I'm moving my blogging back to my website. It has been fun blogging here, but it is more advantageous to blog at my own domain:

http://indicium.us/site_blog/

For those of you who followed me here from my original blog, I apologize for the confusion. I hope you'll continue to track my feed back at my site.

I wrote a little applet called Logician, which is similar to the game Master Mind. Hardly a unique applet, of course, but it was a good way for me to "warm up" and learn a lot of the API. It is available here:

http://indicium.us/cgi-bin/pages/get?view=log

One thing which took me by surprise, as far as Java programming goes, is that drawing to the graphics buffer, and then calling repaint(), is not the same thing as using double buffering. I had just assumed,...

I wrote a small Gentoo tutorial, which detailed one of my experiences trying to get back traces under Gentoo.

http://indicium.us/cgi-bin/pages/get?view=gentoo_bt

Small tip: Be careful when copying text from an Open Office document to your web browser. I copied from an OO document to my Movable Type editor, only to find out when I posted that the formatting was all messed up -- specifically the spacing, margins, and line breaks.

I went back to the Movable Type editor, switch to HTML mode, and I saw that there was a whole bunch of junk in the HTML such as inline styling and extra return characters. It took me about half-an-hour to remove all...

A question I've pondered a few times, revisited in my recent work in Java, which seems to have a pretty solid exception handling system: How deep do you go in handling exceptions? As I see it, there seems to be a few categories:

• Errors cause by bad input from the end-user. (Enters data he is not supposed to, clicks on things he shouldn't, etc.)
• Errors cause by external circumstances that are expected to happen from time to time. (Network connection was dropped, etc.)
• Errors caused by a programmer

...