Life @ NCP

The world is full of people looking for spectacular happiness while they snub contentment. ~Doug Larson ****

I’ve been thinking about this word for a while. Just like how the universe wouldn’t get formed if even just one of the physics constant was a little bit different, it always makes me wonder what other life I can have if it didn’t turn up the way it did. Would I be happier now? would I be happier later? or is there even any difference?

Do you often wonder about this?

Happiness of course is whatever you want to define it as. To me … it is a state of which I am satisfied with myself. People keep on saying that happiness is a journey, not a state. But to me it is a state, so be it. I am talking about happiness that is more to just being content. It is not a state when you were happy when you eat your favorite ayam goreng, or when you get pooed by a bird (it’s a lucky sign according to the popular chinese belief), or when you manage to get a decent job. Once you are happy, you will be happy for a while because it is an accumulation of joyful events in your life. That kind of happy. I know I’m not being as clear, but my mind is currently clouded anyway.

It’s easy to define what was happiness in the prehistoric era. The challenges for those times were to avoid being eaten by other animals, and to feed the stomachs. Therefore the moment of living itself brought happiness to The Flintstones. Challenges correlated with happiness. Once culture and civilisation played a part in human’s life, suddenly filling our stomaches required us to get a job. So, we of course had to get a job. We did that, and then we were happy, again. A typical life of someone who lived 1000 years ago would be: born -> got a job -> (maybe procreated because that also made us happy :p) -> held the job for the lifetime -> died. Simple.

Happiness is a need for all of us. The prehistoric people were at the bottom of the pyramid, and Maslow said it is a normal progression to crave for more satisfaction in life when all the lower satisfactions have been reached. At the top of the pyramid, there are self-actualised people. Most of us fall into this category – people who are working toward fulfilling our potential, toward becoming all that we are capable of becoming. But here is the thing: what is it that each one of us are capable of becoming?

I am graduating this year. I have yet to come to terms with it. I won’t have ‘student’ as my occupation anymore very very soon. I won’t be able to pay concession fee anymore (damn), and there are few more tidbits that come with it. The end of uni opens up a big hole about what can I become? Decisions have to be made at the end of the day, regardless of how much I wonder what it would be like if I decide otherwise ((it reminds me of The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost)). Ignorance is bliss and I wish I won’t spend more time thinking about it. Hobos sleeping on the road only worry about whether they can get food and a place to sleep for the night. Why the hell do I need to worry more?

Well I hope I will be able to find my happiness, sometime even in the faraway future, and I hope everyone who have to make similar decisions as what they are capable of will be, because thinking about it too much will make life less enjoyable.

ps. Gargh my last post was two months ago! &#@%#*! Work, recruitment and thesis are really stealing my time away…

Been playing with GWT ((was very shiny in May 2006)) lately – procrastinating from having to read journal papers. GWT seemed to be pretty good, I am mostly satisfied with the code I produced in terms of design. Much more satisfied than writing (and DEBUGGING) Java Script eeek. But I found the tutorial on GWT is very limited, especially around the actual widgets to create good UI. Maybe GWT users are assumed to be familiar with html/css/java script in general and therefore are proficient in creating UI.

GWT to me, brings a new level of creating UI. UI now can be created with OO concept, no more slabs of long and drowning html/javascript. A self-labeled button is a good example to showcase GWT ability.

What I usually see in the ‘Web 2.0’ app UI, is a radio button where the name of the button can be changed on the fly. See what I meant below, the state goes in order of (1) -> click ‘Unlabeled’ -> (2) -> type ‘Self-labeled’ -> (3)

When I click on the button label ‘Unlabeled’, a textarea will appear and allow me to change the label. Once I click outside the textarea, it will change back to the previous state, but with the new label.

Each of these self-labeled radio button can be created as a widget. The widget is a horizontal panel which consist of a nameless radio button, a label, and a text area. On (1), the radio button and the label are added to the panel. Clicking the label brings the state to (2) – the label is removed from the panel, and the textarea is added. When an onLostFocus event is triggered, the textarea is removed and the label is added back. Of course after the texts are matched between the two elements.

Here is some of the snippet of the code:

[cc lang=”java”]
public class SelfLabeledButton extends Composite {

public SelfLabeledButton(String label) {
button = new RadioButton(“group”,””); // nameless radio button
panel.add(button);
buttonLabel = new Label(label);
buttonLabel.addClickListener(listener);
panel.add(buttonLabel);
buttonTextArea = new TextBox();
buttonTextArea.addFocusListener(listener);

initWidget(panel);
}

private HorizontalPanel panel = new HorizontalPanel();
private RadioButton button;
private Label buttonLabel;
private TextBox buttonTextArea;
private MCListener listener = new MCListener();

private class MCListener implements ClickListener, FocusListener {

// when (1) -> (2)
public void onClick(Widget sender) {
if (sender instanceof Label) {
panel.remove(buttonLabel);
buttonTextArea.setText(buttonLabel.getText());

panel.add(buttonTextArea);
buttonTextArea.selectAll();
}
}

public void onFocus(Widget sender) {
// do nothing
}

// when (2) -> (3)
public void onLostFocus(Widget sender) {
panel.remove(buttonTextArea);
buttonLabel.setText(buttonTextArea.getText());
panel.add(buttonLabel);
}
}

…

}
[/cc]

I listen to podcast pretty frequently, so I thought I will list some of them that are really good. The topic itself matters, but the speaker is the one that matters the most. Have a lookie here, and I will update it as I go from now on. The link to the page is also available from the menu on your right.

