Hello, Android!

So I finally was able to make the Hello World app for Android running in NetBeans. There's a few problems I want to adress:

• Android emulator is super slow. Due to this, I tend to shut it down when it was in fact starting the virtual device.
• After the device starts, I will not see my app running, just the blank default android screen. In order to see how my App looks like, I have to go back to NetBeans and click on debug project.
• Never before have I been so happy to see the Hello World screen on a slow emulator running on a 5 year old machine as right now.

So I guess it's the start of a very stupid journey where I make stupid apps for the kek, and maybe later make some more fun and not so stupid app for real people.

That's enough work for today though. Will update on progress later.

Starting a GitHub

Yesterday I made a stupid decision to make a GUI program from scratch with NetBeans. Its function is calculating the day of the week a specific user-given date is. As I wrote in my last entry, we had this assignment at the university, so I thought it would be fun to write a program I already know using a new language and a new method (GUI vs console-based).

I couldn't be more wrong.

After hundreds of error messages, I finally know how class and object in Java are supposed to work, as well as project linking, importing and referencing between files. That's the good news. The bad news is, I spent all my Friday night and Saturday on it, and my social meter is developing into an interesting number zero.

In accordance with the profound knowledge, I decided to push along the momentum and get to know online repositories and subversions as well. I am not a stranger to the ideas, I have seen people doing it back when I was still a Blender bro. It must have been at least 8 years. How time flies.

But seeing people doing it and actually doing it are very different subjects. I downloaded git, read the tutorial, push/pulled my repo on GitHub as practice, and decided it's too manually complicated. Easy solution? NetBeans. Though I just recently got it, I fell in love with it so much. It has everything a programmer needs (at least that's what I think, I'm no programmer) and it has Git support so that I don't have to use the terminal. Yay laziness.

My first uploaded project can be found here. I was stupid and uploaded the whole NetBeans project, but you can just download the src folder and make a project yourself with whatever tool you like. It still has a lot to improve, but I'm not going to spend another goddamned second on that this weekend.

Another one bites the dust.

So yesterday I was chilling in the computer room as usual when the guy next to me clicked the submit button and his executed his program, effortlessly giving out a wrong answer.

It would not be very notable, in fact, everybody does that on the first try, if not for the fact that he tried looking up a complicated formula for that same program on the internet. The original formula - the leap year rules - was given so that we could write a program to check what day of the week a given day is. His program was executing well until year 399, where his code must have miscalculated and gave out a wrong answer. Instead of reviewing his poor isLeapYear function, he decided to implement the Gaussian algorithm, which also ultimately failed horribly at year 5 or so, and after an hour of frustration, gave up.

It's pretty funny when we think our code is perfect and our algorithm is flawed, instead of acknowledging our fault. I have been this guy. I may be him some time in the future. No one can be sure. This is simply a reminder. Don't put your pride on your incompetence.

Just installed xfce

One of the best things that come with Linux is its freedom. Ironically, one of the worst things that comes with Linux is also its freedom.

As you may know, we can choose our desktop environments when installing any Linux distro. With OpenSUSE, the default environments that you can choose from are GNOME and KDE. I have been using KDE since I started using Linux 6 months ago, and today, after a round of shitposting on /g/ (BAD idea), I go back to earth, realized KDE Plasma was super slow, and decided to try something new.

Side note: Desktop environments are these things that control, after you log into your account, how your windows and desktop look like, and what applications are used for what task. Think of it as denominations of Judaism. First we have the orthodox Jews who prefer terminal over anything, then comes Christians who have these fancy graphical interfaces and desktop environments, then it is divided among themselves into Catholics who use KDE, Evangelists who prefer GNOME, and so on. Then comes the third one in the trilogy, the Muslims who are proud of their Ubuntu installations, but in case the FOSS fighters find out, we're not talking about that.

Now back to my dear laptop. After installing Cinnamon, GNOME becomes unusable (Oops, fatal error, please fuck off, user), and one can't configure much with it anyway - the menu bars are so small but the navigation icons in their file managers are ridiculously big. Cinnamon is a mess.

