I am sitting in the last day of the design patterns class. In merely four classes, we have learned 19-23 object oriented design patterns.

The textbook is a classic, many say. But it is definitely as dry as an over-toasted bread. It contains a lot of concepts that are difficult to be associated with real life examples if we do not happen to use them at work. And some of them simply invoke my reaction of “that is a design pattern?!!”

For example, we already have Iterator interface in Java, but I would never have thought that it was derived from a design pattern. I guess it is true, C++ didn’t have it.

Interpreter is basically a way to parse formal grammar. It is difficult to find any real life example besides pattern matching or for developing compilers. What else do we need to use it for?

Proxy is a well-known solution. It is also a design pattern? And object pools is widely used today as the basis for connection pooling. I never knew that connetion pooling is also an implementation of singleton, where all requests to connections go through a single point of entrance.

Some of the design patterns are driving me nuts; my mind is like a swirling sundae. Bridge and adapter. Bridge and visitor. State and strategy. God. They look like twins to me! If I just look at the class diagrams, they look very very VERY similar! Yet they are designed to solve different problems? What is the next higher level up of abstraction? Can’t we have another abstract solution for all these similar problems?

Leave me alone, please. After this class, I shall stop thinking like the nerds here in class for a while. Then I need to pick up the book again to review everything, re-do all homework to refresh memory, and redraw all class diagrams to help me understand the similarities and differences of all of them. Probably then I will blog about each design pattern to drive my readers nuts, like me right now. =) You will know what I mean by “my mind is like a sundae” then.

This is not the first time already. My fingers and wrists and arms hurt from typing too much. Bad posture, perhaps. Now every finger movement on the keyboard triggers some soreness and pain that travels from tip of those fingers to wrists, to upper arms, to elbows, to upper arms, and then reaches my shoulders.

I feel good in spirit. I have been drinking Red Bull to keep my energy up. I am getting more work done, feeling the pressure of deadlines. All is good.

Classes are ending soon. That pressure will be lifted for a few weeks, until the next wave hits me. Two major deadline in June. I can feel the time is clicking. Can’t believe it’s already the end of May.. crap.

How many times I thought that I just had the perfect business idea, only to find out that either it has already been implemented, or that something similar is launched in a few months after I thought of it?

Well, this time I am more “hurt” than ever, almost felt that I was cheated.

http://www.411song.com/

This site offers the service that you can call in and play a tune for 15 seconds, and it will be able to identify the song for you.

My idea originally, is to be able to send in any type of analog signal, then the service will provide you with song information, and all artists who have played/sang it. It will be a nice feature for finding song’s original singers and backgrounds.

This time, just like the numberless times in the past year, that my idea is implemented by somebody else, more or less similar to what I had in mind. The thing that made me the saddest, is not that somebody gets to make money out of it while I cannot. It is that even if I have a better “solution” or “service” in the future, those people who came up with the simpler solutions would have already patented it, making my idea less original and profitable.

This is really lame.

Garnet Hertz: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

This is a weird project. Truely, weird. Using a giant cockroach to control a robot? Err.. I find it almost shocking that this guy is from my own school, in the program that I was once interested in (Interdisciplinary arts, Computer and engineer program). But if I had known that some projects might be something like this, to deal with cockroaches, I would have never wanted to be 500 feet near the buildings.

But I find some of the Q&A quite funny.

Isn’t it cruel to use a cockroach like this?

People are upset if cockroaches are healthy, happy and producing piles of babies in their kitchens. People are also upset if they are being hurt for the sake of entertainment… The insects I use lead normal, healthy lives: if you don’t believe me, send me your address and I’ll slip some eggs under your front door.

You should read for yourself. =)

While meeting with my supervisor today, I realized I have one deadline coming. It’s supposed to be due beginning of June!!! But that project has been dragging so long because of numerous unknown/unsolved issues on the data extract portion, now it’s only 50% done!

AHH!

The other project is not going too smoothly either. After our IBM OS upgrade, now all the security needs to be re-tested for the web application that I am responsible for. Apparently, nothing works after the upgrade. *sigh. Access issues, file permission issues, database access issues…

I was really hoping at least one thing could go right. But I guess not. =\