On Sunday Erica, Finster, and I went to Letchworth again with Erin and Sparkles. We hiked trail 1 from Wolf Creek to Lower falls. I'm estimating it was about 9 miles (3 miles/hour @ 3 hours). We took an adventurous route off of trail 1 across a ridge and then a little back country hiking without the aid of a trail, or markers. It was pretty cool again to see Letchworth like we have never seen it before. Finster was bushed when we were done but didn't seem to hurt too bad that night.

Last night I worked on my capstone project for finishing up my masters degree. I am writing software that will integrate the store's (www.presenttensebooks.com) Point of Sale software with Amazon.com's web services. The idea is that with our POS software we have to type in every book's data point: title, author, hardcover/paperback, department, vendor, isbn, retail price, and wholesale price. All this stuff can be supplied by amazon's web service via an isbn query.

So at this point I have finished all the code except inserting a 'book' into our POS's database. The problem that took me 2 days to figure out basically boiled down to a lack of documentation on the POS SDK. The catch is that you can't just enter any old department, or vendor, you have to query the POS database to get the acceptable values. This is fine, but is not documented on how to do this anywhere that I could find. Eventually, through scrolling through their API definition I found a IVendorQuery and an IDepartmentQuery! Woot, after trying these out everything flowed smoothly and so now my little project works.

My next task is to clean up the code and write user documentation and test cases. Once done with that I am done with my formal education forever!

On Monday we took a trip to letchworth and hiked between the lower falls and the upper falls on the far side of the river on trail 7 most of the way. This was a great hike, very few people and a great vantage of each of the falls. It's great seeing something new of a sight that you've seen so many times.

Finster got a bit tired and was sore for the next two days :(. He also got attacked by another dog which I grabbed by the collar and threw to his owner, at least according to Erica. I don't really remember much just grabbing his collar.

We were idiots yet again and forgot to bring any water! I think the hike was about 5 miles round trip, it's hard to tell though because gmaps still has a pretty crappy satellite picture of the park.

Today I struggled with sorting columns in a JTable in Java 1.6. I wanted to have an underlying object (called job) which corresponded with a table Row. At first I created my own JobTableModel which implemented AbstractTableModel. This worked great until I tried to use table sorters. The underlying ArrayList containing my Job objects were synced up with the the row that represented them, so when you sorted the rows got jumbled compared to their corresponding job objects.

To solve this problem I decided to just keep my list of job objects unsorted, and just search the list based on a value in the table which would match one of the variables in the job object. This worked great until I sorted a column; which utterly confused me. Apparently, when you use JTable.getSelectedRow it still doesn't match up with the underlying table model. Instead you have to make this call to get the actual row that was clicked!
int selected=_tJobs.convertRowIndexToMode(_tJobs.getSelectedRow());

Phew, now everything works great! Thank you Java for adding RowSorting with JTables!