I was looking for a Java plotting/graphing library to do some of the hard work in my new GA optimisation piece. I came across JFreeChart. While I haven’t used it yet, I was sufficiently impressed with the examples on their site that I had to post the link. So here it is: http://www.jfree.org/index.html. I’ll be sure to add to this post when I’ve had a little time working with it. ~ 1 hour later ~ Ok, I’m back. Download 2 things: the library jfreechart-1.0.13.zip, and the dependency jcommon-1.0.16.tar.gz. They’re both on sourceforge. Extract them wherever you keep your user java libraries (eg...

Just found a great little intro to Singletons in Java. Didn’t want to loose it. So here it is: http://www.javacoffeebreak.com/articles/designpatterns/index.html For coordinating interactions between GUI output, GUI controls, and a background model, try the MVC design pattern. See here for example. Here is something on the Sun site. But the best I’ve found so far...

I needed a way to save and recall data easily from within my Java programs. After a little googling I found XStream, which is a package that will encode an entire object into XML: String xml = xstream.toXML(myObject); and decode it when you need it: MyClass newObject = (MyClass)xstream.fromXML(xml); Wow! I suppose these XML parsers are available in all OOP languages. This is the first time I’ve seen one. I can’t believe how powerful it is. I guess the point is that you just save the state of your whole program in one go. In this blog I’m going to go through a full noob-friendly example of how to get...

In the wee hours of Monday morning, while most of my side of the world is tucked away in bed, Europeans sit in stadiums, basking in the shimmering heat rising from black tarmac, and the unmistakable scream of 24 Formula 1 cars. That scream is turned right down on my tv. I don’t want to wake anyone, so I’ve turned all the lights off too. The flickering screen lights the room just enough to see. But I’m so awake; tonight I’m on European time. This is my first coding blog, and it’s about a software project that burrowed itself into the back of my mind some time during my undergrad years… probably while...