Classes finished up in the early afternoon so Lauren and I headed back to Austin. It was a pretty exciting drive up Highway 71 including a stop at Tony’s Restaurant ( voted best restaurant in Austin county, so claimeth the billboard ). Noting that the weather forecast promises cold and wet I stopped by Best Buy and picked up a wireless guitar controller and the Guitar Hero II video game. I had played at the demo at Fry’s in Sunnyvale when I was in the valley last week and I had had such a good time I wanted to have the fun at home ( until such time as I can get my grubby mitts on a Wii ).

I recently signed up to take an Algorithms class online via Coursera. The language of the class is the new lingua franca, Java. I do most of my development on a VPS which means I’m accustomed to doing my work on the command line with my editor being Vim. While the class doesn’t require one to use an IDE, I didn’t see that any other work flows explained how to do the assignments without an IDE. I’ve done some work around Java build management using Maven, so I thought I would try to apply Maven’s basics so that I could do my work on my VPS.