Older blog entries for judge (starting at number 15)

glek.net has been updated! I have converted most of the tables to div tags and make use of CSS extensively. It's soo much nicer to have a homepage that feels like 2003.

Zealotry and fans of those other OS(rant)
I generally like to read windows-oriented websites to keep myself in touch with what's going on in the computer world. I mainly try to keep up with development-related news. This helps me ensure that I'm not using an inferior tool for a job. codeproject and activewin.com are interesting websites. One is filled with lots of smart people posting about windows-related programming and the other is filled with people who defend microsoft like their firstborn child(and occasional announcements of interesting ms stuff).
OS/vendor biggots really drive me nutts. They are (probably clueless) non-productive people who make too much noise. osnews.com has become unreadable due to ease-of-use/snappiness comments. Anyways, I decided to rant because I wanted to see some interesting development blogging about longhorn(akin to monologue). Instead I had to wade through lots of apologetic crap and open source insults at longhornblogs. I'm so mad at how unproffesional people can be sometimes.

iRATE
The current CVS is very solid. We are slowly closing on all of the release-critical bugs. Please try out CVS or webstart "releases" and report bugs.
On an unrelated note. It seems that some iRATE users are buying CDs by artists discovered with iRATE. This is pretty impressive because we haven't implemented(yet) an "artist website" button and people are resorting to google. I know that myself and one other iRATE contributor purchased iRATE-discovered CDs. Several users also reported buying CDs. Has anybody here purchased iRATE music?

Arnie
I love it. First we had the Bush/Gore humour, now Arnie. What is USA gonna come up with next?

Professional Project Management
Judas I was very interested by your discussion of project development and management. I'm very much an amateur in the area due to lack of big company experience. All of the little companies I worked for used floppies/cds for version control and word-of-mouth for bug tracking.
However I am compensating for that with open source experience. I have stumbled upon version control and decided that it was a basic need, I also setup autobuild systems and eventually decided that they were a basic need too.
However I haven't had any experience with version control integrated with issue tracking(like you described). Can anybody suggest open source projects that allow for that level of integration? By the way, I'm a subversion user.
I'm still not conviced on the likes of bugzilla(and sf bug tracker) due to crappy bug descriptions and a horrid UI. I find it much more effective to exchange emails(or phone, or icq) with the person who is experiencing a bug. It's just impossible to track down weird bugs otherwise.

Borland C++Builder
mrorganic I found BCB to be a kickass RAD C++ tool. It was just too easy to create GUI C++ programs. I don't think anybody else even comes close to that. I loved VCL's properties and simplicity. Too bad that C++ doesn't support those.
Also, builderX will have a wx design tool. It's one of the biggest features. However I agree that it's a very stupid tool. It looks like a massive resource hog with a single feature: compiler/debugger agnosticness(got a better word?). Since when is application development dependant on being able to compile with 6 different compilers on windows and 2 or 3 on other platforms? In my experience 1-2 compilers-per-platform is plenty and it's easy enough to learn their debuggers. It just seems that borland decided to give up on their C++ development tools and just pretend that they didn't by having a GUI compiler wrapper.
On the other hand, this is good news for wxwindows. As any opensource project, they can always use more help.

Life
My brain feels much better lately. I guess I finally got a good mix of gym, socializing, love, sleep, food and god knows what. It feels nice to be in working condition.

iRATE
Well, as a result of the recent spike in life energy, much has been done on irate. I added http resume and the prev button. Some protocol optimizations are being worked on.

Kaffe
robilad Great news! iRATE finally works in kaffe cvs. I tried kaffe a few weeks ago and it had serious issues with jthreads. Switching to pthreads prevented irate from deadlocking, but javasound would die after 2min or so.
I tried pthread kaffe cvs today and everything worked! Wonderful. ant worked too!

iRATE
Hey diablod3. Current iRATE cvs versions have a different download strategy from 0.2. It now downloads based on a confugurable number of unrated tracks. For example my irate autodownloads if I have less than 3 unrated tracks.
There are no coding problems with doing a pure java mp3 player. In fact we have one already. The problem is that the pure java player requires a fairly advanced java vm. We try to make iRATE available as a free binary, produced by free tools. However, as of right now there are no free java vms that have adequate support for javasound api. The other issue is that pure-java anything requires a serious amount of CPU and I don't appreciate my laptop burning my lap because java needs a constant 30-50% of my cpu.
Regarding bittorment: we can't legally provide that right now. Problem is that we need explicit permission from artists before we can distribute their musi. Eventually we will mark freely-redistributable tracks and provide fancy ways of downloading those.
Resuming downloads. That one has been on my todo list for quite a while. Luckily cable makes it an optional feature :). Guess I'll implement it next time I have a chance to do some serious coding.
I'll chuck mp3-validation into if-there-is-absolutely-nothing-else-i-can-think-of-to-code pile. As of right now it's more work than it's worth.
By the way: help wanted. We need somebody to look after lots and lots of minor(or if the person chooses not-so-minor) coding issues.

