Ricky Clarkson's Bits and Pieces

Hi, welcome to my world.

I am a salsa-dancing, DJing Java programmer who works at the University of Salford as a Research Assistant doing cool things with the network simulator that I write.

And no, I don't dance, DJ and program all at the same time. What were you thinking?

If you'd like to contact me, I use gmail - ricky.clarkson@gmail.com (mailto link).

Java

I have been programming in Java for 7 years, and I'm actually fairly good at it. I even understand generics. In 2001, before I knew what I was doing in Java, I passed the SCJP exam, while I was working at Teleca, who ended up giving me no Java work, but I learned a lot about pressing buttons on mobile phones from them. Placement years from universities are great..

I have a few bugbears about conventional Java development though: Subclassing is bad for the heart, Swing's API writers needed to learn some encapsulation, and functional programming is damn cool, but I don't yet know whether it's generally applicable.

I teach a couple of courses in Java at the University of Salford:

• Programming on the Internet - this is on the Multimedia and Internet Technology degree course. I keep evolving this each year, and this year I think I will push the students towards 3D graphics with Java Monkey Engine, which will plug a gap on their course. There are discussions about removing this module from their course, which I hope doesn't happen, because I think the upper half of the students learn useful things on it. The rest just try to pass, which is why they're not in the upper half. I don't think I have enough time with them to adequately teach Java server-side technologies, apart from JSP, which is so similar to ASP and PHP that they probably wouldn't gain much from it, so I try to make sure that they have a good grounding in Java and to get something 'multimedia' out of it.
• A-Level Computing - I teach a small group of students and their teachers from the Blue Coat School, who come to Salford to learn Java. They are focused around databases, currently using JDBC, because that's the main part of the assignment that the A-Level board give them. I started last year on HSQLDB, which worked really well, then for their assignment the students used MS Access, because they were apparently already familiar with the SQL format for it. It later turned out that they just generated SQL and didn't understand it, so this time I will try to teach them some SQL, and keep them away from Access. I do think there's some value in generating SQL, but the students couldn't really explain what they were doing.

I develop a layout manager "without the WTF", AnyLayout. It is different in that it delegates to user-supplied constraint implementations for the layout. It also provides many constraints, and combinations of constraints, for common layout needs.

I wrote an IRC bot that looks a bit like blootbot, which is used on a few Java-related channels on Freenode IRC. It has contributions from others too, and is now a Sourceforge project.

Salsa

I run Cuban salsa classes in Chorlton, Manchester, and DJ in Copa Cabana in Manchester, which is nowhere near as cheesy as the website looks!

I edit an online book on rueda (a group-based form of salsa), when I'm bored.

Articles

Research: Dead or Moving House?

My blog about Java
My blog about salsa dancing

Humourous excerpts from IRC

The Lord's Prayer, adapted for Salford, a city of England.
An example of the strange humour of Freenode's #debian
A user mistaking a helping robot for a human, with funny results.
Mistaken identity
I think he's trying to say he takes advantage of drunk women
What am I talking about?