Discovering new classes with Class Viewer

A while back I noticed myself using the Java StringBuilder class. But if I learned about that class long ago I don't remember it happening, and finally stopped to ask myself, how do I know about it now?

Answer is that I use the String class as my primary example class with my Class Viewer program. I was coming up with more examples or something and it turns out when I look at the String class with my program, there in the Constructors section is a construction of a String with StringBuilder.

It must have caught my eye, and I started using it without thinking about it much.

What I've noticed that Class Viewer gives me is a quick reference tool that is constantly updated. If there are any new public constructors, methods or fields to a class, I can see them immediately.

Beats having a book that may become outdated.

And that is how I started using a new class with String. Also notice that to keep up with the bulk of classes that handle Strings I can just use Class Viewer and only remember the String class itself, which is what I do.

Leaves more room to remember more important things.


James Harris

My tab ad video idea

I like to do web searches around things related to my research and various interests, like on the names of my blogs, so I was doing a search on "lostincomment" and was fascinated to find a link to Search Engine Journal showing comments I made almost 3 years ago--back May 12th according to the date on the site--in response to an article they were doing about Youtube launching new ads for video.

Thing is I used to sit around and think about monetizing Youtube, for various reasons, and toss ideas out there like on my blogs. And one day I'm thinking to myself, hey, they should have a tab on popular videos that says "Ad Supported" and if people want to see the ad and who is sponsoring the video, they would have to click on the tab! (I know, maybe seems a little dumb.)

Here's a link to the Search Engine Journal article with comments.

And here's a link to my original idea on my Lost in Comment blog: Stealthier advertising

I still think my original idea is clever, even though presumably most people would never click on the "Ad" tab, so never see the sponsor, but others might and sit through a full commercial.

So I'm tossing it back out there into the mix. Of course Youtube monetization is not the news item it was way back then when so many questioned if Google could ever figure it out.


James Harris

Problem solving healthcare

Techniques in problem solving appear to be a lot more advanced than knowledge of them, which is unfortunate given the growing list of problems that are critical in our everyday lives. I was lucky enough as a kid to have courses on problem solving and also to have a lot of personal reading on the subject. As an adult I am at times mystified when solutions that seem simple to me not only are not known, but people still don't do them even when given solutions that are easy, and easy to explain.

Like consider healthcare insurance which is big in the news a lot lately as well it should be. Healthcare costs are a growing cost of government, and they are spiraling out of control, where one major issue is insuring everyone.

Insurance companies don't want to insure sick people, or people they deem very likely to get sick.

People need insurance though and politicians try to force insurance companies to "insure" people when it really just becomes paying their medical bills as it's no longer insurance when you know the person is already sick, or very likely to get sick. Kind of like asking auto insurance companies to give car insurance to people after the car has been in a wreck.

Oddly enough, politicians seem intent on framing the problem as evil insurance companies, when the proper framing of the problem appears to be, who pays for people who are ill or likely to become ill.

Seem like a small shift? Not really.

I worked for a while at a corporation that had a health insurance company that third party administered its health insurance. So the health insurance company issued us their insurance card, but our company actually paid the insurance costs.

What makes that story even more remarkable to me was that I was working at an insurance company. Naively you might wonder why they didn't just do the insurance themselves, which I wondered. Turns out it was better business to let another insurance company do the administration, while they paid the actual money out.

So if the problem is who pays for people for whom "insurance" is the wrong word, simple answer I'd think is the government, but they still have the same insurance as everyone else, in that they get the same card, but are third party administered.

See? All that from properly framing the problem, but it gets better.

If health insurance companies only directly insure healthy people but everyone has the same insurance while the government just pays for some who are third party administered, then they have a business incentive to keep people healthy!!!

Wow. We just went from evil insurance companies that won't "insure" sick people to benefit partners who work to keep people healthy.

Can that system be gamed?

How? If health insurance companies can only directly bill healthy people what possible incentive might they have to, say, diminish their profit area by saying someone is not healthy if they are? And why would they claim someone ill is healthy? Then they're back to the issue they have today!

I've given more on the pluses and minuses with a full plan that I tweeted a while back and then expanded on one of my other blogs.

I tweeted it July 26th and put it on my blog September 9th, in 2009.

I've watched the healthcare debate with a lot of interest since then, and what is clear to me is that demonizing insurance companies is about asking them to not do the business of insurance, but instead engage in social welfare, without calling it such, when they can be valuable forces for good, by having a simple system that allows them to work hard to increase the number, yup, of healthy people who would be happily paying customers.

Oh, so what happens when a healthy person gets sick? Their insurance company pays to the limits of the policy. Beyond those limits that person gets paid for by the government, but they keep their insurance company which begins third party administration.

So is there some reason it would be really hard for third party administration on the national level? I'll admit, I do not know. Looking for web information on it, here's something I found on the Wikipedia, which I think can give an idea: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_administrator

Oh, and what about government entities that already take care of people like Medicare and Medicaid?

Under this idea they'd no longer be necessary.

The government would pay for people who were third party administered and would collect their insurance premiums (yes, you'd still pay premiums if you could afford them), so the cost of administration would be shifted off of the government and onto the insurance companies, leaving the government to handle the social welfare role.

Leaving the business of insurance, to the insurance companies.


James Harris

Prime Counter

An early mathematical result of mine was my own prime counting function.

With natural numbers--means use ints or longs--where p_j is the jth prime:

P(x,n) = x - 1 - sum for j=1 to n of {P(x/p_j,j-1) - (j-1)}

It counts primes when n equals the count of primes up to sqrt(x), so if n is greater than the count of primes up to and including sqrt(x) then n is reset to that count.

To see an example of it used click here.

For say, the count of primes up to 100, if you tried P(100,10), the algorithm would reset n to n=4, so you'd have P(100,4), because there are 4 primes--2, 3, 5 and 7--up to sqrt(100), and the answer of course is 25. The algorithm is fairly easy to program.

An innovation of mine was to use a two-variable function where math people traditionally use a single variable one.

If you're curious about more of the underlying mathematics--warning is a good deal more abstruse--you can go to a post of mine on my math blog.


James Harris

Design philosophy of Class Viewer

Class Viewer allowed me to put out my minimalist design philosophy. From the outset I wanted to stay away from feature-creep and lots of buttons or menus or all those other things that developers are notorious for tossing into projects. So much so that even as a tech-savvy person I'm amazed still when I can't use my cellphone well, without consulting a manual, which tends to be incomprehensible. I joke you need a college course to properly use one of these things. (Of course modern kids seem to just inhale them, but they're genetic mutants who have evolved to use modern technology.)

So Class Viewer is designed to be a user friendly as possible--for real, not just saying it is.

Actually I wanted to toss menus entirely but found I couldn't, but I could deliberately break the traditional set of menus across the top!!!

The two window groups design was deliberate as well. My idea was of a larger dataset to your left, which you refine to a simpler set of data to your right. The program is focused around methods, so they can fill the left window, with results in the stacked windows on the right.

Of course I also wasn't excited about trying to put out a lot of languages for what I'd hope would be a useful app--there are too many around the planet and I just really know English--so I like to think that if you're shown how to use Class Viewer, you can use it in any language, and in fact downloads now come from roughly 30+ countries per seven days, according to SourceForge statistics, so maybe I achieved that goal.

So the simple answer to the design philosophy of Class Viewer is, simplicity.


James