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.
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.
iRATE
I think I finally got download timeouts to work. Basicly, I reverted to what was my first & most naive attempt at the problem + made it shorter. Turns out that as soon as I tried to use any serious threading stuff, gcj wouldn't support it on win32.
In any case, MichaelCrawford immediately stumbled upon another grave win32 bug(which we just added this week!). Bugs seem to like him.
J-Alice
I got rid of the silly xrc(wxwindows api) xml parser and replaced it with a libxml2 one. This didn't change our loading perfomance much. So then I replaced the wx hashmap with an stl map and suddenly our memory usage + cpu loading became 6x faster. Next our todo list is to revert to using stl strings & data structures.
btw, does anyone know of a good threading/socket library that is portable & lgpl/bsd/mit licensed? wxwindows(wxbase too!) seems to have more bugs than features. Ideally the library would be in c++, but we can deal with C ones too. So far we(me and s-a-t-a-n) haven't found anything that is usable. If this goes on, we'll have to revert to the custom coded Socket classes(our serversocket didn't work on win95..and had strange bugs on other platforms..silly mixing winsock + bsd sockets) and write some threading ones.
Servlets
I've been working with clientside java since java 1.0. I was never a big fan of the java vm for user apps. Java VMs are huge and take quite a while to initialize. For example on my computer ant takes longer to startup than to compile iRATE.
Some people say that java is better on the serverside. Well, I tried tomcat/jetty and it hurts to watch JSP pages compile. I can now see why people hate search crawlers on sites full of java/asp.net stuff.
It seems that once the jsp/server compiles/JITs the perfomance is acceptible.
I generally like to quickly test my programs every time I change some code. With these compilation delays, life is painful on my laptop 700mhz/128ram vaio.
As a workaround, I've been working on a gcj/cgi-bin servlet container. Eventually I might even turn it into an apache module for perfomance reasons. With gcj compilation is fast and hitting the servlet doesn't make make my laptop cry. The other advantage of this implementation is the coolness factor. It's much cooler to compile & run java as standalone programs as opposed to processing them with a vm :)
Thanks gcj people :)
Anyways, as of right now my proof-of-concept servlet runs and I plan to turn this into a proof-of-concept cgi iRATE http server.
iRATE
Turns out win32 gcj(actually libjava) doesn't have some of the fancier threading features like Thread.interupt or Thread.destroy.
MichaelCrawford: I ended up rewriting the download timing mechanism in less efficient way. Hopefully it works.
I also turned on the irate-commits mailing list today for everybody's cvs following needs.
Sun's java idiocy
So a few ago days I started working on a cgi-bin gcj servlet wrapper(written little or no code yet) and ran into 2 not-so-amusing java deprecation issues.
Eclipse-gtk2
Eclipse rocks. However right now it's hard to use on linux due to serious swt-gtk2 speed issues. A few days I tried the experimental FOX SWT port. It makes eclipse FAST :)
btw, am I the only one to notice how horridly awful gtk2 speed is? Even if one doesn't use AA, the drawing perfomance is a joke. Using some of the bigger gtk2 apps on my 700mhz laptop makes me feel like the laptop is long obsolete. On the other hand all other toolkits(even the lovely bloated XUL) perform decently(no I refuse to use a gtk2 build of moz since moz doesn't make use of any useful gtk2 features and only seems to use gtk to slow self down...why didn't xlib moz became default moz?)
Eclipse-gcj
Some bright redhat people made gcj bright enought o run eclipse. That's very wonderful. Now, can anyone repackage their stuff as mdk9.1 binaries? :)
The new RHAS looks like a kickass distro. Even though I'm not generally a redhat fan, congrads to Redhat for making linux much more workstation-grade(and including + working on eclipse!).
Studying
Well, I'm supposed to be studying for my CSC355(Digital Logic Design) and ECON103(Macroeconomics) finals. Turns out I'm not quite as clueless in CSC355 as I thought. I might even get a reasonable mark in that course. Back to studying I go...
Excuse me if there are any grammar errors, but it's late and I can't sleep.
Ok, I'm certified now, but I still can't get myself listed as developer on irate. Guess I'm not sertified enough.
iRATE
I have school to deal with, but when I need to relax I code. Lately iRATE has become my favourite project. It's just soo cool :)
So this past weekend I relazed by relief by doing non-coding irate work. Here is what I got done.
I think I need to be certified before I can setup myself as a developer on iRATE.
I can't wait to go back to my regular swt coding on irate. I don't generally like programming gui stuff, but iRATE is has such a simple UI that it keeps the gui code to a minimum.
I guess on the weekend I'll be adding the search box, rating popup menu and making a gcj servlet prototype to base the server on
People
Michael Crawford rocks. I thought I was going to go through the pain of promoting iRATE, but instead I just emailed him and he gladly took the opportunity to quadriple or maybe 2^ize the number of irate users. As a result I can concentrate on coding AND since there is more irate users, I get lots of cool heavy metal to listen to.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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