This week: 2-26-11

This week I did some serious reviewing for the AP test. I reviewed the major concepts of object oriented programming. For example, I reviewed the difference between public and private. I also reviewed the concepts of encapsulation and aliasing. One of the most interesting concepts I reviewed was "this". The idea that there is a pointer that can refer to instance variables in a method is interesting. I had a bit of difficulty with the concepts of 'static' but I think I understand.

As a side note I'm excited about the new mac releases.

Another Blog Post

I need another blog post so I've decided to write about an application I've got on a USB drive. When I was back at Kealing there were some applications that people would pass to each other between flash drives. The first application I'd like to talk about is falling sand. From a teacher's point of view, falling sand is a menace. IT's easy to transfer between students, the window is small and easily concealable, and the application is a big time waster. However, I believe that falling sand is one of the best things for computer science. In fact, falling sand got me interested in programming. At one point in 6th grade I got a copy of falling sand with the source file. It turns out that kealing had an active community of students that would reprogram falling sand with their own elements. We would make tons of crazy elements other than the standard fire and oil. We programmed in electricity, fireworks, sparks, mudbombs. It was seriously fun and introduced me to the concept of programming. After that, I wanted to know more so I began to explore other programming languages.

As it turns out, the code for falling sand is similar to html. I remember using tags to create new elements. Although I no longer have the source code to edit, I still have a custom version of falling sand at home.

Progress Update

I have made some significant progress in this class. While you weren't here, I took some time off of working on my application to study some more computer science theory. I reviewed 'for each' loops as well as arrays (1 and 2-d), exceptions, and calling methods. Overall, the two times you were gone were spent reading from the AP preparation book. Also, I got a new Asus laptop. It runs pretty well except there isn't much RAM.

 double[][] matrix = new double [x][y]; //creates a matrix in 2-d that is x rows by y columns

Progress

This week has seen a bit of everything. I've done less studying for the AP exam. Instead, I've been working diligently on my Quizbowl application. I was stumped by the task of dividing a paragraph into sentences. It seems easy. You'd think I could just split it by periods. It isn't that easy. To do this yourself you would need to create an Arraylist. Then, you would need to parse that array list for periods. Instead, I tried using break iterators.
The problem I found is that most of the code for the break iterator is private and hidden. I can't edit the code. The break iterator defines a sentence as the string between periods and /n. There are no methods that allow me to ignore the /n boundary. Another student in my class has advised me to try using tokenizers. As it turns out he was right (for the wrong reason). String tokenizers do allow me to specify what boundaries I want to use. I have made significant process in using string tokenizers to automatically analyze files that the user will input. In the process, I've studied strings, boolean algebra, and methodology that will help me on the AP.