Roo’s Ramblings

Woo hoo! ‘About time’, I hear you cry! Or maybe not. Anyway, Jacman v0.3 is here. You’ll find:

• Multilingual supprt via a language menu (Only English and Polish at the moment - more to follow).
• Experimental system tray access to Jacman.
• Proper preferences dialog to set custom Jacman settings.
• Improved console view to see what pacman’s up to.
• ‘pacman-optimize’ button on the main screen.
• Plus many other little tweaks.

Special thanks to the Jacman team for their contributions (including the translators).

More info can be found on the Jacman Project page. (See the Readme.txt too.)

I stumbled upon a blog the other day and was impressed with the category list that you often see on a side bar of the page. What I liked was how each item was in a box with rounded corners. It was all nicely designed and changed colour when you hovered, etc. I’ve done menus with rounded buttons before - I needed lots of images. But this site was not using images here, as I could select the text. Hmm… better look under the hood…

It turns out to be a pure CSS solution and a single line at that:

-moz-border-radius: 2px

Gasp! What is this?!? Mozilla specific CSS! Good grief. Haven’t we been here before guys? After all the scorn poured upon Microsoft for constantly ignoring standards, I was slighltly agog at how our champion of compliance had started to sneak in its own proprietary elements in to the fray.

Calm down

I fired off a query to Google quicker than you could say “hypocrite”. What I quickly discovered was, thankfully, not Mozilla pushing it’s own ideas of what CSS should be. My fears were quickly allayed, and frankly, I was feeling a bit sheepish for jumping to the incorrect conclusions instead of thinking things through a little further. If you had forgotten, like me, that Mozilla is much more than a browser: it’s an application platform. Mozilla uses its own XUL (XML User Interface Language) for defining interfaces. To get the interface to do anything, JavaScript is used. From this it is possible to produce cross-platform applications. And this is where these damn tags fit in. They were in fact intended for use within XUL-based interfaces.

Mozilla is not recommending they be used for public webpages for obvious reasons. If they are, then they are essentially being abused. I suppose in some situations you could risk it, even though they are essentially being abused. If you want to find out what else is available, here’s a list.

Postscript

It has just occurred to me that whilst using proprietary tags is a Bad Idea, there is an unusal analogy. Things like rounded corners on boxes will be coming in for CSS3 (which isn’t even complete yet). However, there have already been many advances in the CSS2 standard. However, what’s the point of something like CSS3 in the real world? The fact remains that the vast majority of users do not run a browser capable of implementing the standards (cheers, Microsoft). In many respects, using the lastest CSS standards, you are in fact using a niche feature set that many people can’t appreciate. Judging by my website logs, the vast majority of non-IE users are using a Mozilla-based product. Therefore, if you’re using CSS2, transparent PNGs, SVG, etc, then you could be forgiven for using Mozilla specific features.

It’s something that always bothers me: why are cars manufactured to go faster than the highest speed limits? Why am I even thinking about this, especially when it’s Christmas? Well, I was reading an old copy of PC Pro magazine and a journalist also made a similar remark about cars going fast in reference to the music industry’s successful hounding of p2p networks.

Sony won its landmark case decades ago that deferred responsibility from itself should anyone use video recorders for illegal activities. P2p networks ought to benefit from the same precedent, right? Well, no. Because they don’t have the same expensive lawyers to defend their interestes.

So, why hasn’t anyone sued a car manufacturer yet for deliberately making cars travel faster than the speed limit? Speeding can cause real harm to people, not just to the bottom-line.

So, I went to see March of the Penguins the other day. It’s an interesting little wildlife documentary - not the sort of thing you expect to see at the cinema, but welcome nonetheless. I would recommend it to others. But, man, does it tug on the heartstrings? It makes the Bambi look like a walk in the park. You’ll be needing to reach for the tissues more times than a Pamela Anderson home video.

The film charts the pretty amazing ritual of the Emperor Penguins’ breeding season - or, as Hollywood would say, it’s a “love story”. I won’t say any more other than because the location is antartica, it’s a tad chilly and that presents a few problems. Those crazy penguins…

Dang, it only took two years to contradict himself since his 2003 I ain’t #%&$ing dead yet. Richard Pryor was a genius - rather fucked up, but, hey, that’s rock and roll. Under ‘occupation’, he described himself as “Fucking legend”, and he wasn’t wrong.

Mr Pryor, RIP.

Jacman is one of my favourite projects. I had a lot of motivation to work on it when I conceived the idea. Plus, it seemed to get a good reception for its v0.1 release. However, development had pretty much ceased. This was largely due to my relocation and new job. Plus, Jon-Anders (Sonix) has a busy workload with his studies. That said, possibly the largest factor was because my motivation had faded due to underwhelming reviews.

