for a credit company. Her job is to go after debtors day and night, and Detective Bang is her next assignment. But whenever the detective answers Mu-Ryeong's persistent calls, he disrespects her and berates her with profanity. The two then meet at the police station where he works without knowing the other person's identity at first...

Although it may never happen in real life, a love story revolving around debt collecting is an interesting idea, because you could only imagine what could happen between the two; and there is enough action in the movie to keep you entertained as well. I think these two reasons are enough to justify why you should also watch Romantic Debtors, which you can collect on YesAsia.com.

Tokyo Girl

2011-11-26T23:31:00.003-10:00

Tokyo Girl is another excellent Japanese film worth watching. The movie is just as heart-warming as High School Debut and Love You You, but unlike these two movies, I would not classify Tokyo Girl as a comedy film. Rather, it combines fantasy with romance:

The year is 2008. Miho, a high school student, refuses to approve her widowed mother’s potential husband when they meet each other at a restaurant. As she storms out of the restaurant, an earthquake happens, causing her to drop her cell phone down a staircase. The phone is then found by Miyata Tokijiro, a boy living in 1912.

As the movie progresses, Miho and Miyata help each other overcome their problems at home, which makes the film very moving and inspirational, and I think it gives the phrase "long-distance relationship" a whole different meaning.

Tokyo Girl puts an interesting twist on the romance genre, and I was glad to have watched it tonight. You should watch it, too, especially if you are in a long-distance relationship. Have your far-away loved one watch it the same time you are watching it. You can buy two DVDs here on YesAsia.com, one for each of you.


Japanese poster	Korean poster

High School Debut

2011-11-26T19:04:00.008-10:00

If you dated for the first time during high school, High School Debut will probably bring back those memories. It's a Japanese romantic comedy about two teenagers:

Haruna Nagashima gave softball her all in middle school, but now that she is a freshman in high school, she has decided to focus on a new goal: getting a boyfriend and falling in love. However, she has one small problem: since she never paid attention to fashion or trends in middle school, she has no idea about how to attract men. But a chance encounter with the popular Yoh Komiyama provides her the opportunity she needs. If he can coach her on how to become attractive, she can surely find herself a boyfriend. So Haruna asks Yoh if he can teach her, and he agrees but only on one condition...

The film is based on a manga series with the same name.

I found the situations that Haruna went through to try to get her first boyfriend hilarious. You will definitely have a good laugh while watching her learn from Yoh. If you like romantic comedies involving teenagers, I think you will enjoy High School Debut. So go ahead and buy the Blu-Ray disc on YesAsia.com, and put it under the Christmas tree this year.

Petty Romance

2011-11-25T22:39:00.004-10:00

Petty Romance is a Korean romantic comedy that I watched tonight about two people, a cartoonist and a story writer:

An adult cartoon contest is announced. The grand prize is 130 million Won (100,000 US dollars). Da-Rim does translation work for an adult magazine and wants to become a writer. Due to her creativity, she always makes mistakes and eventually gets fired. Talented cartoonist Jung-Bae is constantly turned down by publishing companies because of his boring story lines. Both seem to complement each other, so they team up for the adult cartoon contest, leading to all kinds of petty fights and romantic sparks.

The movie is rated 19 on South Korea's television network because of nudity and language. But don't let these two things stop you from watching it. Petty Romance is a funny movie, and I think you will get a good kick out of the situations between Jung-Bae and Da-rim. So buy the DVD today on YesAsia.com.

Love You You

2011-11-25T16:04:00.004-10:00

One of the best mainland Chinese romantic comedy films I've seen so far, Love You You is a definite must-see. I got a chance to watch it today, and here's what it's about:

Law firm employee Xia Mi (Angela Baby) is sent to a picturesque tropical island to investigate You Lele (Eddie Peng), the young owner of the island's beach resort suspected of illegal business practices. She goes undercover to work as a servant in his resort. Like many great love stories before theirs, Xia and You don't really hit it off when they first meet each other, but under the magical spell of the romantic setting, sparks of love begin to fly between them. However, it turns out that they both harbor secrets of their own, which threaten to nip their relationship in the bud.

You will need a box of tissues beside you when you watch this film, especially when the OST kicks in. I really like the OST, and I even included a live performance of Love U U by JJ Lin below.

I'd suggest you buy a Blu-Ray copy of Love You You on YesAsia.com and watch it with your girlfriend or wife this Christmas.

North Korean Guys

2011-11-24T10:26:00.003-10:00

Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you're having a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday with your friends and loved ones. Today, I had time to watch a movie before heading to a relative's house for Thanksgiving dinner.

