Furthermore....

On, and one more thing... The reason I felt I should give the lotto checker an update is because I've now got almost 25000 users.

Christmas Update!

It's been a while since I've last published something on here, but just thought I'd give a quick update. Been working on a couple of different things over the last while. I started working on a spring web app for configuring and training neural networks and I've also decided to do a re-write of the lotto checker app to give it a performance update and a functionality update.

The neural network project came from the fact that I have been reading a great book on neural networks in Java, as a refresher from when I last did AI and machine learning in college as part of an AI module and my final year project. I've always thought this area of computer science was one of the more interesting ones, and it by using spring it gives me a chance to hone my skills in spring development outside of work. Development is not planned and I usually only end up getting around to it if I'm too broke to go out on weekends, or if I'm bored because there's nothing on TV. Both of these situations are common enough for a good chunk of work to have been started on it already.

The lotto checker app has a number of games in it that are not being run any more so I've decided to give it a re-write. I have completely changed the design so that there's a process which is responsible for parsing the web page using regular expressions for each game type. This process puts the numbers in to a value object which a reusable screen component will be able to use for displaying the numbers. I've also decided to abandon any further development on the driver tools app as there are far too many other apps like it out there which are just as good (but with out the graphing). The code that I had written is not all lost as a lot of the GUI stuff in that app I will salvage for the lotto checker re-write.

I'm hoping by posting once more on a semi regular basis to this blog it will keep me motivated to do a bit more work on these projects. In the mean time Happy Christmas!