You see, I wrote Jacman for others. I used to see many calls in the forums for GUI front-ends. I wasn’t bothered myself - I’m fine with the command line. Yet, it seemed like a cool project and I went for it. The problem is, any negative comments about Jacman is rarely about the program itself - but simply about my choice of language. Perhaps I should have known better than to use non-Free software on an otherwise Free platform. Oh, and of course, “Java is slow”. My point is that I can never seem to have a discussion about Jacman - it always goes off on a tangent about the language! Anyone who saw the Jacman thread on the forums this week will have witnessed this.

Anyway, I’ve decided not to let Jacman fade away. I’ve been dipping into the code most nights this week - just adding a few lines here and there. Hopefully the code for the next release will be stable by this time next week, after which I’ll send out a call for translators. For the releases after that, I’ve had some great ideas on how to make the user experience even better, but I’ll keep that to myself for now. Basically, my approach now is to avoid language debates and just let the program speak for itself. I still belive that of all the pacman front-ends in development, it’s functionally ahead, but I would say that, wouldn’t I?! Fortunately, Jon-Anders and I have plenty of ideas on where to take Jacman in the future to improve it in terms of functionality and usablility.

To be fair, this is hardly news. There has been a lot of work with font rendering in Mustang (Java 1.6.0) and with Sun releasing weekly builds, people have been able to test this for months.

Today was the first day for me though. No one could deny that fonts in Java looked poor (relative to other GUI libs, at least). It was possible to turn on anti-aliasing, which helped, but then they sometimes looked a little fuzzy, especially for smaller sizes. Anyway, here’s the current situation.

JRE 1.5.0 (default)	JRE 1.5.0 (with AA)	Mustang b61 (default)

I was very pleased to see the display in Mustang looking great - as they should be! Now, Mustang also supports subpixel anti-aliasing for improved rendering on LCD screens. What I’ve yet to establish is whether it was on for the above screenshots. They look pretty good, so it could be the case.

I was at the bus stop this morning, killing time whilst waiting for the inevitably late bus. The cold was setting in, and my mind for some unknown reason wandered to the excellent web comic series, Mr Tourette at ModernToss.com. Now, those cartoons crack me up big time (”I still want paying”). So, a big grin quickly turned into a small giggle and then into full belly laughs. This normally wouldn’t bother me except for the 10 other people at the bus stop suddenly started to give me a wide birth - move away from the nutter.

Still, it’s hardly the worst thing in the world. The only saving grace was that I had my iPod on and so I could at least pretend I was listening to Bill Hicks rather than my usualy funky choons.

Anyone given this a try yet? It’s a Java port of the Quake 2 game. I tried it a few months ago - admittedly, I was in my Windows partition at the time - and it ran really well.

Ok, I can read your mind though: “it must be sloooow?!?”.

Well, I can’t give you my own findings, but there are some benchmarks on the site charting the progress of their port.

Here’s the table from their page:

Benchmarks being benchmarks, there is always flaws. However, I think the numbers are pretty decent. The Quake FPS test has been a pretty robust benchmark for many years. That said, testing at 800×600 seems rather too conservative. Running in full-screen mode is what seems to cause the largest issues, but it’s hardly sluggish.

Chanced upon this site earlier: http://turbulence.org/Works/nums/prepare.html. It’s supposedly a visualisation of the frequency of used numbers on the Internet, or something like that. However, I just thought it was quite a funky little Java applet. The actual results aren’t that interesting, I have to say. But the interface is pretty snazzy. Give it a whirl!

Dang! Catcus has been doing some spring-cleaning over at cactuswax.net and there’s no more Transit Tales. I thought I’d carry the baton for a little while since I do rely on public transport quite a bit. To get to work, I catch a bus, then the tube and finally an overground train.

So, last week, I jumped on the 8.19 train to Cambridge from London Liverpool Street (I don’t work in Cambridge - I just get the train that heads that way!) and not only did it leave on time, it arrived a couple of minutes ahead of schedule. Well, as a British traveller, I don’t pay some of the highest fares in Europe to get a prompt service! Why couldn’t it be as shite as every other day?!? Anyway, time to write a letter, methinks…

MS have been trumpting their new-look fonts for Vista. They’re nice, you have to agree. But, they’re Microsoft’s fonts and so they won’t want us Linux users getting our grubby hands them. This is where Mr Friedman comes in. He kindly published a great list on his blog titled, 25 Best License-Free Quality Fonts.

I personally warming to Lacuna:

I’m pretty happy with my Getting to Grips with Latex tutorials. I know they’ve gone down well because I get plenty of feedback from readers telling me so. But every now and then, I like to check how they are doing in the Google-sphere. If you type “latex tutorials” into Google, you get:

I come 2nd! Woo hoo! Now, I know it’s not first, but I don’t reasonably expect to leapfrog the Tex Users’ Group site. So, I’m pretty chuffed because most people doing a Google search at least sees the top few entries before they decided to click. The other reason I’m pretty happy is because I’m a new kid on the block when it comes to Latex guides. Latex has been out for decades and there’s no shortage of sites to help users.

