Shambling Towards Perfection

So now that my Master of Science degree is complete, I've decided to start working on the The Knitting Guild Assocation 's (TKGA)  Masters Program - Hand Knitting . There are 3 levels, and the first involves knitting a mitten plus 16 swatches, writing a report and answering questions about the swatches. On the surface it seems pretty easy, but from reading the Ravelry group's posts  I'm quite convinced that it's not. The knitting has to be technically nearly perfect: no weird stretched out stitches, no "rowing out" (in stockinette, where your purls and knits aren't the same tension so there's a visible difference between rows), etc. The swatches and mitten are to be blocked, which helps with some things, but not everything. It's extremely common to have to re-knit and/or re-write things, even by very experienced knitters (e.g. people who've been knitting 30 or 40 years). It should be plenty challenging for me. I'm currently working on...

I met with my professor on Monday and luckily he was very understanding about the lack of visible progress this sprint. I wasn't able to demo the entire system, only a few command-line tools to prove that what I did get done is actually working. But he was fine with my progress anyhow. We discussed when we would next meet, and decided that (since I'm crazy busy this week and will be out of town for a few days, as well) we'll meet the Monday after Thanksgiving. So this will be a 3 week sprint. I intend to push hard to finish this rewrite; since I will have a 5 day weekend for Thanksgiving I think it's do-able. This is the beginning of the end for the basic functionality of the system. I should be done by the beginning of the spring semester, leaving revising the UI and the paper as the main things to accomplish next semester. The paper shouldn't be much of a problem; I'm a pretty fast writer and way back in high school I was actually better at English than mo...

I've been working on my Masters degree one class at a time for the last 4 years (working full-time doesn't leave much time for either classes or homework). In May I finally finished up all of the required coursework, so now I just have my project left; that will be the (initial?) focus of this blog, as I created it solely because of the project.  I hope that by documenting my process, design decisions, etc. here, it will serve as a head-start on the required paperwork and documentation for the finished project. The project is called, for now, the Project Management System, and is based off of a project I completed for Advanced Software Engineering in the spring of 2011. It's a web-app using HSQLDB as the database, Java for the data access layer, Java Servlets for the application layer, and JSP/CSS/JavaScript for the presentation layer (to the latter, I intend to add JQuery and JSTL in the near future). A presentation  on my project as it stood at the end of the class is a...