So. Third week
in. Well, We were supposed to come up with a program demonstrating
the interface between Jung and Prefuse...data input, graphical,
etc... When I started doing this, I actually thought that I had
made a huge mistake somewhere, that maybe all it did was display
a simple graph, nothing more. And then I thought, well, that would
be a pretty poor excuse for an interface, wouldn't it? If they
were going to spend time creating the interface, they would have
spent time to make sure that the interface was compatible with
all parts of Prefuse. Heart attack over.
So I set up
a basic application, just to test that I could read in the graph
through Jung and get the items in Prefuse...worked fine. As I
started expanding the abilities of the program, I realized that
the interface worked perfectly. Once I got the graph into Prefuse,
I didn't even touch Jung. I only had to use Prefuse tools to do
all of the visualization (as advertised).
While this
is good, I also had to learn an entirely new package, which was
a little hard, because it's set up very differently than Jung,
the only other one I've seen. It was sort of like trying to learn
a functional programming language when all I ever knew were object
oriented. But after hours staring at the screen and a few bursts
of inspiration, I was able to set the text of items, and, even
color code them by attribute. (I'm rather proud of that).
And at the
end of the week, I set up the basics for our program and user
interaction. I now can tell which node was clicked, where it was
clicked, and it's relationship to all of the other nodes. We're
implementing two variables, delta and epsilon, to gauge association
between the nodes that the user moved. That's pretty much all
set, I just have to infer what the user meant by moving this node
there, that node not with this node, etc... I'll probably do this
sometime this weekend.
In Other News:
Tonight there's a barbeque at the apartments, which should be
good. I won't have to cook! And tomorrow I'm going out with some
people from another department. It should be nice to get off campus
and go out! Maybe I'll even find something to buy...a belt maybe?
My religious advisor has so kindly offered to lend me her A.L.I.A.S.
dvds and I'm very tempted to take her up on the offer...I miss
tv, even though there's nothing good on in the summer. And this
would be better; there would be no commercials! Hmmmm...I'll have
to think about it.