Also known as Lost in the South Mission: Going Home, North Korean Guys is a Korean comedy film about two North Korean men, both in the DPRK Navy, a captain and a seaman, who get stranded in South Korea after their raft gets tossed in the Sea of Japan by a violet squall. They try to find their way out of South Korea, but their attempts are foiled every time by the people they meet: a runaway girl, the police, fishermen...

Definitely buy North Korean Guys from YesAsia.com and add it to your movie collection. You will definitely get a good kick out of it.

Hawaii Five-O Shoot

2011-11-23T20:34:00.002-10:00

Today, the film crew of Hawaii Five-O was shooting in front of the Castle & Cooke Aviation Building. Luckily, I brought my Canon point-and-shoot camera with me, and I got a chance to video part of the scene for an upcoming episode.

After shooting the first video, my boss Robert asked me, "When you get your own car, are you going to spin around like how that car did?" I told him jokingly that maybe I'll do it at night when no one's watching and the road is empty. But look at the smoke coming from the first car in both videos. I bet its tires were hurting after the shoot.

My Way

2011-11-22T20:01:00.000-10:00

I'm keeping my eyes out on My Way, a Korean war movie that will be released next month. Here is the trailer for that movie:

Quirky Guys and Gals

2011-11-19T23:01:00.001-10:00

Quirky Guys and Gals (Japanese title: Sabi Otoko, Sabi Onna) is the first collection of Japanese comedy shorts that I've seen, and all of them were hilarious! Here is a quick summary of each of them:

Quirky Guys and Gals ties together four stories of people searching for a spark in their lives:

Cheer Girls (Director: Yosuke Fujita)
An entertaining tale of a woman whose passion is to lead cheers, though not for sports teams. Rather, she finds common people and creates anthems to encourage them in everyday life.

Boy? Meets Girl (Director: Tomoko Matsunashi)
A boy goes to great lengths to attract the girl he likes.

Claim Night (Director: Mipo O)
The 30-something Mayuko returns home to find the electricity in her apartment turned off, yet when she finally gets someone from the electric company to come over, their over-the-top confrontation gives rise to a wildly comedic situation.

The House Full of "Abandoned" Businessmen (Director: Gen Sekiguchi)
A housewife collects out-of-work salarymen and tries to give them a fresh start.

Definitely buy Quirky Guys and Gals from YesAsia.com and watch all four shorts. I think you will enjoy them all.

Miao Miao

2011-11-19T17:58:00.013-10:00

I watched Miao Miao today. Miao Miao is a Taiwanese film about unrequited love, a theme that I haven't really encountered in any of the Asian movies I've seen so far. The plot is quite interesting:

18 year-old Ai lives the life of a mischievous teenager. She ignores her studies, putting all her passion into baking cakes that always come out burnt, lopsided, or hard as a rock. Ai cannot imagine a greater happiness than making the perfect pastry one day, until someone new walks into her life and Ai discovers that some things in life are sweeter than cakes. Meet Miao Miao, a shy exchange student from Japan. Yet behind Miao Miao's modest exterior hides a master chef. Miao Miao teaches Ai the delicate art of baking, and Ai introduces Miao Miao to Taipei's ugliest snack, chicken feet. Both girls promise to make this year special, and both find out what it means to love.

The OST is quite good. In fact, I included a song titled Meaning of Travel from the movie below. The song is sung by Chen Chi Chen. The Chinese and English lyrics can be found here.

Those who experienced unrequited love can relate to the characters in Miao Miao. The movie is not your typical Asian romance film, but it is still worth watching.

Oba: The Last Samurai

2011-11-19T15:26:00.004-10:00

Oba: The Last Samurai is an excellent Japanese war movie about Captain Sakae Oba, the commander of the 18th Regiment of the Imperial Japanese Army, during and after the Battle of Saipan. Oba and his troops hid from American forces for 512 days after the island fell to the U.S. on July 9, 1944, and during that time, from Mount Tapochau, which they made their home base, they raided American positions on the island guerrilla-style. Because of his speed and stealth during these operations, the Americans on Saipan nicknamed him "Fox." Eventually, Oba and the remnants of the 18th Regiment surrendered on December 1, 1945, more than three months after Japan had surrendered.

I watched the movie last night, and it was a very good action-packed film. Definitely check it out sometime. You can buy the Blu-ray disc here from YesAsia.com.

