Roo’s Ramblings

So I treated myself to a nice Canon EOS 400D (or XTi Rebel to those over the Pond) and have started taking up photography. I wish I had more time and remembered to take my camera out more, but hey, I’ll get there, and I’m still having fun. So Flickr seems to be the place to be for all budding photographers, and I must admit I’m getting rather addicted to it. I could spend hours on end just clicking the Reload button on this page: http://flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/ - do check it out.

In the meantime, here are a few of mine that seem to have caught other peoples’ attention…

(This one was used at Flickr’s recent 4th birthday party!)

Do share your pics too!

I didn’t realise how many people would actually want to look at the Jacman source. As it turns out since I released v0.4 I hadn’t made the source available (through sheer laziness). I’ve had quite a few emails and PMs and so I have finally put an end to this omission this morning.

The source is now available via the Jacman Project page.

Non-Brits may not have had the pleasure of the Britain’s finest newsreader/interviewer, Jeremy Paxman. Here’s how he signed-off last week, informing viewers that he wasn’t 100% supportive of the editor’s future improvements.

Video over at YouTube.

It’s been a while but the latest version of Jacman was finally rolled out today. Functionality wise, there’s not more to report on - I’ve added some filters to the Install dialog which should be helpful for those who simply like to browse around the package repos. The application basically received a bit of a face-lift. A new look and feel looks a lot fresher in my opinion. The eye candy has also been boosted, but it’s not easy to spot unless you are using Jacman itself (try hovering over a button. Nice, eh?!)

Give it a whirl and see what you think. Also, I’ll never say no to any Java developers who wish to help out and become part of the Jacman team

Power of Nightmares is a fantastic documentary investigating the climate of fear. I remember seeing it when it was originally screened (a couple of years ago, IIRC). It’s a three parter - an hour each. Some bright spark has uploaded to Google Video. I’m not condoning the breaching of copyright, which this is a clear case. However, as I’m a UK TV licence payer, I, along with every payer, contributed to this, and I think it ought to be seen by everyone.

Check them out whilst they’re still online.

• Part 1 - Baby It’s Cold Outside
• Part 2 - The Phantom Victory
• Part 3 - The Shadows In The Cave

Part 1, perhaps the most important, as it sets out a lot of the foundations for the thesis, is not the most exciting. Parts 2 and 3 were fascinating.

I don’t use Linux 100% any more like I used to, which is a shame. It’s largely because I do a lot of work from home and it I need to be in Windows. And when I have booted in to Arch Linux, I tend not to pacman -Syu very often - I don’t know why, I guess it’s a it ain’t broken thing. Anyway, upgraded yesterday and I had 200Mb of stuff waiting to be upgraded, including Firefox 2. I’ve been using FF2 since it was released on Windows and I was happy to see it has graduated out of testing in AL. However, I forgotten about all the fuss about FF branding, and now AL has ‘Bon Echo’ instead.

A few things struck me:

1. What a silly name.
2. What a silly logo - not even SVG.
3. That silly name is now in the user-agent.

I dare say that no-one else cares about the first two points - and fair enough. However, point three is something that slightly grated. It’s only a name, for god’s sake! Within 5 mins of launching FF2 (or BE2) on AL I was on YouTube, and whilst it seemed to work ok, I was constantly distracted with a little message about an unknown user-agent. It made me think about the fact that there are many websites looking out for that user-agent string for reasons other than browser stats.

As annoying as it is, browsers are not 100% compatible and so web devs have worked hard to try and ensure their site works great on the main browsers. Web devs know about Firefox. “WTF is Bon Echo”, I imagine they are saying.

It didn’t take me long to dive into about:config and change the user-agent back to what it should be. In hindsight, perhaps I should have left it to see if there were any possible side-effects: does gmail work properly? What about Hotmail? Meebo? And so on. So now I will need to change this manually each time pacman upgrades FF/BE, right? Bugger that, I think I’ll just download the official binary and have done with it.

Stumbled upon betterfonts.com today. According to the site it has over 10,000 fonts available as freeware or shareware. There are certainly a lot, and it has a pretty nice interface to let you browse them. I thought it was cool.