An interesting aside is that the entry that appears on the Google results page says “Latex tutorials taking you from the very basics towards more advanced topics. Clear presentation and narrative flow.” But, that content doesn’t appear in my site. This must be what others have written about them! B)

I keep a little counter on the main page (which is basically a contents page). In the past 20 months, I’ve had over 130,000 hits on that single page alone, and I’m now at a rate of 10,000 hits per month.

Saw an excellent blog, by Phillip Eby, almost a year ago, and a friend of happened happened to recall it recently in a discussion about Python. It’s titled Python is not Java and talks about how adopting a Java approach when programming in Python just makes life difficult. In particular, I love the section about overuse of XML:

If you are a Java programmer, do not trust your instincts regarding whether you should use XML as part of your core application in Python. If you’re not implementing an existing XML standard for interoperability reasons, creating some kind of import/export format, or creating some kind of XML editor or processing tool, then Just Don’t Do It. At all. Ever. Not even just this once. Don’t even think about it. Drop that schema and put your hands in the air, now! If your application or platform will be used by Python developers, they will only thank you for not adding the burden of using XML to their workload. [Phil’s emphasis]

Now, it takes a brave man to be critical of any programming language. After overwhelming response from readers, he followed up with Java is not Python Either. It’s nice that he balanced the argument somewhat. His argument is in fact somewhat lacking, and it basically boils down to Java is good because it has generated a lot of good frameworks that are then ported to other platforms. He confesses to taking scraps from the Java table on many-a-occasion in order to avoid reinventing the wheel within a Python project.

I personally am a fan of both languages. The trick is to simply pick the strengths of a given language to match the needs of a given project.

I had myself a wee break in Paris last weekend. Man, that is one amazing capital. The French certainly know how to knock-up a good looking city. ‘Twas vibrant too. Being English means that I’m automatically supposed to hate the French. However, that’s never been the case and I really love the French lifestyle. Would trade Paris for London any day. The only problem with Paris is that it was far too many American tourists!

Anyway, as Skoal put in a request, I happened to spot some funky French buskers. It started off as a rather normal guitar player. Bit boring in many respects. Then, out of nowhere, some bloke turns up with two wooden spoons and starts drumming away on a post. He the man!

I can’t believe it’s taken so long but I’ve finally setup a hosting account. Thanks to Dibble for the heads-up about xs-host.com who have been pretty darn good - and excellent value! I’m such a newbie though when it comes to configuring the databases and software. Still, I’ve managed to get this blog going!

Oh my god! I’m 25. Mid-twenties. It’s all downhill from here…

The HTML rendering component in Java Swing is so dated it’s become a joke. HTML 3.2 compatible with a little bit of support for CSS thrown in - it is not capable of displaying modern websites. Recently, the Flying Saucer project has been delivering a compontent OSS XHTML renderer, which has proved very successful. However, it’s still behind the big names, like Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc.

Jrex does things differently. As useful a Java implemented renderer is, Jrex allows you to embed the Gecko rendering engine, which is used in Mozilla-based products, directly in to your Java app. The Gecko engine has the advantage of being a large project with a lot of man-hours already dedicated to it. It’s up-to-date, robust and pretty speedy. So, I’m very glad that this is available.

I thought it was interesting to see that Adobe have released their own PDF API in Java. Sure, it’s only a viewer Javabean, and it’s not open source. However, it’s free to use and it means you can integrate PDF viewing and printing into your applications.

Java.net published an excellent tutorial on making use of this component. When combined with other libraries, like iText - a Java API for PDF generation - then you can have pretty good setup for reading/writing portable documents.

So a minor release for AL has finally come out (Nipple or something). It’s good to see AL still marching on. Things have felt slightly sluggish recently with all the libslay stuff. I mean that with no disrespect to those working in the background - I know lots of people have been working really hard. Now that it’s out of the way we can continue to look forward to other improvements like an updated installer and libpacman to name but two.

It made me think though about my time with Arch over the past 8 1/2 months. It surprises me that I’m still using a distro for this long. It’s not all been plain sailing either - I seem to have regular problems with my Centrino wireless after the occasional pacman -Syu. I’d have normally switched by now to see what else is happening with other distros. However, I’m feeling strangely loyal and have stuck with AL even when I sometimes hungered for a simpler life.

I therefore thought it a good idea to write a follow-up to my previous Arch-related article, A Week in the Life of an Arch Linux Newbie. I thought I’d write about all the cool things AL has been upto over the past 8 months. Such an article may also quell some the complaining in the forums about our Distrowatch position - a bit of publicity to let the Linux-world know that AL is getting on with business; head down, just working