I started a little java project to play around with some of the ideas I’d learned while doing my degree in Computing and Statistics at the Open University. The project is at Github - no github pages for the project though.

It’s been interesting - I started off with a basic class using 32 bit int types and calculating the factors of those. I then added a (very crude) GUI app on top of it. (One of the things I still want to do is to publish the GUI app so it can be used on other hosts. While I’m sure this is easy, I just haven’t done it yet).

Then I started playing around with some of the Project Euler stuff - one of which was to calculate a prime number of a number too large to be held in an int. I then recoded the whole project to use the long type - and also to include some of the optimisations suggested in the file. But then I started to run into the issue that just by keyboard bashing numbers, it could take a very long time to calculate the prime number even with the optimisations. This seemed a good opportunity for me to try and mess around with threading options - using one thread to do the calculations and the \ other to monitor the calculation process.

In the time I took to do all that - the number I had keyboard bashed - 1784216523597212 - was still going through the calculation process. The next thing I need to do is to work out how to run a thread in the GUI which automatically updates the window current number being tested as a factor. This is relatively easy to do from the command line - doing it in the GUI will be a little more impressive in my view.