JavaFX is getting there

Just a quick note: I revisited JavaFX last weekend, downloading the NetBeans version which includes it, running some of the samples and playing around with some scripting. For the first time, I’m ready to say that I’m impressed and looking forward to building some nice looking apps with it. If you want to see more check out the online examples here:http://javafx.com/samples/

Microsoft floating 3.8B in Debt – Why?

Two possible reasons:

1. They’re planning a huge acquisition and will need the money. It hard to imagine this since they’ve already got 25B in cash, but hey, maybe they want to buy a small country somewhere. A place where they can outlaw Linux.

2. They want to get into the bond business and this is a way to get started. Why they would want to do this is equally hard to imagine.

ref: http://www.smartmoney.com/Investing/Bonds/What-s-Behind-Microsoft-s-Bond-Offering/?afl=yahoo

3D Gaming Returns!

NVidia is marketing a new set of 3D glasses for home gaming. Their old version was great – I used it for years, but early LCD screens lacked adequate refresh rates for doing 3D. That’s changed now and NVidia has decided its time to restart home 3D.

If you’re not familiar with the tech, here are the basics. You wear a pair of glasses which use lcds to switch rapidly between being transparant and completely opaque, very rapidly. The two lenses alternate so that when the left lense is clear the right lense is opaque and vice-versa. THe screen is co-ordinated with teh lenses so that it is flashing the left eye’s image when the left lense is clear etc. That’s why you need a high refresh rate: each eye only gets about half of the available bandwidth. If the total bandwidth is too low, the image will start getting jumpy.

Unfortunately this product is not in stores yet but apparently they will be soon!

Here’s more info from Toms’ Hardware.

MPI on a PS3

No, really!  Some folks at Dartmouth have not only done this, but posted a step-by-step guide for anyone who wants to do it themselves. I am not one of these – I don’t own a PS3, a Wii, or any other gaming device. 

The trick is to install the 64-bit Fedora Core 8 via a DVD and a thumb drive (for booting) and then run MPI as usual. Since the PS3 apparently has 8 cores in it, this may not be as nutty as it sounds. The Dartmouth claim is that you can build a super-computer for under $4K. Considering that 10 PS3s would give you 80 cores, well, that might be fun!

Setting Up Tomcat 6 with JSF

So, I’m setting up Tomcat 6 and want to run some JSF 1.2 apps with MyFaces core and Tomahawk. Got everything configured properly except the JSTL jar and spent some time banging my head against a class not found error, specifically the Config class in the JSTL jar.

I found this very useful post, which advied me to install glassfish and pull a couple jars from its lib folder. I did this, and it did not work: I wonder if this is because I am using MyFaces instead of Mojarra. However, the following note, lefd me to the solution I needed:

“Tomcat will ignore .. any JAR file [inside your app's WEB-INF/lib folder] completely if it contains the class javax.servlet.Servlet)”

So, I moved the jstl jar file to tomcat’s lib folder, rebooted the server, and bang everything started working.

JavaFX 1.0 Released – Finally

Sun has finally released JavaFX 1.0!  Is it too late to matter? No, not really. Although Flex is doing well, its competitor, SliverLight, will not receive any meaningful adoption until MS-Visual Studio tools are released for it. This will be in 2010 when MS-VS 10 ships. Does Microsoft ever ship software late? LOL – maybe they should have called it VS 2012.

To me JavaFX is a great idea that doesn’t look very usable yet, but this is from playing with the betas etc. that were released prior to 1.0. Not sure when I’ll have time to play with 1.0, but I’ll try. Check it out yourself at the JavaFX home page.

Here’s an interview with Tony Wyant, lead engineer for JavaFX media, and here’s an excerpt:

” …[JavaFX] provides both a cross-platform video format and plays the formats available on the client machine. The FXM media format can be played wherever JavaFX can be played. Furthermore, when running on Windows, FX Script can play all the media formats that Windows Media Player can play, and on the Macintosh, all the formats that QuickTime can play…”

Microsoft and HTML 5

I have become a real fan of HTML 5. I learned this summer that as the spec is being refined portions of it are already being included in the major borwsers, except of course, Microsoft’s. The word from Microsoft is that they feel HTML 5 os “too dangerous”. Chris Wilson, Microsoft’s IE architect, has blogged about this at http://blogs.msdn.com/cwilso/. He’s also complained about the “negativity” of those who disagree with Microsoft – I mean his – opinions. THis is his “personal” blog after all.

For those of you who missed the $3 billion ad campaign, Microsoft is investing heavily in a “new” technology called Silverlight. Silverlight is basically a retreaded version of Flash, but one that the blue badges can make money on. HTML 5 overlaps much of Silverlight’s abilities. See for example the canvas tag, already implemented in Firefox et al (but not IE). So while the open source community is moving towards building the things people want to do right into the browser, Microsoft is holding back, looking for ways to cash in. Nice.

What really cracks me up about this is that, while they’ve thrown a lead weight around HTML 5 they are publicly making a big deal about their “support” of open source. I recently was told by an Apache committer that Microsoft has donated $1 million to ASF (the Apache Software Foundation) and at Apache con they made big noise about their open source embrace.

I guess this Mac vs. PC video says it all.

A blog on distributed systems…

Although I blog elsewhere, I would like to have a blog for my personal computing interests which center around Terracotta, JPPF, and the non-Java languages erlang and Haskell. I have bene blogging about these, and other things at http://www.aerial-bear.com/bears/blog, but I would rather talk about distributed systems in a more public forum.