I think many people who know me know I’m make quite a lot of my GUI apps in Java. Whilst I found the API a struggle at first, I soon realised that it was extremely powerful and flexible. I do believe that Java’s Swing toolkit is excellent - it’s largely spoiled by it’s poor looking cross-platform look and feel.

Still, some people may know about Jacman - a Swing app which I think it looks pretty darn good. And there’s Romain Guy et al’s Aerith which is a superb looking app. Java is powerful; Swing is powerful - where are all the desktop apps?
I therefore wanted to start something which acts as a focal point for are issues relating to Swing and the Desktop Java effort.  A showcase for good quality apps; discussion about Desktop Java issues; and a place for showing off little tips and tricks. So, SwingBling is the place to go. (Do get in touch if you are using some handy Java apps that you think others would like to know about.)
The first post was Java 6 on the desktop - part 1 which  is an overview on some of the improvements users of Swing desktop apps will benefit from in with the soon-to-be-released Java 6. (This was also linked to on OSNews).

Actually, I won’t bother with another tongue-in-cheek post (even if some people detected 0% sarcasm). But following on, especially regarding the KDE is a big fat beast and GNOME is nice and lightweight debate, people should read a new comparison between the two.

Lubos Lunak has done some benchmarks regarding memory consumption. WARNING! SPOILER COMING! Well, the findings are certainly in favour of KDE, which surprised even myself. I’m not terribly worried about memory. I made sure my ‘puter was well stocked in this area when I bought it, but it’s promising to know that KDE is in fact a contender for lower-specced PCs too. Clearly the “bloat” isn’t making the difference that people expect.
One thing that got me thinking though was how much the choice of distro affects the performance of the DEs. So I intend to replicate the experiment at some point to see what’s happening on my Arch box.

Some computer users, even technically savvy ones, some times get confused about how hard disk performance is affected by the data it holds. Let me clarify: the more data you store on the hard drive, the slower it gets. It’s obvious when you think about it - each of those bytes of data adds extra weight on the disk platters which means it takes longer to spin-up and spin-down.

So, you may have thought that all those techies who keep going on about “bloat” were a crazy, but now you can see it makes total sense. Disk I/O is the biggest bottle-neck in most workstations and so reducing that is paramount. Don’t be fooled, software package size is the key factor in application performance, it’s nothing to do with poorly written algorithms, for example.

As we know, KDE is a poor performer because it comes bundled with lots of additional applications. Even though these applications are not loaded until requested, the sheer presence of them, as discussed earlier, will weigh down the hard drive. Functionality and ergonomics are not “real” metrics! Saving those micro-seconds is what keeps the world spinning around.

Continuing this, remember not to use a “bloated” OS, like Ubuntu or Arch Linux, as these OSes can occupy hundreds and hundreds of megabytes of disk space. Use muLinux or if you don’t mind the performance hit, Damn Small Linux. Don’t worry if you don’t have access to software that you want or are used to, at least the alternatives you get in these small Linux distros are also lightwight, and that’s all that matters.

An update to my string tokeniser library was released last week. For this version the main addition was a GUI frontend so that people could experiment with the library without having to do any coding at all. Nice.

Project page is here.

Believe it or not, we’re having a heat-wave in Britain! It’s very hot in London where I live, and my commute via tube and train (i.e., mobile greenhouses) is harsh to say the least. Last week a news report measured temperatures of 48C (118F) on the tube and 52C (125F) on certain buses!! Too. Darn. Hot. I’m from the north of England - I’m not used to this “heat” stuff.

I’m crossing my fingers for clouds and rain

Not that I was particularly good at blogging at the best of times, but I thought I’d knock up a couple of posts. The main reason why I’ve been quiet recently is that since the beginning of June, my girlfriend was diagnosed with cancer. And not just any cancer, but a very rare type too! She’s only 24 and this is the second time she’s had cancer. So it’s been understandably tough for her, and as a result my life gets pretty hard too. Still, she’s amazingly strong about this and tries her best to keep plodding on as normal.

Whilst all this has been happening, my job has been getting more hectic too. Lots of deadlines; lots of pressure; and lots of resignations! We’ve lost 3 people in our (relatively small) department, including my line manager. So hardly a bundle of laughs, that’s for sure.