Digital Music
jclement: I completely agree with you on the distribution problems with CDs. However there is yet another point that RIAA & friends are missing.
The hassle of buying CDs doesn't end at the store. There is still the problem of the CD getting boring and the effort needed to eventually admit that you've had enough of that cd and want to put another one in. There is also the effort of deciding what else you'd be willing to listen to. Then you have to figure out where you keep that replacement cd. Oh, CDs get damanged over time too!
Basicly, keeping music on CDs is a nightmare. I end up ripping all of the CDs that I buy. It's much more convenient to listen to playlists of hundreds of songs instead of 9. Of course once the CD is bought & ripped I've spent much more effort and money on obtaining it than I would've if I downloaded it off a p2p network.
Furthermore, after I've discovered iRATE, I'm having a real hard time even using a conventional mp3 player. I've grown used to having the computer figure out my taste, fetch me more music I like and filter out the crap. I believe that the future of music lies in such software.
From what I've read, iTunes deals with a lot of these issues too, but that product is much more conventional and is merely a slow evolution of the existing concept without anyof the innovative ideas that iRATE provides.
Obviously I am lazy and I am biased towards iRATE, but I'm sure there are people out there with similar frustrations to mine.

Digital Music
jclement: I completely agree with you on the distribution problems with CDs. However there is yet another point that RIAA & friends are missing.
The hassle of buying CDs doesn't end at the store. There is still the problem of the CD getting boring and the effort needed to eventually admit that you've had enough of that cd and want to put another one in. There is also the effort of deciding what else you'd be willing to listen to. Then you have to figure out where you keep that replacement cd. Oh, CDs get damanged over time too!
Basicly, keeping music on CDs is a nightmare. I end up ripping all of the CDs that I buy. It's much more convenient to listen to playlists of hundreds of songs instead of 9. Of course once the CD is bought & ripped I've spent much more effort and money on obtaining it than I would've if I downloaded it off a p2p network.
Furthermore, after I've discovered iRATE, I'm having a real hard time even using a conventional mp3 player. I've grown used to having the computer figure out my taste, fetch me more music I like and filter out the crap. I believe that the future of music lies in such software.
From what I've read, iTunes deals with a lot of these issues too, but that product is much more conventional and is merely a slow evolution of the existing concept without anyof the innovative ideas that iRATE provides.
Obviously I am lazy and I am biased towards iRATE, but I'm sure there are people out there with similar frustrations to mine.

iRATE
It certainly is cool. That's why we work on it.
diablod3: currently we are swamped with work. As of now people just post links on the mailing list and Tony writes spiders to find mp3s.
I recommend that people try recent iRATE cvs(or unstable snapshots). We've done a few nice fixes and improvements. I'm sure that our next release will be yet another big step towards world domination.

JavaScript
nymia: I have no idea why more people don't embrace javascript. It's an absolutely rocking c-like scripting language. We used the mozilla js engine in j-alice.org stuff and it was just amazing. It's very portable, very easy to embed and makes the application much more flexible. In our case embedding javascript in the data made it possible to provide simple logic without having to recompiling the core. That's convenient to both developers and users.
I learned js in the early days of html and it was nice to reuse that knowledge and apply it to a real application.
It's too bad that most javascript users are clueless web monkeys who just use premade scripts that they found on script-collection websites.

MichaelCrawford, I clicked on the webstart file and for some reason my mozilla immediately located javaws(i couldn't even get webstart going from commandline) and launched irate.
For some reason sun refuses to make webstart add kde(and gnome?) menu entries for the programs that it downloads. As far as I know there is a common format for those in kde3/gnome2.

Life
I haven't had any life. My life has been dedicated to home[room] improvement. After weeks of sweat & dust & worn out fingers my room looks like it's made for royalty. Yay, tommorrow I should move my stuff back into it and regain my right to live. Nice timing too, since my classes start on Tuesday. This project has nicely taken over my entire break from school.
On the positive note, next time someone complains about lack of undo in some program I'll just point them to real world(tm).

GNU Make
I somehow got make to hate me and reverse dependencies on me. For some reason it took a "%.properties.o: %.properties" rule and decided to make .properties files out of .properties.o ones. This really sucks since it basicly ends up wiping out my original .propertiesf files. If anyone know how or why it would do such horrible things let me know. Changing .properties.o to .res(ie no appended suffix) made the problem go away, but I'd really like to do it with appending a .o suffix.