Uncle's Fish Market and Grill

2011-11-18T23:05:00.002-10:00

Today, seven co-workers and I ate at Uncle's Fish Market & Grill for lunch, and I had the fresh fish sandwich of the day. Today's fresh fish was sea bass, and it was nicely prepared, in my opinion. Served breaded and deep-fried with tomatoes, lettuce, and coleslaw on a fresh-baked Kaiser roll, with a side of french fries and some kind of mayonnaise-based dip to go along with the fries, the sandwich was very good, probably the best fish sandwich I ever had. My co-worker Austen really enjoyed his. The waitress told us that they serve sea bass only once a year, so I guess we were lucky. For US$14.61 (including tax), I think I had a very good deal. I'm definitely coming back soon for more seafood!

Austen took that picture of my lunch with his iPhone 4. I'm amazed at the picture quality. The resolution is higher than the resolution of the pictures I took with my iPad 2, and the picture came out less grainy as well. Very nice!

The Front Line

2011-11-17T22:53:00.004-10:00

If you like action-packed war movies like Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War and 71: Into the Fire, I think you'll also enjoy watching The Front Line, and I certainly did tonight. Here's the plot summary:

Towards the end of the Korean War, a South Korean battalion is fiercely battling North Korean troops over a hill in order to capture a strategic point that would determine the new border between the two nations. The ownership of this small patch of land would swap multiple times each day, and Lieutenant Kang Eun-Pyo is dispatched to the front line in order to investigate the tacit case that has been happening there. But he gets spiraled into a war that is more terrifying than death itself when he meets his friend Kim Soo-Hyuk and his unit, Alligator Company. As the countdown towards ceasefire begins, both sides become more vicious, resulting in deaths of countless lives until the armistice is signed on July 27, 1953.

Swing Girls

2011-11-16T22:35:00.006-10:00

I watched Swing Girls tonight. The movie is a comedy film about a group of delinquent, lazy students who take up music, although they don't know anything about playing instruments, in an effort to get out of remedial summer school after accidentally giving the school's band food poisoning. The moral of the movie is perseverance despite what others think, and I'd recommend Swing Girls to those who enjoy music, are looking for inspiration, or just want a laugh.

List of Japanese movies: Part II

2011-11-13T16:47:00.001-10:00

For Part I, click here.

Below is a list of movies that I watched a long time ago but didn't write a blog post about. Check them out sometime. Click on a movie poster to view the plot summary for that movie.


Black Belt	Grave of the Fireflies	Last Operations Under the Orion

Memories of Tomorrow	Oppai Volleyball	Spy Sorge

Tokyo Friends

Paradise Kiss

2011-11-12T17:48:00.006-10:00

Here's an important life lesson: do what you want to do, not what others want you to do; and follow your dream. That's the moral in Paradise Kiss, a Japanese romantic comedy based on a manga (Japanese comic) with the same name. Here's a brief summary of the movie:

Yukari Hayasaka is a high school student who has become tired of her life of constant schooling. She then comes across a group of student fashion designers who are in need of a model for their Paradise Kiss clothing label. Yukari knows nothing about the fashion world and is taken aback by the group's eccentric ways, but she soon comes to admire their free thinking ways and ability to pursue their dreams.

Check out Paradise Kiss if you're into fashion or romantic comedies. At first, I thought the movie was going to be geared towards women, but I was wrong. I think everyone will enjoy it.

Summer Love

2011-11-11T17:00:00.005-10:00

I think Summer Love is the first movie from Hong Kong that I've ever seen (the movie is in Cantonese and comes with English subtitles), and I got a chance to watch it today. Here's the plot summary:

The story begins with three friends who live in Hong Kong and share something in common: they are single and desperate for love. After suffering many rejections, they decide to travel to Hainan, China, in search of love. On their adventure, they suffer plenty of bad luck, one after another, but love may just be around the corner.

The movie is very funny and full of silly situations. I'd recommend Summer Love to anyone looking for a comedy movie, and also to those who want to see cute Chinese girls in bikinis.

In Love and the War

2011-11-11T12:27:00.007-10:00

In Love and the War is a Korean romantic comedy with a little bit of war mixed in it. Set in 1950 in South Korea, the movie is about a North Korean Army lieutenant named Kim Jung-Woong who is sent to a South Korean village called Seokjeongri with his troops to liberate its people. Once he is in the village, he meets a South Korean girl named Sul-Hee whom he met before, but she doesn't recognize him at first. Then things start to happen: the soldiers and residents start to mix together, but when the war is not going in North Korea's favor, higher level authorities in North Korea give Jung-Woong a mission to carry out.

In Love and the War is not as action-packed as Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War and 71: Into the Fire, but it's still worth watching. It can be tear-dropping at times, though. You have been forewarned.

