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.

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 revamped Academia’s main menu just a tiny bit, as I’ve changed up the title section and the background and merged them into an image and set that as the background. I may do that for the input forms, but I doubt it (only if time allows and I find a neat-looking, non-obtrusive way of doing it).

As you look at the modify form, shown on the right, you will be able to select a student from the list, and edit their various bits of information. On the far far right of the screenshot is the part where you can add or modify that current student’s classes. The ‘add class’ form that shows up is almost an exact copy of the ‘add student’ form (minus the student input part). When you select a class from the dropdown list below the add class button, the semester/year/grade fields are shown. From there you can make changes to those bits, and save changes (or delete a class if you’d like). I haven’t yet implemented a confirmation dialog that asks if you want to delete; I’ll do that for the delete student button as well, once I put it in.

Tonight I spent all my time rewriting my Course and Enrollment classes; I setup Course before I even thought to implement Enrollment as a class, and thus when you enrolled a student in a course, it would talk to a method in the Student class that would talk to the Enrollment database layer class, sending it a Student object and a Course object. I rewrote all that so the form would instead talk to the Enrollment class and it would create an Enrollment instead of a Course — the way it was meant to be in the first place. I also rewrote the way that courses were brought up when you’d select them from the drop down lists in the Add forms to match the Update forms. In other words, I probably should have thought more about modifying the database before adding to it. I probably didn’t plan that well enough.

That’s enough from me tonight. Thanksgiving is coming up, everyone. Eat lots of turkey, tofurkey, chicken, spam, or whatever it is that your family chooses. I’ll be eating my fair share, and coding over the break as well. Have fun!

• The two circles overlap because the app is meant to focus on relational databases and how certain data will overlap and relate and form complete queries.
• It’s in black & white because the program is overly simplified for what it does.
• And it’s A+, because that’s the grade I hope to get on this project (I guess you could look at it because it’s for inputting grades).

My first dilemma was getting the user to input their courses. How was I going to go about implementing that? My initial idea was to have the user just type in the name of the class and the grade they got. I then realized that if this became an actual application on the market (free or commercial), that wouldn’t cut it. Well, a lot of the stuff I’m doing probably wouldn’t cut it, anyway — but I wasn’t okay with that method of user input. So I went with combo boxes. All combo boxes. Except the name of the course, which gets pulled from the database and stuck on the form as a simple text label.

My second dilemma actually got solved before the first one did, and that’s which classes to include in my database (or rather how to get them there in the first place). I wanted to keep things simple (something I usually have problems doing), so I went with Missouri State’s class schedule to get course codes and short descriptions. I figured it wouldn’t be much of a problem to use the whole course catalog, so I began to copy. I would’ve gotten though the whole catalog in 20 minutes, but I stopped halfway through and realized something. I’ve got to put in credit hour amounts for each one of these classes, and I’m already at 2,000 classes. So I backtracked and only selected a set of departments (business ones like Marketing, Accounting, Management, CIS); I have close to 300 classes in my database, and I think that’ll do fine for what I’m trying to do. I may update the classes with better class names (right now they’re abbreviated names that look pretty crappy on a form) but I’ll save that for once I’ve got everything else done.

Meanwhile, I’m throwing together songs while I’m slinging code that really get me pumped. Call me nerdy, but they’re great motivators for me. And no, there’s no Barry Manilow. I’ll probably post the mix once I’m finished with Academia.

On my to-do list? Create an application icon, for one. I’d like to get that out of the way before I move on to Part II, or the update form. It’s another great motivator, because I like design more than I like coding. I’ll certainly post the icon on here once it’s done.

I’m tired, so I’m calling it a night.

Edit: here’s the project proposal.

Instruction is difficult when it comes to teaching a database course online. I understand that. So why have it online? In conferring with the others in my online class(es), they’d much rather have some sort of session where we meet in class part of the time, and turn in assignments online. Course instruction would make more sense to us students that way. Either way, I’m not bitching about one or two classes that don’t work out online. I’m upset for the students that will have to take their entire degree online in this manner. There are some courses that are being taught online well, and there are some that are sad excuses for online classes. Instead of transitioning the entire CIS degree into an online course, why don’t we examine how students feel about the current online classes given and improve on those first? Otherwise, we’re going to have this whole major where students have no idea what’s going on.

I think I’ve lost all the fury I had stored up about this since originally hearing about it a couple of weeks ago. But the bottom line is still there: let’s improve our existing program first, and then work to make it more accessible to students outside of the university (and charging them double per credit hour). Unless, of course, all the university cares about is making tons and tons of money. And in that case (the likely one) it seems like the customers, the students, are quickly losing their buying power. And the university is going in whatever-the-hell direction the Provost herself chooses.

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.