JavaGu(i)(y)

Tickets for the WorldCup available (prefer trading)

mvdb — 2006-06-06T10:10:59+01:00

Last saturday we�ve picked up our tickets in Germany �.. but unfortunately we still don�t have tickets for Argentina against the Netherlands. But �. we have some �trading material�: * 2 category 1 tickets for Argentina � Serbia and Montenegro in Gelsenkirchen. * 1 category 4 ticket for Switzerland � Korea Republic in Hannover. * 2 category 1 tickets for the 1/8 final winner group F � runner-up group E1 in Dortmund. * 2 category 3 tickets for the 1/8 final winner group H - runner-up group G in Hanover. We are always willing to sell these tickets, but that�s not our main objective. We want to trade tickets to get hold of tickets for the Netherlands. So, spread the word and if someone is interested he can can contact us at baahmi@gmail.com or just leave a comment.

Arrived in SF for JavaOne

mvdb — 2006-05-14T17:22:34+01:00

The flight yesterday was ok, although a bit long and boring. The thing I am happy about is that I arrived quite healthy, which was a nice bonus of the seat I got myself.. A shock when I hit US soil, is that the people from customs, taxi and the hotel couldn't really speak english very well. With all of them I had something : "What the fuck are they saying???" and they had that with me too I guess. In the end it was nice to meet some people who actually could speak understandebly English (that is besides my Dutch! collegues) I am not saying everyone should be able to talk English, but at least be understandable if you speak.. Today we'll go to the San Fracisco Giants - LA Dodgers baseball match and in the evening a NLUG dinnerparty at AZIE around seven..

Builiding a house of glass..

mvdb — 2006-03-10T15:01:03+01:00

My brother and his girlfriend is soon going to start building a house of glass in Mol, Belgium. A very interesting project to say the least and I defintely don't want to stand in their shoes regarding the task of window washing :)
We have made a website for it, named www.glazenhuis.com, where you can see the design, 3d images of the anticipated result and pictures of the progress.
The dutch website is here and the English website is here.

I am still doubting about the present they are going to get when they moved in : Window cleaner or a hammer with lot's of nails :)

Eclipse 3.1.2 released

mvdb — 2006-01-26T17:55:28+01:00

See http://www.eclipse.org/eclipse/development/readme_eclipse_3.1.2.html
for the list of 66 issues that they resolved.

Maven 1 SVG Plugin released

mvdb — 2005-12-19T19:32:58+01:00

I finally released the maven1 SVG Plugin See http://www.mvdb.org/maven/plugins/svg/
It just converts svg images to jpg and/or png.
The version is 1.1 and the only thing changed is that it depends on batik 1.6 which solves a problem of parsing images without any size settings.

A maven2 version of the plugin will follow..

Have fun...

plan/b backup software

mvdb — 2005-11-27T14:50:28+01:00

Just stumbled on planb when browsing on the ActiveMq site.
To quote the site :
"Plan/B is a network aware file backup system specifically designed to make the backup of files from multiple machines to a variety of devices simple."

This is exactly the concept I had in mind as a backup system for myself and since I couldn't find one, I was planning on writing a javabased backup system myself.
As far as I can see it is free, but it is not clear if it will stay that way. The one thing that is missing is some kind of API to write extensions (although I might just have missed that).

JavaPolis, who else is coming?

mvdb — 2005-11-25T23:35:49+01:00

Just registered for javapolis for the whole week :) I am not going to conferences a lot, but since this is affordable, not too far a drive (about 30 minutes) and has some very nice topics.
I already scheduled with Martin Marinschek (MyFaces) to have some drinks, hope to meet James Strachan again, Vincent Massol and I just read Milos Kleint (mevenide) is also going to be presenting there.
If you are going to be there and like to meet up, let me know.. (mail me at feest at mvdb.net or leave a comment).
For people who don't know who I am (it is not a secret, but also not specifically mentioned on the website) : I am Martin van den Bemt..

If you are in a big emergency of finding a place to stay, you can stay at my place (I live in The Netherlands, about 30 minutes from Antwerp)
If you are frightened of cats (or allergic), you better find some other place to bunk..

