Many of my traditional blog post live on this site, but a great majority of my social-style posts can be found on my much-busier microbloging site at updates.passthejoe.net. It's busier because my BlogPoster "microblogging" script generates short, Twitter-style posts from the Linux or Windows (or anywhere you can run Ruby with too many Gems) command line, uploads them to the web server and send them out on my Twitter and Mastodon feeds.
I used to post to this blog via scripts and Unix/Linux utilities (curl and Unison) that helped me mirror the files locally and on the server. Since this site recently moved hosts, none of that is set up. I'm just using SFTP and SSH to write posts and manage the site.
Disqus comments are not live just yet because I'm not sure about what I'm going to do for the domain on this site. I'll probably restore the old domain at first just to have some continuity, but for now I like using the "free" domain from this site's new host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net.
I'm aiming to learn more Java, and in preparation decided to replace Java 8 with Java 10 on my Windows 10 laptop.
The first time through the installer, I only got the JRE and not the full JDK. Then I removed my old JDK installations via Windows' add-and-remove-programs utility and re-installed the JDK software via Oracle's bundle.
The second time I got the full JDK, but a check of java
and javac
on the Windows command line showed java
working but javac
not.
A quick Googling brought up a Stack Overflow question (and answer) that told me I had to add the JDK to my Windows path.
Once I did that, javac
worked. Since the JDK comes from Oracle with a GUI installer, even if I somehow missed the checkbox where the installer modifies my system's path, having to Google and then do this manually is a messy ending to installing the JDK. If I'm installing the JDK, I want it in my path, and that should be the default.
It's an unnecessary hurdle for new programmers or people who aren't the best amateur sysadmin.
Since I installed the JDK instead of the JRE, I didn't know if automatic Java updates would come at all and would cover the development portion of the tools.
I got the update today, and as you can see from the image above of my Windows command line, all is updated.
Today I started playing with Java arrays.
I'm also trying to figure out JavaScript objects at the same time.
(The Javascript is for a project I'm cooking up. I'll focus when I'm ready to focus.)
Time has been a little tight over the past couple of weeks, but I had an "opening" today that I used to work on Java. Beginning Java. Very beginning Java.
I'm using the Oracle Java tutorials. You can download the whole thing as HTML in a .zip, or as epub
and mobi
files.
I have both the full HTML and the mobi
version, which is made up of 20 separate .mobi
files that I emailed to my Amazon Kindle reader because a) I'm too lazy to plug it in to the computer and b) they offer e-mail-to-Kindle, so why not use it.
I'm going through the material slowly, typing in the programs when that seems appropriate and using javac
to compile and java
to run them.