Implementation changes Design

Well, These past few week have been quite productive. I now have the project entirely on code.google.com, and I also was able to get the data from the web to the database successfully. This required changes to the design, but because of the lack of understanding with the persistence API many more things will be changing that fit better with the persistence API. I just have to make it display. There is quite a bit more work to do on that aspect, though it shouldn't be as hard as learning the persistence API. There are still some changes to be made to the entity classes, which will result in changes in the database. It shouldn't be too hard though. It will be nice to have those changes done. At some point I would like to get many things worked out, but programing is an incremental endeavor, and one that won't always be fast increments.
So A review of things left to be done for a .1 release:

1. Finish the chapter selection process
2. Write the necessary methods to display the chapter in the space provided
3. Create/edit notes
4. (a maybe) Have the basics of the users down.

Well, that would pretty much what is done right now. I will of course be working on it more tonight, and more this week.

After a Long Absence

OK, it has been a while since I posted before, and since a lot has changed, I decided to post again. Perhaps the biggest change is that I've re based the program on to the swing application framework, and then also I changed the hosting site to Google's site instead of source forge. I think Google has a few more ready made tools that make it easier. Anyways. I'm pretty much gonna have to redo the GUI section, though that shouldn't be too hard, especially with the GUI designer in Netbeans.
Some of the things I have accomplished within the past week or two:

• Got the scripture HTML converter fine tuned and working with the Database objects.
• Started (and still working on) getting a class written that facilitates downloading the scriptures.
  
• Wrote the functions to dynamically get the copyright from a scripture site.
  
• Got the project based on Swing Application Framework
• Switched Hosting to Goolge Code from sourceforge. This took care of some repository cleanup i was going to have to do.

This got me thinking I should probably put some of these things into packages more. And I should make a template/abstract class for the converters, so that they can all be interacted with in the same way. That way hopefully we can get another way of interacting with the class in a more consistent fashion.

Hopefully I can get .1 finished by the beginning of the school year. i had a scare with my laptop going down last night. The power cord got cut, and had started to short. After a little bit i opened it up and started to examine how it was made, etc. I found I could fix it after I had thought about it enough to realize I didn't need to try to save it anymore. It looks uglier, but it is more stable then before.

I think that is all the news and advancements made in the project for this post.

Status of Scripture Study Plus

I decided to keep a status update on Scripture Study Plus, what the advances are week by week.

To Start off with, right now the program is in a currently unusable state. So far we have a base graphical design, and some underlayment for some of the functionality. I think I have decided to go with the JavaDB(Apache Derby). It is embeddable across all platforms, and the drivers come with java.(as of 6 or later) Some of the most pressing things to do are:

1. Connect to an embedded database. (This is my top priority)
2. Reliably download the scriptures from online.
   
3. Connect the UI to the database.
   
4. Make notes workable.
5. Make highlighting workable
6. Make rudimentary search work.
7. Make an installer for the program.
   

I would to have the installer done when notes are done. That is pretty much my status report for now. I will hopefully have something to report next week.

Why PCLinuxOS is the Best

For many years I have been using desktop Linux. I like to try different distributions rather frequently. I fist started with Mandrake. Back when it was still Mandrake, and at version 7. something to bat. I then discovered the wonderful world of Suse. I have been mostly stuck on Suse since. I have gone out and tried different ones and burned through hundreds of cd-rs. I always had some sort of problem with the way other distrobutions handled things, and ran into "dependency hell" many times. I like Suse for it's ease of install, and ease of configuration. yast2 is fantastic. I do not, however, like the shift to gnome. Like the published internet articles about Linus not liking gnome, I too dislike gnome for the same reasons he does. Configuration is difficult at best. Downloading configuration tools after installing the desktop just does not seem like the way a desktop should be shipped. KDE can definitely be bloated. But all in all I know if I want to tweak the look and feel, i can. Gnome, not so much without a great deal of hassle. Even then I still have not figured out how to figure out how to get the clock in gnome to look like I want too. In KDE it is simple. Anyways, I have diverged from my original subject. I may post later on the reasons why I dislike gnome. Suse Linux has been the mainstay of my desktop for quite a while. I found that Suse Linux 10 to be absolutely fantastic. It was rock hard reliable, and did everything I ever wanted it to at the time. 10.1 then came out, and the package management absolutely stunk. The stability I was used to turned into a great deal of insecurity. I started to look at other distributions. Fedora jsut didn't work with my hardware. Gentoo was to hard to install (before their new way of installing). Mandrake turned to Mandriva and was not free. I was left with few distributions to try. Debian stable was too old, Debian testing to unstable, though I did love the Synaptic package manager and Debian packages. That wouldn't be a bad standard combination across any type distro of Linux. I then stumbled upon an awkwardly named distribution that seemed to be absolutely fantastic. It was PCLinuxOS. At version .93, it almost everything I wanted. The package manager was synaptic, and it functioned just like it did in debian, though it used RPM's instead of Deb's. I was still short a few applications that I really like(namely DDD) for programing, but nothing that is a huge show stopper. As I was using PCLOS I kept an eye on other distributions that were being released. Suse was up and coming with the newest features, and it seemed like PCLOS was lagging behind in the latest and greatest outside of KDE. Once Suse figured out the package management woes, I went back with 10.2. Until I saw the PCLOS was coming out with a new version, I was very happy. Suse always has been slow. I downloaded the latest beta, ( as stable as most releases for other distributions) and was very pleased with with what I saw and started using it ever since. that wasn't that long ago. I recommended it to everyone I knew, as long as they specifically didn't want a KDE desktop. If the wanted a gnome desktop, I recommended Ubuntu. I had tried Kubuntu, but the team over at Canonical obviously does not spend much time in the KDE desktop or Kubuntu distribution. It is the slowest implementation of KDE I have seen. Suse ran faster. I just got a laptop about three weeks ago. I put PCLOS on it right away, the OS (Vista) that came on it wasn't worth much. (Barely the electricity to store the bits that make it up.) I only had one problem. DVD playback with Beryl enabled caused blue dots to appear all over the screen. I thought I would simply install another "easy to use" Distribution to fix the problem. I tried Debian. It worked extremely well for that purpose, however my wifi card, a must have for school, didn't work. An absolute no go. the NDIS wrapper setup got it to connect to my network at home, but not the network at school. So I decided to try the newest release of Mandriva, still in Beta. That was an absolute flop. So I decided to go back to PCLOS. I found DVD playback worked just fine without beryl installed. So without a 3-d desktop, but DVD playback, I have my easy to use Wireless network capabilities (they really are the best that I have seen yet). That is why I am confident in being able to say that PCLOS is the best distribution out there. The Kernel maybe a bit old (I like the latest and greatest), but the stability is rock hard, and because of the closeness to the original configurations of packages, it is very easy to compile and install what is not packaged form the PCLOS team. So, after what as turned out to be a lengthy post, PCLOS is hard to be beat. Without a doubt I will be able to have 3d desktop features full time rather shortly. The packages for the 3d desktop projects aren't even at their feature complete state yet. So if you need a distribution that makes it extremely easy for the common computer user use, PCLOS is it.

(Can you tell I don't like paragraphs ;)?"