I was blown away by MyGWT ((was very shiny in Sept 2007)) after seeing what it can do on its demo. I quickly jumped on my squirtle and started to read the tutorial madly. But sadly the tutorial wasn’t really made for a dumb-ass like myself, so it took me painfully long hours just to run my mygwt hello world! If you look through the tutorial, it firstly doesn’t look like a ‘Creating your first MyGWT application’ type of thing. It was too ambitious trying to explain some concepts instead of focusing on getting something to work.

GWT hasn’t been there for a long time, so I think it will be good to have some reference to at least how to get GWT working (point them out to gwt site perhaps?). What about connecting your project to eclipse? There is a page on ‘Configuring Eclipse’, but again, wasn’t even referenced in 101.

So here it goes, hopefully you can follow this steps to make something work. I will assume that you are new to gwt and you are using eclipse, so I will start from Installing GWT and then MyGWT.

Download the source for this tutorial here. This is only for viewing purpose, don’t expect it to unzip it and work (because it is downloaded straight from my local directory). You will need to follow the tutorial.

Installing GWT

Download GWT from gwt site.

Unzip the folder in your workspace folder and treat it as an individual java project.

Add the unzipped folder to your environment variable PATH, so add something like ‘C:Documents and SettingsMeworkspacegwt-windows-1.4.61’ if you are using Windows. Other OS shouldn’t be too different.

Lets call our application MyGWT100. Create another folder using that name in your workspace (case sensitive). From inside the folder, run ‘projectCreator -eclipse MyGWT100’ from the command line. You should be getting messages such as this:

Created directory C:Documents and SettingsMartyworkspaceMyGWT100src <br /> Created directory C:Documents and SettingsMartyworkspaceMyGWT100test <br /> Created file C:Documents and SettingsMartyworkspaceMyGWT100.project <br /> Created file C:Documents and SettingsMartyworkspaceMyGWT100.classpath

The projectCreator that comes with the gwt version I am using is not smart enough to create the folder ‘MyGWT100’ on its own, therefore if you didn’t create the folder first before you run the projectCreator, you will end up with those 4 items scattered around.

Once that’s done, run ‘applicationCreator -eclipse MyGWT101 com.mycompany.client.MyGWT101’. Make sure that the final package is ‘client’, gwt should then spit out something like this:
Created directory C:Documents and SettingsMartyworkspaceMyGWT100srccommycompany <br /> Created directory C:Documents and SettingsMartyworkspaceMyGWT100srccommycompanyclient <br /> Created directory C:Documents and SettingsMartyworkspaceMyGWT100srccommycompanypublic <br /> Created file C:Documents and SettingsMartyworkspaceMyGWT100srccommycompanyMyGWT100.gwt.xml <br /> Created file C:Documents and SettingsMartyworkspaceMyGWT100srccommycompanypublicMyGWT100.html <br /> Created file C:Documents and SettingsMartyworkspaceMyGWT100srccommycompanyclientMyGWT100.java <br /> Created file C:Documents and SettingsMartyworkspaceMyGWT100MyGWT101.launch <br /> Created file C:Documents and SettingsMartyworkspaceMyGWT100MyGWT101-shell.cmd <br /> Created file C:Documents and SettingsMartyworkspaceMyGWT100MyGWT101-compile.cmd

When you run ‘MyGWT100-shell’, it should come up with gwt wrapper html

If you can see that, it is a good thing 🙂

Installing MyGWT

Download the zip file from here, and unzip them in your workspace folder just like you did with gwt.

Add your MyGWT100 as a java project in eclipse. Your package explorer view should look like this:

Right click on the project and choose ‘Build Path -> Configure Build Path’. Go to ‘Libraries’ tab and click on ‘Add External JARs’. Look for the unzipped folder of MyGWT that you previously downloaded. Directly in the folder, you should be able to find ‘mygwt.jar’. Your view should look like this now:

In MyGWT100.gwt.xml, add this line underneath the line that is already there.

In MyGWT100.html, empty the area by removing the default example text from gwt. Your body area should just be .

Now to the last utmost essential part, edit your ‘MyGWT100-shell.cmd’ and ‘MyGWT100-compile.cmd’ files. In both files, you should be able to see something like this: @java -cp “%~dp0src;%~dp0bin;C:/Documents and Settings/Marty/workspace/gwt-windows-1.4.61/gwt-user.jar;C:/Documents and Settings/Marty/workspace/gwt-windows-1.4.61/gwt-dev-windows.jar”

You will need to include mygwt.jar to it, so it becomes:

@java -cp “%~dp0src;%~dp0bin;C:/Documents and Settings/Marty/workspace/gwt-windows-1.4.61/gwt-user.jar;C:/Documents and Settings/Marty/workspace/gwt-windows-1.4.61/gwt-dev-windows.jar;C:/Documents and Settings/Marty/workspace/mygwt-0.4.44/mygwt.jar“

Double click on ‘MyGWT100-shell.cmd’ on the Package Explorer to run your code. This is what you should be able to see:

Yay!

Note: I am using gwt-windows-1.4.61 and MyGWT0.4.44 for this tutorial.

Sorry. Based on the information you have submitted to us, you are ineligible to register for YouTube.com. That’s the only message come up whenever I tried to register. I tried using different email address, tried using different youtube ID, made sure that my age was +18. Still no luck.. very sad