Then I tried xfce. It's a simplified version of KDE, and it works. I feel much faster now, and the customization is bearable. I only hate it the first time I logged in, when a buzz destroyed my ears. Fuck the beep system, why does it have to be so high volume?

The xfce desktop is much better than its KDE counterpart. I think I can stick to this from now on.

Free and Stuck Up

So, back to Linux.

It is a wonderful thing that Linux happened. The principle it propagates, "free", may have been the biggest leap of human society in the 20th century. However, for somebody totally uninterested, or unaware of what is free (as in freedom, not as in free candies in the back of that man's van), it might be frustrating.

Now this is maybe the fourth time I installed Linux on my laptop in the last 6 months, but every time I do it, I have to look online for help, because all my media files can't be played. I understand it perfectly, that these files are encoded with propriety formats and therefore need a decoder that is not free albeit gratis, or even worse, propriety, to play, but it would be much better if the vendor just put some information somewhere easy to find, like for example on the fucking desktop, instead of us having to type our problems into online search engines, which hilariously and ironically, are all propriety, just to know that we need packman and this special package called "gstreamer-0_10-fluendo-mp3" in order to play mp3 files in Clementine (spoiler alert: fluendo is NOT free - oh God, oh Heaven, oh Sky, what a blasphemy that someone dares developing non free shit on our free platform!).

On the one hand, I think it's good that people try to enforce this idea of freedom. On the other hand, I think many of them are so stuck up on some kind of higher moral ground that they put themselves in, that it makes free softwares and free format repulsive to beginners and/or potential users who are converting from propriety software usage. I knew Ubuntu since 2008 or even earlier, but only after 7 years was I convinced to switch completely to Linux. And it will be a long time until I get rid of my mp3s and avis.

Rolling Thunder

Today I was watching some videos on YouTube when a suggestion came up and caught my attention. Donald Trump was speaking in D.C. (supposedly, since I suck at paying attention).

Guess I'll just embed it for easy understanding.

The Trump speech is not particularly remarkable, since he's only repeating what he's been saying all over the campaign trail, but the name of the event, I really like it.

Rolling Thunder.

I don't know what the hell that is, but when I read the name, I immediately thought of a marching army of powerful robots under a stormy sky.

Rolling Thunder.

What a beautiful name.

I guess we should start somewhere.

After an unknown problem after an unorthodox attempt at removing the Android Studio from my /home folder, my iBus stopped working. So I thought to myself, what the hell, fresh install is always a good thing to do (which is false, but I'm going to keep myself that - if you disagree you can go suck a puck) and reinstalled my Leap 42.1 OS.

To avoid making the same mistake, did a better partitioning this time, leaving 50GB for / and 50 for /home. I now have all the space I want, so I installed Android SDK tools on /home. It took 20GB. I also installed NetBeans IDE and started playing with it. So far I still couldn't make an android program that works, even a Hello World, but I think I would be able soon.

The GUI designer in NetBeans is quite practical. I used Qt for the last month during my practice in the Uni, and got fond of its designer. However, it has a retarded license, with which you have to pay 3000 or so Euro if you want to develop a closed source program, and it sucks. Because I haven't even seen 3000 Euro in my life.

So I switched to NetBeans. And to make sure, I looked up in the NetBeans wiki, and it states:

Can I use NetBeans to create a commercial application?

Yes, you can use NetBeans to create commercial applications and sell them.
There are no license costs for any kind of usage of NetBeans.

• You can use the NetBeans IDE to create applications and sell them without any charges.
• You can build applications on top of the NetBeans Platform and sell them without any charges.
• You are not required to open-source your own code (but you can).

I'm so happy.

So, where was I? The GUI designer. Had a little fun yesterday making some dumb program calculating some basic shit, with shiny buttons and marvelous text fields. I guess that's a good start. Many was here before. Many will be here again. And as King Solomon said, there is nothing new under the sun.

I installed iBus afterwards and thank God it worked. Now I can write fancy cuck languages now. Wie schön daß man so was sagen darf. But my main goal remains to write to my dear friends and family who cannot afford to write in tiếng Anh. And this blog will have nothing more to do with iBus. I hope.

So happy first post and hello world!