Roo’s Ramblings

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

I spent years using gvim as my main editor for everything, including programming. A year or so ago, I started using Eclipse for my Java projects. Eclipse is not a Java IDE per se. It’s an application framework for which JDK programming modules were implemented. However, you have also find modules for developing C++ and Python within Eclipse too.

Eclipse has grown in popularity so much recently that it’s caused the other OSS offerings - and more crucially, the commerical offerings - to really move up a gear, and I think Netbeans is on the verge of becoming a first-class Java IDE.

I recently experimented with NB 5 beta and finally got around to playing with its killer feature, Matisse. This is NB’s new GUI design module and quite frankly it blows the competition out of the water. Writing GUI code is the most tedious task. Getting a few textboxes and labels on screen is fairly straight-forward, but getting the blasted things aligned properly will ensure you lose an hour of your time!

So, check out the Matisse demo to see what the fuss is about. I think I’ll wait until NB5 is released proper and then I’ll trial it for my next Java project, whatever that may be.

Oh my God! Can you Adam and Eve it? I finally have broadband after about 6 weeks of trying. Phew! I’m glad it’s over. As I’ve said a few times when I endured dial-up to post here, I’ve felt so out of the loop. I’ve not run a pacman -Syu during the last 6 weeks either! I’ve barely posted on the forums and work on Jacman practically ground to a halt.

Anyway, all should change now. More silly blog posts. More surreal AL forum posts and more comments from Skoal! Woo hoo

You guessed it - I finally purchased one of those bad boys last Saturday. What can I say? It just rocks!

About 6-7 years ago I got a Sony DiscMan for xmas. It’s lasted me well, but I’ve been wanting to move away from bulky music players for sometime. I’ve been waiting for the size/capacity ratio to reach a decent balance and I think that 4Gb within the volume of a couple of credit cards is good enough. I wasn’t bothered about getting a iPod per se - it’s just that Apple seemed to be the first to release a media player that fitted my needs.

I do think Apple have got most things just about right, so all credit to them. The only feature I wish the Nano had is some sort of normalising facility so that you don’t blow your ear drums between tracks of different volumes. However, I could do some thing myself to this effect by normalising the tracks directly on my laptop before I copy them over.

Anyway, I’m a happy chappy for now, and no doubt all my fellow commuters are happy, enjoying my involuntary tone-deaf singing

Woo hoo!

I’m so out of the Arch Linux loop at the moment. My broadband still isn’t working. I’ve canceled my account with my previous ISP (Wanadoo) for being utterly useless (i.e., taking a month to not transfer my broadband to my new address). My new ISP (BT) has promised connection for next Thursday, which isn’t bad. So, until then, I’m still on rubbish dial-up.

Anyway, tonight I realised that Jacman had made it community which is great! Thanks all for voting and for providing feedback. Not having broadband has in fact been hindering progress for the next version significantly. I haven’t been syncing with the CVS server so I can’t see what Sonix has been upto, and vice-versa. I had made a couple of significant improvements a while back, namely multi-language support and a proper preferences dialog for configuring Jacman’s options. Sonix was playing with some other features which I won’t give away just yet. Unfortunately, there’s still no news from the AUR guys regarding a sensible way for accessing the AUR database. (C’mon guys - please! Pretty please!

Basically, this time next week I’d like to release the next version. I don’t want people to think that we’ve given up working on it because that’s far from the truth. There’s still plenty of potential for it improve and add useful functionality. It’s just the circumstances of new job; new life and no broadband that’s causing some delays.

Oh no. The dreaded moving date is getting rather close. As some of you know, I got a job recently that means I have to relocate down south to smelly London. The 28th will be my last day in lovely Leeds for the foreseeable future.

As any English person knows, the north of England is far nicer than the south. Take the county of East Sussex, for example, on the south coast of England. Famous for Eastbourne (a town where old people move to die, aka “God’s waiting room”!) and the Beachy Head cliffs (the UK’s #1 suicide location). Woo hoo! (Don’t worry, I’m only saying this to wind up Dibble - hehe)

The advantages of moving to London are:

• More computing jobs
• More music and comedy gigs
• Food!!! Lots of fine cuisine from all over the globe
• Travel - easy to catch the train to Paris or to fly from the many London airports.
• My girlfriend will stop whingeing about wanting to live in London (yeah, she’s a soft southener).
• Culture - many fine galleries and museums, theatres and cinemas.
• Interesting array of buskers (I’ll keep the Busker review updated, don’t you worry!)

The dissadvantages can be summed up as:

• Expensive
• It’s smelly
• Tourists
• Too many posh people (toffs)
• Can’t get fish, chips and gravy!
• Futher away from my family
• Seems to be a few too many bombs around at the moment too

Anyway, the advantage for you guys is that I’ll be pretty busy next week, so you won’t have to endure my posts!

Can you believe that web developers still write sites that explicitly block all browsers other than IE?!? Are these people deluded or what?!? They must sincerely believe that IE is actually a decent browser.

“Optimised for Internet Explorer” - no it isn’t. It’s been downgraded for IE; it’s gone backwards! Muppets…

As Skoal’s showing his face again, I know he’s been waiting for my next exciting busker review. Well, I was in London a few weeks back and I was walking along the Thames, near the Millenium Bridge, where I should happen to chance upon “Budgie Man”. I couldn’t believe my eyes! Or my ears for that matter, because he was singing his own little jingle: “Budgie man, budgie man - I’m the b-b-b-b-budgie man…” lol The relavence of the budgie was his little gang of budgies that he had patiently trained to do cute tricks and stunts. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera. But, a quick search on Google yielded this photo from another bemused spotter.

This guy took busking to a new level.