Hopefully things will perk up soon…

Last year I wrote a bunch of articles for OSNews. The majority were on Java, but one was for Arch Linux, and the other was about LaTeX. My article, LaTeX isn’t for everyone but it could be for you went down very well, and I was pleased when the editor of the online journal, PracTeX contacted me to include it in their next issue.

It wasn’t just the article, though. I thought that the cool thing the editor did here was to plough through the 120+ comments that were left that vent some of the problems that people have with LaTeX in the real world. Quite interesting, I think.

The latest issue has just been released, and a PDF version is due in the near future, I understand.

Oh, and I’ve just received my copy of the LaTeX Companion, 2nd Ed.  Fortunately, I’m employed by Pearson, of which Addison-Wesley is an imprint, so I got it 1/2 price It’s a darn cool book if you use LaTeX on a regular basis and need to get to grips with some of the finer points of the package.

One of the annoyances of using someone else’s PC is that you often don’t have access to all the software that you have become accustomed, if not reliant on. This is even worse on machines in net cafes or work PCs that are restricted.

I recently wanted to get access to an IM client at work that could cope with multiple protocols. I could have installed GAIM, but the truth be known, I shouldn’t install anything on my work PC, and if I do, and get work, there has to be a damn good reason (i.e., it’s essential for my work!)

So, I’ve turned to the AJAX revolutionaries for help, and wasn’t disappointed when I found a site called Meebo. It’s a cool little site that bulges with AJAX goodliness. You get a pretty reasonable IM client all within your web browser, without all the Flash and Java applet complications. It just works! Sometimes I forget that this is all HTML+AJAX (and some nice graphic design). Very clever stuff, I thought.

You can just specify the login details for the IM network(s) of choice and it logs in for you. If you wish, you can create a Meebo account, which saves all the IM details, and so you can login to your usual accounts with a single username. Handy.

There is still some work to do with Meebo. I personally don’t like having lots of individual chat windows opened, but rather a tabbed interface that I can switch between (which is how I normally have my IM client open). You can’t do anything other that basic chatting, like web cams, file transfers, etc. Although, I quite like its simplicity, it’s refreshing.

Give it a whirl if you get caught out without your favourite IM app.

Blimey, long time, no post. Moved house recently and so it took up lots of time and had all the hassle of getting my broadband connection up-and-running once again. Anyway…

For many years now, Kmail has been my favourite email client. Recently, I’ve been using Windows more than I normally do (for a bit of win32 programming) and so I installed Thunderbird. It’s pretty darn good and has improved a lot since I last used it. However, for me at least, it highlighted three small details that keep me hooked on kmail.

1. Keyboard navigation. I think the majority of people I reckon, they will have the message list with a preview pane below - it’s true for me at least. As I’m reluctant to use the mouse, I want to be able to move between messages easily, and then scroll through a message in the preview pane if it is of interest. Kmail solves this thus: LEFT = previous message; RIGHT = next message; DOWN = scroll down current message; UP = scroll up. I think this is nice. I can navigate quickly using the cursor keys. As far as I can tell in Thunderbird, UP and DOWN moves between messages. To scroll in the preview pane, you can hit SPACE, which is like a PGDOWN. Not quite as elegant for me.
2. Missing attachments. Prior to Kmail, about 8/10 emails that were supposed to have an attachment (and directly referred to them) left my outbox rather more lighter than intended. Thankfully Kmail includes a handy check feature: when you click “Send”, it searches for terms like ‘attached’ or ‘attachment’ (this list is customisable) and if there is a match but no actual attachment, it’ll flag this up. Nice
3. Tray notification. Thunderbird will put an icon in your system tray upon arrival of new messages. However, and this is extremely petty and subjective, kmail outdoes Thunderbird here. Not only do you get the Kmail icon, but it is overlaid with an actual message count. It means that you can see exactly how many unread messages you have even before you restore the application. As I say, it’s a rather small detail, one that 99.9% of people could care less about: what’s the difference between 1 or 10 messages - all you need to know is that you have new messages. Well, I can’t answer that other than to say, I just prefer it!

