Plugin name
Introduction On MDL-74272, I came across a comment wanting the display of the plugin name to be optional as a
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Author: Gareth Barnard
Pause for thought
Disclaimers Names / logos can be trademarks of their respective owners. Please review their website for details. I am independent
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Information overload
The other day I was clearing out my eMail inbox of all the unimportant messages I’d not had time to read yet, as I’ve done before. But this time the thought struck me of how things have changed, we still can have lots to process but now it appears to be easier to fall into the trap of subscribing to so many things. How did this happen and how can it be managed?
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Readability
Introduction When I was going my PGCE I was taught that when writing on the board to use separated characters
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Challenge accepted!
Recently a mate of mine had been mulling over a puzzle that he’d found via Reddit and couldn’t solve. It goes something like this “You can only be exactly twice someone’s age once, and it’s when they turn the same age you were when they were born. Every birthday after that makes you less than twice their age”. So I thought, ‘Hang on a moment! I’ve been writing calendar orientated small Java programs, Java has a “GregorianCalendar” class that I can use, and you can perform time functions! Challenge accepted!’.
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SynHi revisited
Back in September 2020, I wrote about a new plugin I’d developed for syntax highlighting called ‘SynHi’. In this post I’ll revisit and explain more of my thoughts around it.
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Collapsed Topics is 14!
On the 18th February 2023, I was improving Collapsed Topics with the consequence of updating the Changes.md file. This lead to me scanning through all that I had done since its creation. Then I realised that the first version (0.1) was released on the 21st February 2009, and thus its fourteenth birthday would be on the 21st February 2023. I had to do something to celebrate this event.
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Some more Java
As a follow on from ‘A little bit more Java’, this time we will progress to look at how we can input from the command line and enhance our program even further. The beginnings of a program can be an uphill struggle as we work away to get something that actually does something. Now we’ve made progress, that hill will start to soften and we’ll be able to add more functionality now that we have our base.
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Calendar
In recent years, I’ve been creating a calendar using images that I’ve taken. Back in 2002, I created a small Java program that prints out the calendar for the next twelve months. In my themes and on the MoodleBites eLearningWorld theme courses I have code that arranges the Moodle blocks horizontally, this is partly facilitated through the employment of column CSS classes that are based upon the ideas implemented in the Bootstrap framework. Combine all of these thoughts, and add to my recent posts with Java then I thought ‘Why can’t I get Java to create a calendar just like the one I have printed?’. And that’s what this month is all about, where we will additionally see how pre-processing of HTML output can be designed and implemented from scratch.
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A little bit more Java
As a follow on from ‘A little bit of Java’, I thought that we’d progress into something a bit more complicated. The thing is with software creation is that the initial learning curve is steep, but once you’ve gotten over that then things do become easier. One way of climbing that initial curve is to have a defined goal with an outcome that you strive to reach. The program also needs to have a purpose so that it does something useful for us. Then we will be motivated to attain the goal of achieving our solution when things get tricky. Therefore our program will take text that we enter and apply a ‘Substitution cipher’ and tell us the result. That result we can then enter again and get what we originally typed back.
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