Month: November 2019

Updating CSCI 205

CSCI 205 has been a highly successful course for our majors. It is a lot of work for students, and likewise for the instructors who teach it (myself and Prof. Chris Dancy.) But, the rewards have been plenty, as the course teaches a lot about there is a lot of material that is out of date. The course will still relying on Java 7, and used Netbeans.

I’ve taken quite a bit of extra time this semester to update some of the course. As of Fall 2019, the course has been updated in the following ways:

  • We are now using IntelliJ IDEA
  • The course has been updated to Java 12
  • Many videos have been re-recorded to address the updated content, including:
    • Heavier emphasis on lambda expressions than ever before
    • Teaching more java.nio and java.nio2 along with java.io
    • Added new material on socket programming with java.net
    • Added new material on multithreading and concurrency in Java
    • Introduced the Java Stream API (not to be confused with the I/O streams)
  • The final project has been overhauled. Every student now must use Gitlab for all their Scrum task board and sprint management (This has worked surprisingly well!)
  • Expanded the JavaFX material 

It’s a start. There is a lot to be done still.

In a recent discussion with Chris Dancy, he expressed significant interest in incorporating elements of engineering social justice into the course. This represents a broader move by the engineering community at large to start helping our students recognize the impact that their choices have on humanity. I am at fault here. Like many of us, we focus on the goals without teaching our students the impacts that their choices have. Well, that’s not entirely true. I discuss impact – computational resource impact. That’s not enough. I do not give enough attention to social, moral or ethical impact. So, I believe this will be the next set of revisions we make to the course. Chris may likely start on some of those changes in Spring 2020. But, we’ll likely make a more substantial effort to incorporate this into the project over the summer. It’s time for engineers to emphasize people as more important considerations than profits.

Posting from MarsEdit

I’m still slacking off on my hope to do a better job with keeping a presence online. I need massive simplicity, and as much as I dig WordPress, I don’t find the workflow intuitive. So, on my quest to find the simplest, easiest editor that will let me publish posts quickly, with relatively rich content, I continue to stumble around. Nothing out there does exactly what I want. And frankly, this is just not anywhere near representing a high priority. Blogo was easy to use, but they died. I’m not sure where they went? IFTTT supports an automatic hook to allow a new Evernote post to post to WP, but not a self-hosted WP blog like this. I am close to just giving up and editing directly on the WP interface. Given the great functionality that Project Gutenberg has given to WP users with Blocks, that’s not really a bad option. My bit of frustration comes just with dealing with media files, mostly images.

So, checking out MarsEdit, available on the App Store. Do not let the free price to download and install fool you. It’s free with complete features for 14-days, then your ability to publish content is disabled. To continue, you must pay $49 for a full license.

Here’s the interface running on my Mac in Dark Mode. You can see it fully supports Dark Mode in Catalina:

There are also options to edit your slug, tags, select the WP categories this post is assigned to, select your featured image, and other server options to set your post status, author, whether comments are closed, etc. Overall, it seems quite simple. But, I mostly care about editing. You can see above it’s a basic functional rich-text editor. It supports the most common formatting commands.

Yet, we know that WP has made a substantial commitment to its Project Gutenberg – their new Blocks editor. So, what happens when you publish a brand new post? It comes up in “classic” mode when you open your post in WP:

I can attempt to convert my post to Blocks…

MarsEdit_convert_to_blocks

but sometimes it results in no change, and leaves your post in classic mode. Other times, it does indeed work. I’m not certain what the triggers are that prevent your post from converting to separate blocks, though this is not a big deal to me.

At first glance, this tool seems a bit pricey. However, the workflow I need to quickly publish updates from my Mac with minimal effort is definitely there. I might adopt this. Why? There are two tools I rely on extensively when writing documentation – quick screen captures, and recording quick little GIF animations. Having to save a file, upload it to my Media, and then reference it, is an absolute pain.

I’ll try this for a bit…