Older blog entries for cbj (starting at number 8)

Work on javap/javah going fairly well though I didn't manage to finish this weekend. Need to do somehow incorporate a test suite to make maintenance easier.

I watched Open Water this weekend. I liked the movie, but I liked it even more after watching the sort of "making of" documentary on the dvd. Apparently shot on weekends and vacations by a husband and wife team with two actors, financed by the husband's day job over a two and a half year period.

So Gnome Volume Control has got to be one of the worst programs ever. There are more than 130 volume controls just for Sound Blaster Live! [Alsa Mixer]. What the hell do I really care about all those volume controls? And why is sound always turned down to zero in software every time I boot? The saving grace is that the program does seem to work. Please, if you work on Desktop apps, take a more minimalist approach or at least make all that extra detail something you don't have to see by default, thanks.

Separated the junit and mauve serialization test into separate classes, so that compiling the mauve version shouldn't require junit now. I see a few 1.5 tests now show up in Mauve. That's pretty cool. I need to get the batch runner to run my external test though.

Now I'm looking into fixing cp-tools's javah and javap. Looks like the stuff Jeroen wrote for japitools will work nicely with a little work. Quite a few tools needed still for jar signing, rmi, etc.

Recently got to play with some VoIP software for work, one version is written in C++ and another duplicate version is written in Java. The Java version doesn't appear to support H.323 video at the moment. Anyway, SIP and VoIP are both cool. I can use the software to make phone calls as if I'm at my desk at work which is quite handy when working at home. They don't have the full version available so that I could also receive calls made to my PSTN phone on the computer but that's ok, at least purely SIP calls work.

Since Paul is going to be visiting for a little while over the holidays I been trying to think of something he and I could hack on for one day or one night for fun, as in complete from start to finish in less than 12 hours, as is divinely intended for all cool hacks. I'm personally having a hard time thinking of something cool to do, I think he wants to set me up with some VoIP via Asterisk but that isn't coding.

In other news it seems I'm now in search of a new job, completely on my terms since I'm still working at the moment at least. Restructuring and continued outsourcing are moving the work I enjoy away and substituting work I truly dislike with absolutely no career growth potential in the new year. As someone who made it into a software architect role for just two months before restructuring (downsizing, layoffs) turned me back into just a developer in Sept. this year, the news of an impending lower point still on the career graph doesn't sit well. If anyone has leads in the Raleigh/Durham area let me know.

So Sun has made yet another license for their TCK, this time in the form of "look but don't touch." Dalibor as usual is all over it and has a nice post in the comments section. You can see the article here.

Spent a little time trying to get the changelog plugin for eclipse working in my 3.0 installation on Windows. Adding the missing feature.properties file resolved a minor issue in "Manage Configuration". Still doesn't appear to work. The eclipse PDE error log doesn't help. I think it would help if the developer were to create an update site per FAQ 92 and put that up. Other than that not really sure why it doesn't show up in the preferences menu. No more time available right now to read up on how to setup plugin development and build it myself.

I've noticed that the amount of list traffic for the project, and to some extent the work going on within the project, are directly proportional to the amount of time I or someone like me spends working on the project. Somewhat disconcerting since I'd like to be able to leave the project for a week or two or even a couple of months without it stagnating.

Released GNU Classpath 0.05 a week ago. I have updated the peer interface classes to what appears to be the 1.4 API although I need to give more thought to this since there are parties desiring to unify their peer interfaces with ours to make things more seemless. Other ongoing future work will apparently be to rework the VM support classes to be more optimal for all JVMs even though it will break things for a time.

The alpha pre-releases of GNU Classpath have been little more than tar files of a snapshot in time in the past. My goal is to eventually change that. Hard to imagine a project that has only had alpha pre-releases for five years but that is where we're at. The specific goals that we all have working on the project that would constitute a more complete public release have not all been met yet. This has more to do with tracking an external proprietary product as it evolves and less to do with the enormous amount of work that has already gone into the project. The goal for 2003 is to get the AWT working and usable.