Wa-pow, biatch!

I’d like to preface this by saying that Markov chains are awesomely cool entities.

I’ll also say that I found the opportunity to program them to be fascinating and fun.

I’ll even toss in a (*Grin*) for the grade the testing script gave me. Not perfect, but we’re definitely entering “time sink” area, and I can’t afford that this week.

Now I’m going to bitch about how many miniscule details fucked that shit up every step of the way.

Holy shit I have lost too much sleep for a project that was supposed to be review. And since I bombed the first 40% of the project, the best I can get will be about a 75%, methinks, despite my recovery. I feel a hell of a lot more comfortable with the ideas I needed to learn to complete this, but holy hell…

First, though: Math.random() sucks.

Spaces at the end of lines when justifying text are no-no’s. Insert un-zestily odd looping conditions to fix. (This one haunted me on my run (!!!) and subsequent campus walk last night.)

Unevenly distributed spaces are a no-no. Java’s Math.random() sucked ass for generating unweighted values in every attempt I made to use it. Discussion is brewing in the forums as to whether we should be able to evenly distribute the spaces (the test script checks for this) or if we have to randomly distribute the spaces (the specs say to do this). It does not seem possible to have both. I have done the former, for now.

Somewhere along the way I lost my ability to comment a book’s worth of notes into code; maybe because the program isn’t very large in terms of objects being manipulated and I can keep it all in my head. Bad practice, nonetheless. Bad Lissa. That’s all that’s left to do, barring a change in the above tidbit.

Have I mentioned that Math.random() sucks? Is my clock (used a seed) sitting perfectly still?

Hours, hours spent tweaking loop conditions and the order of statements and doing old-school outputting of variables to debug…

Another nice thing, however: since I’m going to be working on my next project over break, at least it’s an interesting one. We’re duplicating and extending the functionality of the UNIX cal command.

Or maybe I’m just a dork…