I’ve just put out an 0.20 release of eMusic/J. This fixes an issue that appears only on some JVMs (in this case, it seems to be Blackdown) where System.getenv(String) isn’t supported. However, it doesn’t fail gracefully, no…it throws an Error (not just an Exception even). See these Sun bug reports for details. I think that… Read More »
I’m writing this post from my new computer, finally an upgrade from my venerable old Duron 700. The specs on the new one are: Athlon64 X2 4600+ AM2 2.4Ghz 512Kb cache Asus M2N4-SLi AM2 2x 1Gb DDR2-800 2x Western Digital Caviar 250Gb SATA II 7,200RPM 16Mb cache Gigabyte 7600GT PCIE Graphics card 256Mb DDR3 and… Read More »
After several months of not getting around to it, I’ve finally put out a new version of eMusic/J. There aren’t a huge number of changes in this one, but there is one that will be significant for new users: it no longer requires Sun Java, any 1.4 Java environment will do the job. Thanks to… Read More »
If you want to link to an html file directly in a subversion repository, there is a problem. By default, subversion doesn’t distinguish between filetypes other than binary versus text. So when you request a (text) file directly from the repository, it comes in as text/plain, no matter what it really is. This causes all… Read More »
Here is a great explanation of when using proprietary, or at least close-format-based, software can be life-threatening. Quite a scary idea.
I was playing with a test server for something I was working on, and one of the data files got corrupted. From the look of it, half way through one write process, another started, erased the file, wrote the new content, finished. Then the first one wrote the remainder of the data. This confused me… Read More »
I was asked to install Ubuntu Linux on someone’s Acer Travelmate 230 laptop, and I ran into a problem that was very easily fixed, once I knew what it was. However it wasn’t documented anywhere under the laptop model, which made finding the solution hard. The problem was that X would start with only a… Read More »
If you’re packaging a set of data into a class to pass to the client side of Google’s web toolkit, there are two things you must do for it to work. One is implement IsSerializable, the other is provide a no-args constructor.
Recently I’ve been using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) for writing a web-based application (nothing I can talk about just yet 🙂 ). It’s a very nice way of building an AJAX-type web app in pure Java. You write the client-side code in much the same way as you would a typical Java GUI application,… Read More »
I went for a walk today, and found a couple of interesting looking aliens. The first being a small-person-sized (and unusually dark) “grey” [click for larger images]: The other clearly demonstrates why they have arrived: they want to strip the Earth of its resources! .