Weird String code

mvdb — 2005-11-21T18:56:24+01:00

String String = "String";
String = new String(String);

Pretty confusing if you give this to a java beginner :)

Timing differences in Systems nanoTime and Milliseconds

mvdb — 2005-11-19T16:19:42+01:00

I often write preformance test for small code snippets to figure out what the, at least in my eyes, is the best and fasted code.
One example is checking to see if overall NIO file access is faster for my scenerio, instead of non nio based file access. Or how expensive method calls are, compared to direct instance variable access. I have a timertestcase which I use for timing how long a method is running. The problem is that one time something takes 50 ms another time 10 ms and again another time it takes 80 ms (even doing non file based things). So I thought it would be nice to check out the jdk 1.5 System.nanoTime(). I created the test (see below) and to my surprise, nanoTime actually gives better time feedback than System.currentTimeMillis. The testscenario is setting registring the starttime, sleep for 55 ms and registring the stoptime. This should end up with about 55.
I am looping 50 times.
System.currentTimeMillis has 0 hits on 55 ms and minimum was 46 ms and the maximum was 63, although this gives you an average of 54,5.
System.nanoTime() has 49 hits on 55 ms and one miss at 63.

Don't know what to think of this though. Just in case someone is intersted : the test was run on Windows XP sp 2, P4 3.0Ghz, with 1 gig of RAM, and the test was run from eclipse.

Here is the code... Curious about the result of others.. It's not a contest for nice coding practices though :)

long start = 0;
long stop = 0;
int correctMs = 0;
long maxValue = 0;
long minValue = -1;
long total = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < 50; i++) {
  start = System.currentTimeMillis();
  Thread.sleep(55);
  stop = System.currentTimeMillis();
  total = stop -start;
  if (total == 55) {
    correctMs++;
  } else {
    if (total > maxValue) maxValue = total;
    if (total < minValue || minValue == -1) minValue = total;
  }

}
System.out.println("Correct ms : " + correctMs);
System.out.println("min : " + minValue);
System.out.println("max : " + maxValue);
int correctNs = 0;
maxValue = 0;
minValue = -1;
for (int i = 0; i < 50; i++) {
  start = System.nanoTime();
  Thread.sleep(55);
  stop = System.nanoTime();
  total = ((stop - start) / 1000000);
  if (total == 55) {
     correctNs++;
  } else {
     if (total > maxValue) maxValue = total;
     if (total < minValue || minValue == -1) minValue = total;
   }
}
System.out.println("Correct ms : " + correctNs);
System.out.println("min : " + minValue);
System.out.println("max : " + maxValue);

Update : Sam Pullara gave me a fix for the code (already changed above) and noted that commenting wasn't working, which is fixed again Thanx. Sam.
He also gave me the results from above for the MacOS and there was less difference between the 2 methods than on my machine :
Correct ms : 48
min : 56
max : 56
Correct ms : 47
min : 54
max : 54

Sometimes I just want to be a user

mvdb — 2005-11-19T11:54:34+01:00

One minute I am sick and tired of open source and the other minute I am going at it again.
One of my biggest reasons to ignore opensource for a while, is that using opensource can be a real productivity killer for me.
To help me achieve something in my software, I "stumble" on a certain project that can help me in that effort. I start using that package and a at a certain stage I hit a bug or lack of functionaly to be expected from a piece of code (this is almost a rule, not an exception for me), you checkout the source to see if the latest is doing a better job and if not you start fixing it. So now you have to get familiar with the people behind the project, coding style, making tests and praying your patch actually gets applied. If this happens a bit too often, you get so distracted from your actual goals, that you don't have much time left to do the real work.
At a certain stage you are so sick and tired of fixing things, waiting to get things patched that you just don't bother anymore, or you just fork the code and happily fix it there and not contributing back anymore. At a certain stage you will have a go at it again and the process starts over.

Let me make clear that I love opensource and absolutely don't want to work without it, so this is not a specific opensource problem, since I hit a lot of bugs in commercial software too, but it's kind of hard to fix stuff (or figure out why it is broken) if you don't have the source :)

I wish I could be more of a user for the software I use, without feeling I am a tester, debugger and possibly a fixer for everything I use or at least try to find a nice balance.
Won't care about the balance if doing this kind of thing was actually also in my job description.

