Maurits thinks aloud

I did some initial experiments with programming for Google Wave. Basically I got the code from the tutorial and created a robot (called Dalek) which automatically translates the entered text (so called blips) from English to Spanish using the Java version of the Google Translate API. Screenshot of the result:

My first wave

Overall impression so far: very easy to use API. Google Wave itself can be terribly slow. Sometimes the syncing of ‘unsynced waves’ takes more than a minute. Next step: thinking of a more serious application.

And for those interested, the actual Java code:

package dalek;

import com.google.api.detect.Detect;
import com.google.api.translate.Language;
import com.google.api.translate.Translate;
import com.google.wave.api.AbstractRobotServlet;
import com.google.wave.api.Blip;
import com.google.wave.api.Event;
import com.google.wave.api.EventType;
import com.google.wave.api.RobotMessageBundle;
import com.google.wave.api.TextView;
import com.google.wave.api.Wavelet;

public class DalekServlet extends AbstractRobotServlet {

   @Override
   public void processEvents(RobotMessageBundle bundle) {
      Wavelet wavelet = bundle.getWavelet();

      if (bundle.wasSelfAdded()) {
         addText(wavelet, "We are the Daleks");
      }

      for (Event e : bundle.getEvents()) {
         if (e.getType() == EventType.WAVELET_PARTICIPANTS_CHANGED) {
            addText(wavelet, "Exterminate... exterminate... exterminate");
         } else if (e.getType() == EventType.BLIP_SUBMITTED) {
            addTranslation(e.getBlip());
         }
      }
   }

   private void addTranslation(Blip blip) {
      if (!blip.getCreator().equals("mjbvrijk@appspot.com")) {
         String originalText = blip.getDocument().getText();
         try {
            Detect.setHttpReferrer("maurits.wordpress.com");

            String translatedText = Translate.execute(originalText, Language.AUTO_DETECT, Language.SPANISH);
            createChildBlip(blip, translatedText);
         } catch (Exception e) {
            createChildBlip(blip, "Translation failed");
         }
      }
   }

   private void createChildBlip(Blip blip, String s) {
      addTextToBlip(blip.createChild(), s);
   }

   private void addText(Wavelet wavelet, String s) {
      addTextToBlip(wavelet.appendBlip(), s);
   }

   private void addTextToBlip(Blip blip, String s) {
      TextView textView = blip.getDocument();
      textView.append(s);
   }
}

I intend to buy an Android phone. It’s probably going to be the HTC Hero mainly because it’s almost available where I live and it also comes without a simlock, unlike for example the HTC Magic which is exclusive for Vodafone. Next I plan to develop some übercool applications but in the meantime I’ll start with porting a very old game I did more than a decade ago: it was called Groundhog. A screenshot:

Groundhog screenshot

So stay tuned for a Groundhog coming to your mobile…

In 25 years of programming I blogged about the lines of code I have written in several programming languages. I am experimenting with the Google Chart API and created a graphical overview of my personal top 7. Result:

The url to generate the pie chart:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chtt=Top+7&chts=0000ff,32&chd=t:100,70,20,20,5,5,2,3&chs=650x250&chl=C%20(100000)|C%23%20(70000)|Java%20(20000)|C%2B%2B%20(20000)|Pascal%20(5000)|PV~Wave%20(5000)|Basic%20(2000)|Other%20(3400)|

Continue reading Experiments with the Google Chart API…

I have been reading a lot over the last couple of months. Great books like “The World is Flat 3.0″, “Dreaming in Code”, “My Job went to India”, “The five dysfunctions of a team”, “Clean Code” and quite a few more. However I started to realize that although reading is fun, it tends to keep me in my comfort zone. I should really practice writing. People remember great writers. You hardly ever hear people saying “he was such a great reader” about a person that died hundred years ago.

So I just put down here what I’m doing at the moment. Lately I started to automate some things like writing progress reports for customers. Now please don’t stop reading at the word “progress report”. It might become a bit more interesting Continue reading Hacking JIRA with Ruby…