Cyrano Agency

2011-11-11T00:04:00.007-10:00

Tonight's choice for movie night was Cyrano Agency. I guess it's been a long time since I last watched a very good Korean movie. Basically, it's about an agency that is similar to a matchmaking agency like EM Club, except that instead of setting men up with women whom they don't know on dates, the agency, called Cyrano Agency, sets men up with women whom they know and are in love with in secret without the women knowing.

The movie is quite funny, the OST is nice, and the actresses are beautiful as well. Cyrano Agency is definitely a must-see romantic comedy that I think both single people and couples will enjoy. I'd definitely watch this movie again soon.

Eine Deutsche Flugzeug in Hawaii

2011-11-09T19:47:00.006-10:00

Yesterday, I saw yet another Lion Air Boeing 737 (tail number: PK-LJG) pull alongside the hanger at the Castle and Cooke Aviation building. I wonder how many more Boeing 737's the company plans on ordering this year. Click on a picture to view a larger version.

Then this morning, when I walked into the Sunset Lounge at work to drop off my lunch, I saw a rare bird parked right in back of the same building. What kind of plane was it? Can you spot the tiny flag below? It's a German private jet! Check out this aircraft's information here. Airliners.net also has some higher quality photographs taken by other plane spotters here.

APEC 2011 is going on this week. I wonder if there are any German dignitaries here on the island for this very important conference. Maybe that's why that Bombardier jet is here.

The Unbroken

2011-11-05T19:37:00.007-10:00

The Unbroken is a fictitious story based on the Japan Airlines Flight 123 tragedy about one man's struggle to improve safety for Japan's national airline carrier, National Airlines (NAL). Ken Watanabe, my favorite Japanese actor, stars as Hajime Onchi who is the union leader for the airline and whose attempts to improve working conditions have made many people in management not like him. As a result of winning victories for the union, he gets posted to NAL's overseas offices in Karachi (Pakistan), Tehran (Iran), and Nairobi (Kenya) where he is powerless to mess with internal corporate politics.

The movie is three hours long and is a good corporate thriller. It shows how one man always stood up for his principles and never gave in to corporate immorality. If you are a fan of Ken Watanabe, or if you like movies that deal with overcoming human struggles in the face of tragedy or opposition, definitely check out The Unbroken.

Java Tip of the Day #10: == versus equals

2011-11-02T19:48:00.005-10:00

Only use the == operator to compare primitive types, except doubles and floats, in which case you should use this method for comparison. Use the equals method to compare non-primitives. If you want to know whether two references are pointing to the same object, use the == operator. For example:

Object a = new Object();
Object b = a;
if (a == b) {
  // The code in here will run.
}

If you want to know whether two objects are equal, i.e. they both contain the same values for their member variables, use equals. For example:

Box box1 = new Box();
box1.setDimensions(100, 100);
Box box2 = new Box();
box2.setDimensions(100, 100);
if (box1.equals(box2)) {
  // Assuming you overwrote equals in the Box class to check whether the
  // dimensions are equal, the code in here will run.
}

As the comment above suggests, you should overwrite equals when creating your own class, especially when you create a subclass of an existing class. You also have to overwrite the hashCode method whenever you overwrite equals. A great discussion on these two methods can be found here.

Another true story: I had to fix a bug today at work that is related to today's post. The person who wrote the code used == to compare two UUID objects when he should have used equals instead. The code in the if block never ran even though the contents of the two UUID objects were the same, because the references were different (both weren't pointing to the same object; each was pointing to a separate object), hence false would always be returned.

Be careful, folks.

Java Tip of the Day #9: Beware of Memory Leaks

2011-11-01T19:43:00.008-10:00

Beware of memory leaks in Java when working with Swing components, especially when you start registering components as listeners for events such as mouse and keyboard events. Here's a true story: at work, I created a JFrame that contains a JPanel. In the JFrame, there is also a JTree, which contains nodes that a user can select to open a report in the JPanel. A user can navigate between the various reports by selecting nodes in the JTree. When a user selects a node, the constructor for the JPanel will set up the various components and register some as listeners. For example, when a user selects a device name in a JComboBox, the actionPerformed method will be called to update another JComboBox, which contains a list of interface names that are on that device. Even the JPanel itself will be registered as a listener in some objects in the constructor. Now, here's the bad news: when a JPanel is opened, it will be added as a listener to an object. When a different JPanel is opened, it too will be added as a listener to that same object. The problem here is that the object will still be holding onto a reference to the first JPanel (because it was added as a listener to that object). To make the object no longer hold onto references to any JPanels (e.g. when the user selects a different report or closes the JFrame), write a method that will be called before the reference to the current JPanel is lost. For example:

public class MyFrame extends JFrame {

  private MyPanel reportPanel;
  private SomeObject objectA;

  public MyFrame(Report defaultReport, SomeObject objectA) {
    this.objectA = objectA;
    showReport(defaultReport);
  }

  public void showReport(Report report) {
    if (this.reportPanel != null) {
      this.reportPanel.close();
    }
    this.reportPanel = new MyPanel(report, this.objectA);
    this.reportPanel.setVisible(true);
  }

