9/10: Project approved by prof Jim Rogers. I'm calling it OLGA, the On Line Gaming Application. I ordered Macromedia Dreamweaver from the school store so I could begin work on the web page, and then went online to look for computing surveys on distributed networks.

9/12: The real research begun: began to search through the 200+ pages of material I pulled off the web for useful bits (if you'll excuse the unintentional pun). There's a lot of junk here . . .

9/15: Web page, journal page work begun. It's pretty simple, but then again Jim doesn't want it to be complicated. It's a shame is anti-frame; it would be nice to use a top frame for a site map. I can already see that this is going to get to be a moderately complex site. I also began to think of the project architecture and began to worry about the paper. Although I have no concrete plans yet, I have some ideas about them.

9/24: Web page up, paper outline, development schedule created, decided to use Java based on consultations with experts (Charlie Peck and Ned Bingham). I'll have to order some books on Java; I have a compiler but not much in the way of a reference or textbook. Ned recommended Java in a Nutshell (Flanagan, by O'Reilly), and since I have had good experiences with O'Reilly I think I'll go with that text. In the meantime, I'll start on the cheesy Java Tutorial that comes with the compiler.

9/25: Journal page up, content added to web page, Java books ordered. I ended up getting Java in a Nutshell, a tagalong book for that text called Java Examples in a Nutshell, and Java Distributed Networks. Hopefully these will come in soon; the two former shouldn't take long because they're on two day air, but the latter might take a while because I'm getting it used from somebody through Amazon.com. Hope that works out OK. Learning java is going smoothly, but I'm not sure if this tutorial is going to go far enough - I may have to experiment on my own for a bit before I get the hang of it.

10/1: Met with Jim; he has asked me to make my journal entries a little more detailed, so I filled in the old entries from the journal page. Today I added a brief blurb about my paper plans to my web page, and fixed some of links. I was apparently naming files differently on my computer and on the CS server. I've decided to update my journal once a week; hopefully that will be OK with Jim. In the meantime, I need to do some more research and to fix up my plan.

10/7: It's taking too long to learn java; I'm going to have to pick up the pace a good deal. Also, I need to get moving on the proposal due next Wednesday. Not much else going on; I've been researching a fair amount about distributed networks. I have some solid notes on the architecture. I'll probably post those next week. I'm also trying to figure out how to post my Gant chart, but that's not exactly high on the priority list. Going to have to start coding directly after midterm break. I can't wait.

10/14: I didn't get any where as much work done as I expected to, although that's to be expected I guess. I did do a good deal more research into using java but I still have a long way to go. I'm going to play around with it some more this week but I really need to crack down and figure it out - at least to the point of writing simple programs - by next week. Besides that, I've been working on the presentation for my proposal. I think it'll go pretty well, even though I still don't grasp the details of building the network. That's another thing to research, I suppose. I'll probably get some help from Jim in that regard, and Aaron has told me he might be able to give me some pointers.

10/21: The presentation went well; I got pretty good marks except when it came to details. Which I expected, of course. Not much else going on this past week, though: more reading on Java and more experimenting. I'm going to start coding next week.

10/28: Jim has suggested that I begin coding by writing a small program that just opens a socket and listens. I can then add to that, introducing a thread that opens a connection to that socket, passing a message to it, and then running the two pieces on separate machines. Then I can get a feel for the smallest aspects of the entire program without getting into the largest parts as well. It's a divide and conquer technique that I'm looking forward to trying. In the meantime, I'm going to be looking around for a good java compiler for Linux. Then I have to go through the whole rigamarole of installing it. Sometimes, this linux machine drives me up the wall . . .