To be honest, I think Kmail is not always given due credit. It’s extremely well featured, responsive, robust and has plenty of nice touches. And if you want the extra groupware functionality, Kmail is properly integrated to Kontact (KDE’s Outlook/Evolution equiv).

I’m not a huge gamer. I like games, but I’m not very good at them and so I tend to only play them for a little while (whilst the difficulty is low!) Fortunately, my brother works for a game retailer and he sends me many of his “old” games (he’s very good gamer and finishes things within hours). Anyway, the point is that I sort of like games, but they’re not a big deal, but then I saw Spore…
Spore is essentially a game that simulates the process of evolution. You start off life as a simple cell, searching for food sources, avoiding parasites, etc and it’s all very 2D. When you reproduce, you “edit” the next generation by making changes and then moving on. Eventually you become more complex and the world becomes 3D. It all sounds a bit weird but it looks very smart.
A great presentation can be found here. There’s also a good entry already in Wikipedia, even though the game hasn’t been released.

I’m still intrigued about how they will ensure that the player remains “hooked” because it does have the potential to get a bit stale. However, I’m hugely impressed at the vision of the game and it seems like it will really pull it off.

I’m enjoying a week off at the moment. Daytime TV is so dire that you are forced to delve into your DVD collection. I have quite a few, and my collection includes all three extended editions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I must be a real fan, right? Well, no, actually.

I bought the first (Fellowship) on a whim because my girlfriend thought I’d like it (for some reason she thinks that because I’m into computing, I must like sci-fi/fantasy!). The film wasn’t that good but what I enjoyed a lot was the two discs of extras which come with the extended editions. They were really great and very interesting - I personally enjoyed them more than the films, and ended up buying the other two films purely on the stength of the extras (sucker!)
Yesterday, I watched Return of the King. I saw it at the cimema when it was released, but this was the first time I watched the extended version. My gawd, is it me or did that film last for about three days?!? Yawn.

How come no ones’ facial hair gets longer throughout these films?

Is this the coolest colour chooser you’ve ever seen?

This is part of Kirill Grouchnikov’s excellent Substance LAF. Substance goes beyond the usual look and feel implementations, as it also provides components like this. I’ve become a recent convert to this LAF because of how easy it is to customise it, and I can’t wait for an opportunity to include this chooser too - it’s darn cool!

Blimey, it’s been a while. Well, I’ve been rather busy (who isn’t?!?). I’ve had a paper accepted for a journal (which is a first for me), a paper at an international conference, and a couple of papers accepted at various conference workshops. For me, a lot of it revolves around a Arabic language processing, and a program I’ve started called aConCorde. The problem is, I don’t speak Arabic! Whilst it hasn’t hindered me so far, it’s something I’d really like to do. The first hurdle for me has been simply getting to grips with the completely new alphabet. Although I have a book, and there are many web pages with the alphabet, I wanted something to test me, and that’s why I started making a simple little app called JAlphabet.

It’s still rather rusty at the moment, which is why I’ve not actually released any code yet. But the main screen looks a little like this:

Yep, it’s another one of those pesky Java apps that I can’t stop myself from writing! However, like with Jacman, I don’t want to produce apps with the standard Java aethestics. This is clearly borrowing from Apple, with a brushed metal theme. I think it looks great, over all. What you can’t see is the fade in/out effects when you hover over a button. Of course, I didn’t do all the hardwork myself - I’ve made use of an excellent, and very flexible, Java Look ‘n’ Feel called Substance. I’m not saying my interface is perfect at the moment, but I think it’s basically there and only needs some tweaks (like window and font sizes).
Anyway, it’s very nice that I can test my grasp of the Arabic alphabet, but then came a recent challange at work where, for reasons I can’t disclose, it would be advantagous if I could understand a little bit of Japanese - or at least grasp which of the many Japanese alphabets a given word is written in. So, I’ve just started to abstract the code a little so it becomes a generic tester for any language to care to supply:

I’m currently writing a new intro screen where you get to select the language/alphabet that you wish to test. There is a basic summary screen at the end when you finish the test (or click Finish) which tells you your score and displays the items you got right and wrong. This too needs some more work, but it’s generally it’s there. Hopefully I’ll get to release the first version sometime this week.