}

Your close method, which would remove listeners and perform other cleanup routines, should look like the following:

public class MyPanel extends JPanel implements ActionListener {
  private Report report;
  private SomeObject objectA;

  public MyPanel(Report report, SomeObject objectA) {
    this.report = report;
    this.objectA = objectA;
    this.objectA.addActionListener(this);
  }

  public void close() {
    this.objectA.removeActionListener(this);
  }

  @Override
  public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
    // Do something.
  }

}

If you're not careful and don't remove your listeners after you're finished with them, in a matter of minutes, your heap size could balloon to hundreds of megabytes, and I'm speaking from experience. The lesson here is that memory leaks do exist in Java, so be careful, folks.

To Walk Beside You

2011-10-31T21:02:00.005-10:00

Although To Walk Beside You is not so much a romantic movie as Eternal First Love, it certainly is a funny film, and I'm glad I had a chance to watch it tonight after work. Here's a summary of the movie:

Norio, a 17-year-old country boy, decides his only option is to follow his late parents’ example and commit suicide. But after failing to commit suicide, his 34-year-old English teacher Akemi Tanaka convinces him that he should instead move to Tokyo with her and become a lawyer on her dime. Unfortunately, Akemi doesn’t have quite as much money as she leads Norio to believe and has to secretly get a job at a karaoke bar. Meanwhile, she continuously prods her somewhat dimwitted student to work harder towards her manufactured goal of him becoming a lawyer. But Norio is not really interested in studying, and matters only get worse when he discovers his benefactor’s secret source of income.

Why is Norio not interested in studying? I'll leave it to you to find out. Anyway, you should check out To Walk Beside You sometime. I think you will enjoy it too.

Eternal First Love

2011-10-30T16:29:00.010-10:00

Today, I watched Eternal First Love, and it was a very good movie. Here's the synopsis:

Takeshi, an Italian restaurant chef, and Ruri could have been lovers, but Takeshi was too comfortable with their current relationship that he chose to stay best friends with her. Now, Ruri is engaged to another man, and Takeshi is deep in regret. He runs through the night of Tokyo to tell her his true feelings before it’s too late, but right as he stands in front of Ruri, an unfortunate accident happens. However, a twist of fate brings them back together once again in an ironic situation.

If you like eating food and watching romantic flicks, definitely buy this movie on YesAsia.com and watch it. I think you will like the soundtrack as well.

Flowers

2011-10-29T22:08:00.001-10:00

I just finished watching Flowers tonight, and I thought it was a great movie. Here's a brief summary:

A story about six women from three generations. In the 1930s, Rin is worried about her arranged marriage that her parents set up. Rin has three daughters: Kaoru, who tragically loses her husband in a car accident; Midori, a career woman who becomes shaken by a marriage proposal; and Sato, the youngest child. In the 1960s, Sato gives birth to Kana and Kei. In the present day, Kana is worried about becoming a single mother.

I would recommend Flowers to anyone who is looking for a movie about familial relationships and about people overcoming life's obstacles. This movie definitely gives the audience an insight into what many women went through in the past and what some are going through today.

A Solitary Strait

2011-10-28T21:06:00.001-10:00

I finally had some free time to watch the last episode of Kaikyo, and it was very good! Get some tissues ready before you watch this one, though, because it could make you cry. I'm not going to say what this episode is about; you're just going to have to watch it yourself. It's really good, trust me. In short, Kaikyo will definitely make you gain an appreciation of how a war and its aftermath could have a tremendous impact on people's lives.

You can buy this drama in DVD format here. I think it would make a very good Christmas or birthday present.

Useful JFreeChart Tips from Stack Overflow

2011-10-27T20:26:00.000-10:00

Instead of posting the following tips from Stack Overflow in this post, I'm creating a separate post that is dedicated to just JFreeChart. As always, I will be updating this list from time to time, so check back again soon for more tips.

Questions:

Answers:

How to evenly space out Y-axis tick units

Sunrise in Honolulu

2011-10-24T20:25:00.002-10:00

I took the following pictures this morning with my Canon point-and-shoot digital camera from the office where my desk is located at the company I work for, Referentia. I see this kind of sunrise every morning, and it's very beautiful. There's something soothing about those colors, which make me think about how wonderful life is. I hope you think so too.

Click on an image to view a larger version. Enjoy!