Finally, a personal-category post. I’ve upgraded to WordPress v2.7; if you experience any problems, please shoot me an email at…

benjaminkreeger [at] gmail [dot] com

In other news, Academia is completely finished (turned it in last Monday), and I’ll probably throw it up on my server along with the source code here once finals are over. Okay, okay — I only have one actual final, but I’m too busy learning Objective-C and studying for that final (two unrelated activities) in the meantime.

EDIT: I actually just peeked behind the hood at the changes to the WordPress dashboard UI. It’s nothing short of awesome and another reason you should be using WordPress as your blogging-platform-of-choice.

So I’m writing another C# app, but this one is for a Systems Design class. It’s a small app (part of a larger imaginary implementation) that displays doctor and patient records (as well as outrageous patient account balances) at a hospital. I’m probably not allowed to divulge much (it is vaguely based off of an existing system being put in place in our area) but here’s a goofy screenshot of me testing the app. Enjoy!

For a short progress indicator on Academia’s progress? It’s almost done. I’ve got to figure out a few things for it this afternoon (how to send the contents of a text field to the printer in C# .NET, for one thing) and then I’ll turn it in late tonight to my instructor. I present my code in class tomorrow, so here’s to hoping I remember everything I’ve done (my comments help, but I don’t know if they’ll help me THAT much in my presentation).

Once I’ve got it turned in and the semester’s open, I’ll post it in the software section along with its source code. What’s my next project, you ask? Well, after finishing up the semester (and all the other projects I’ve got going on), I’m going to take up Objective-C and Cocoa. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do (program for Mac OS X and the iPhone), and I’ve found some great resources (online and off-) that are going to help me out. That, and my Windows programming class has re-introduced me to a lot of object-oriented programming concepts that are helping me learn ObjC (already — I’m following Stanford’s online Cocoa Programming course, and it’s a big help). That’s it for me. Off to work!

I’ve been working on a little desktop design under Windows, and I’ve switched from Rainmeter to Samurize because the latter is easier for a dummy like me to set it up. It’s a work in progress; I hope to make it look really really cool by the time it’s done. Screenshot after the jump.

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I’ve been hammering away at Academia for the past week now (took one day off in the middle), and I’ve made some really good progress on it. I’ve finished most of the add and modify sections; there are a few big things left that I need to implement in those places (including deleting students as well as blank-field input checks), but for the most part, they’re complete. Screenshots and more details after the jump.

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Although I’m a fool with little skill in graphic design, I present to you the icon for Academia, along with a little description of why I made what I made.

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I’ve been doing gobs of work lately on Academia, and I’ve gotten to a small little milestone I’ve set for myself as “Part I,” and that’s the create portion of the application. Well, creating a new student and associating courses with it. Which was a huge source of confusion in my brain, originally. Read on for a few other missteps I had while doing it (sorry, no screenshots yet, maybe later).

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Okay, don’t panic. It’s nothing big. It’s only the reason I haven’t posted much in the past… several weeks. It’s called school. But on top of that is the application I’m writing for my CIS334 (Advanced Windows Programming) C# final project: Academia. And I’m going to try to log my progress publicly through my site. I’ll attach my project proposal to the end of this post once I boot back into OS X and get the file for it.

Edit: here’s the project proposal.

I’ve heard some news that Missouri State’s CIS program is being transitioned into an all-online degree, by order of the Provost (yes, with a capital P). This is alarming, and I’ll tell you why: I’m a CIS major who’s had a few total-online classes (I’m not talking about the blended courses) in the degree, and they have been far less than satisfactory, to put it nicely.

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I think this is the nail in the coffin for my MacBook’s Seagate hard drive. Last night I woke up my laptop to finish my Windows Programming mid-term and OS X froze hard. After a hard reset it crashed again, and then I resorted to Disk Utility which told me my volume couldn’t be repaired. Again. This happened a couple of weeks ago, too, so I think there’s something a bit goofy with my hard drive. I shouldn’t have to be reformatting my hard drive twice a month.

This afternoon I’m taking it to Database Systems and putting it in their Apple Certified repair shop so they can take a look at it. It’s still under AppleCare, and I actually have backups of all my data this time, so it’s not so bad (plus, fall break starts for me in about 45 minutes, so at least it’s not in the middle of an extremely busy week). I just wish hard drives (laptop ones in particular) were engineered to not fail so often (1 in 20 in the first 3 years, I hear is the statistic). When you think about it, that’s a shit ton of hard drives.