Oh, what a beautiful weather! It's quiet here at Chess; many people left already. I feel a lot better now than a week ago; my cold is almost over.

More good news: the deadline for the 5th assignment of Internet Programming has been extended with a week.

A few hours ago I submitted the fourth assignment of Internet Programming... Teddy Bears.com!

Always a relief to be ready with such a thing.

I am currently at the VU to pick up some papers for my graduation. I would like to graduate before the end of August, for financial reasons mainly. However, the official graduation date is not very related to the date of the official event. That means that I can choose between the following dates: August 27th, September 17th and October 15th. No matter what the date will be... everybody's invited!

Brought back a book to the CWI -- didn't have to pay a fine this time. Back to Chess now.

The 4th assignment of Internet Programming is to develop a website where you can buy Teddy Bears online. It just has to be a simple prototype, although 'under water' it has to communicate with the "Bank" I made in exercise 3 and the advertisement server.

It is a very nice assignment (I like it better than programming in C), and a bit similar to my job. However at Chess I never have to bother about layout, and for this site that is part of the assignment of course. The very first version is ready, and it's ready for visitors! And if you ask me, it looks a lot nicer than the real Teddy Bears.com.

Jennie, a friend of mine is also doing this assignment, and she has created a website where you can buy sheep (she likes sheep).

Well, that was a wonderful weekend... I'm pretty much ready with the programs. There are always things that can be more beautiful etc, but it does what it should do and a bit more.

Tomorrow evening I'll work on the documentation, the deadline is Tuesday.

The person who said he likes C better than Java will have a very hard time convincing me now :)

Yesterday evening I implemented the RMI part of the assignment. The goal is to transfer an 'advertisement' (a jpg picture usually) from one computer to another one using RMI, and in another part using RPC.

It's a nice exercise. There are many different technologies involved and altogether I'm writing about 9 programs that all have to work together (in different languages). I hope the next exercise doesn't get any bigger than this though -- it takes a lot of time. I think I'll make it but it's good I took a day off yesterday.

Now I'm integrating yesterday's programs with my "bank server" -- placing advertisements isn't free of course so there are also electronic payments. Some results, just to get an idea:

Guus>> java BankExperiment
Wrote.
Server: HELLO BankServer 1.0
Server: BANK_PAY_RESULT -3

The server (written in C):

Guus>> ./bankd 
Database initialized.
Accepted connection from 127.0.0.1:40184.
Received: HELLO Expertiment 1.0
BANK_PAY 123 123 50.50
Scanf: 2; version 1.000000, hello string: BankExperiment
Start of response: 22
------- To execute: BANK_PAY 123 123 50.50
Scanf BANK_PAY: 3.
Tranfer_money(123, 123, 50.500000) = -3
Writing back to client: HELLO BankServer 1.0
BANK_PAY_RESULT -3 (I am pid=26071).
Closed socket 127.0.0.1:40184.

Today is the first day off at Chess I took. My collegues will likely be surprised to read this because I'm working in the Chess office.

I'm doing the 3rd assignment of Internet Programming. It is quite some work and I'm afraid a weekend wouldn't be enough.


Today is for the Java part of the exercise... it's so much nicer to do than the first part (which had to be written in old-fashioned C).

I've been programming from 12:00 till 23:00 o'clock yesterday, and today from 9:00 till 22:00 again... The assignments are nice but it's not exactly a weekend feeling.

At the end of the afternoon the computers of the VU stopped functioning, one after another. Nobody seems to be able to login anymore. Luckily enough I still have 1 SSH terminal open. Because FTP connections can not be made either I have to 'upload' my files with a cat > file.c command and copy & paste from the editor to my terminal window.

After a (very nice) week of programming there is now a weekend with... programming. I'm working on the 2nd assignment of Internet Programming.

I expect to be working on it all weekend, last time it also took a lot of time. It's quite interesting; the assignment is the make a few small webservers to experiment with various techniques. The deadline is Tuesday.

The first assignment of the course I started took more time than I thought it would. The good news is that it's also a lot more useful than I thought it would be.

I've been working on the first assignment from around 12:00 o'clock till now. Sasha has also been writing a paper so we spent the day quite useful.

It will be another hour or two: two small Java programs and some documentation and then I'm done.