I’m currently in Romania. The main reason for me being out here is to carry out some research experiments regarding the adaptive e-learning software I’ve developed.

However to do e-learning experiments we need students and apparently there are plenty of students in Romania, which is why I’ve spent the last two weeks teaching a Web Application Development course in at Bucharest University.

Spent this afternoon looking into parsing the LAG file format quickly in Java, the idea is to formally specify LAG grammar using ANTLR. I’ve got part of the grammar finished and it’s starting to output AST graphs like the one in this post so it’s looking hopeful and will save a lot of coding work later.

I’m working on a Java CAF + LAG viewer at the moment, and just getting back into programming in Java using Eclipse after a short break programming in python and visual basic.

I decided earlier this week that I’d better start work on my next assignments which are due in early September.

As they are the last assignments for the two courses I am currently studying for (actually my last two in this degree) I’m not allowed any extension period so I had worked through the books faster than usual to give myself ample time for the assignments.

It’s a good job I did because three computer and laptops, four operating systems and seventy-two hours later I had only just managed to get the particular netbeans project I would be working on for the first (M362) assignment to run!

My head was ready to explode as I faced every obscure error in the book, NullPointer and  ClassNotFound exceptions abounded as I tackled problems on both Ubuntu and Windows XP on my laptop, then it was Java Web Start and Glassfish problems on another. When I finally got worried that I was running out of computers to install Java SDK 1.6 + Netbeans 5.5.1 + Glassfish + Java DB it finally worked.

So much for a headstart, I’m just about ready to start the assignment now, half a week later!

Let’s just hope I don’t get problems with the second assignment…