Budget Buddy Progress!

This is the current progress of my budgeting program, the code and classes are made up for the accounts, checks, months, everything. The GUI and interlacing it with the underlying modules is all thats left. I've already started doing that, right now the 5 buttons at the top are the only things not working, as well as a few of the menu items.
On the to do list is:
The add items buttons and the other buttons associated with items and the main scroll pane that will hold the items that go into the budgeting for checks.
After thats done, making the GUI change when you select a different month and check and updating the panes that show information.
After that, the menu items such as saving and loading need to be done. After all of the main stuff, I just need to create the other panes such as the graphics and other things.
It will probably be another week or so before it's done.

Budgeter

Hello Everyone!

I've decided on a project to do before I have to go back to school. I'm making a program that is effectively a smart checkbook. Only, right now I'm not making it to keep track of finances, but to budget them effectively.

Basically, When I get my checks from work, I open notepad and a calculator, enter my check amount into it, then slowly subtract out items as I enter them into the notepad document. So, basically I'm wrapping my setup into a program, and it seems like it's a good idea, mainly because 4 of my friends have taken an interest and have already asked to test my program once it's done. (As done as any program can get, aka release version that gets patches)

Right now I'm fighting between the urge to continue working on it, and the urge to go to bed, it is midnight, and I do have to get up at 7 tomorrow.... but when the mood takes one to code, you do not simply ignore it.

Cluster is Done, next project

I  made it about halfway through Cluster Swarm before getting to overwhelmed by work, friends, and readings. So I took a break from it, and never really got back to it. All the pieces are there, all the ideas, it's just a matter of putting the pieces together. However, I feel like my time would be better spent on other projects.

A few things I've considered, a Budgeting program that I could use to do my budgeting, (I do it in notepad right now), I could make it entirely in Java to make it transportable, I could make it customizable, and also include plenty of features that would be useful. I could model the Towers of Hanoi, and perhaps use what I've learned about genetic algorithms and evolutionary programming to evolve strategies and solutions to the towers. Although I'd probably restrict it to n <= 4 disks for the sake of managing bits. One way I thought about doing it was to use 30 bits to represent a solution to n=4 disks, each bit being able to be one of the three towers. I could initialize random bits to a few, then run it through a validity checker, essentially my fitness function, to see how well it does and to make sure it doesnt place a larger disk on a smaller disk. and then could add in how close to the optimal solution it was to determine it's fitness.

I also thought about representing the towers and their moves as a Grammar.

S -> aC | bC
A -> aB | aC
B -> bA | bC
C -> cA | cB | cƛ
ƛ -> null (end of moves)

You could simply build up possible moves, their validity would be checked by running them through a simulation of the towers, and then calculate how well they did. From their you could breed good solutions with other ones using crossover and mutation, or possibly use some type of neural net to 'train' a program to have tendancies to lean towards one change from one move to another. I'm not entirely sure on if I'm going to do this project yet or not. It's still up in the air.