Really had it with HP...

mvdb — 2005-05-14T16:04:10+01:00

I installed a a photosmart printer yesterday and it works great, but after installation they ask you to register, which I tried. The registration mechanism however said "You don't have an internet connection, please register another way". WTF ???
Even java thinks I have an internet connection!
What the hell does hp use to figure out how to get an internet connection ? A virtual pigeon ??
Today I thought let's do some scanning again.
I just got the message, please reinstall the software or reboot your computer, because of an internal error.
I had the bright idea to actually try the HP software update system.
It can find lot's of updates, but when it comes to downloading it probably uses the same virtual pigeon to connect to the internet.
Please HP keep things simple, so things actually work, especially something as trivial as connecting to the internet!! (at least SAY what probably went wrong!)
I have tons of weird programs running here, that don't seem to have that problem..
Love (to a certain extend, since I also love my Xerox Laserprinter very much) your hardware, but your software is not thought through too well...

Major Design Flaw Hp scanjet 4670

mvdb — 2005-02-12T17:49:12+01:00

I am currently scanning a huge amount of photographs and replaced my old scanner with a new one, which helped me a lot in not getting blind by the scanner beam. No more lid opening while the scanner beam is still on, since I have a glass plate containing the scanner now, which doesn't shine into my eyes..
I was wonderfull when scanning photobooks, but there is one drawback when scanning it from the scanner "placeholder" (sorry cannot find a better word for it).
If you put a photo between the scanner and the placeholder, the photo gets caught in the locking mechanisme and is not straight anymore and you miss parts of the photographs and have to rescan the photo's again and again till you have them right.
People (or HP) might say that there is an option to straighten the images automatically, but it does such a bad job at it, that I had to turn it of.

Sorry hp this scanner gets a big F and if the scanner didn't have this huge problem, it would defintaly be worth a B..

Xulux2

mvdb — 2004-12-17T13:01:28+01:00

Xulux is a typical tool that will never see a release unless I am really happy with it.
If people are going to use xulux, they just have to be sure that I will be able to support it, else the choice of using xulux as the gui framework (or frontend API, as I like to call it), will be risky business.
With the current state of xulux I've hit the limit of what I can do and keep backward compatible with the code we use at the office. I've learnt a lot from development of xulux and experienced first hand the down side of the approach I took. Creating gui's is very fast in xulux (at least for the users of xulux), it saves a huge amount of time, but adding business logic and the interaction between the widgets is not that great. Almost everything can be done, but it takes more coding than I had in mind. Also extending the widgets is pretty copy & paste a complete widget, where you would actually like to just extend part of the functionality.
So I started on xulux2 last week. There will be no release of xulux "1" at all, just the snapshots (which works great for me). Parts of xulux1 will serve as a base for xulux2 (mostly the utils,swing code and the bean data provider). The frontend API will be similar but a lot smarter.
Hope to get a lot done the coming weeks (although I am currently in a restructure of my house, which takes a lot of my time too).
Will try to keep the core to at least support jdk 1.3 and my initial goals are supporting swing, swt and servlets, add scripting support and add support for (custom) rule engines like drools.

Why I never release stuff..

mvdb — 2004-12-17T12:38:09+01:00

I seem to end up as the guy who actually doesn't release anything. I create a lot of (open source) stuff, but I cannot get any further than alpha releases (ehh SNAPSHOT releases). Never releasing anything is, viewed from my position, has a pretty clear reason : If you release you have to be prepared to actually support things (at least that's the way I feel about it). I don't mind giving support, but having to support your software, prevents you from doing actual development and making progress (although it may vary on the tool you are writing).
Since we are talking opensource you would expect that a good reason for releasing is that other people may get involved in the development effort and this way you can do more and get better products.
Yep it COULD. If it doesn't you have to support the stuff on your own, for a system that you are not yet ready to support.
I don't write open source specifically to make other people happy, just to make myself happy. I just try to solve problems I hit and if the result will help other people, I am happy for them.
The reason why I still choose the open source model for my projects depends on where I hit the problem. Open source is an excellent way to make sure that your investment in building the tool that will solve problems in your day job, will not be lost when you eg switch jobs (I tend to put a lot of "spare" time for my day job to do stuff like that).

In short : If I am going to release something , I am prepared to support it and I am very happy with the product.

Theo van Gogh dead.

mvdb — 2004-11-02T10:16:41+01:00

Most of you probably don't know him (unless your dutch), but film maker Theo van Gogh was just shot and died in Amsterdam.
You probably think there is something familiar to his name : you think correctly, the painter Vincent van Gogh is an ancestor of him.
I liked him. He was confrontational, could express himself quite nicely and didn't care how he looked.
He was definitely not trying to blend in with the rest of the people (the "cattle" syndrom) and just did the things he wanted to do in his own unique way..
He was 47.