January 2009
1 post
PDF Viewer and Java 6 Update 10 →
I’ve spent the last few days finally getting round to updating BFO’s PDF Viewer applet to take advantage of the new Java 6 Update 10 features. It was mostly straightforward, with most of…
December 2008
2 posts
The 'official' way to integrate JavaFX with Swing →
Josh Marinacci has a blog entry on how to integrate Java FX into Swing applications: http://blogs.sun.com/javafx/entry/how_to_use_javafx_in. It’s good to have a final answer on how to accomplish…
JavaFX and Swing - again →
I’ve noticed that my previous entry about using JavaFX widgets in Swing applications has been getting a lot of traffic since JavaFX 1.0 was finally released. Having finally had time to download…
November 2008
2 posts
GPS and MapView in Android →
Having spent an evening hacking around writing an Android application that uses the GPS position together with the MapView component to show both your current location latitude/longitude and visually…
Tracking Java versions of web site visitors →
Gili over at ‘Where the cows roam free” has a very interesting post about how to combine Google Analytics and the new Java deployment file to track what version of Java visitors to a website are…
October 2008
3 posts
Java 6 Update 10 released →
Looks like Java 6 Update 10 has been officially released - for some reason Sun seem to be keeping it quiet, which seems a little odd, considering how significant this release should be for…
Fail blog →
A photo I took is potentially going to be included on Fail Blog - it’s obviously the best one, so please vote it up! more fail, owned and pwned pics and videos
Debugging Applets on OS X →
So, despite Apple’s best efforts to hide the Java Preferences dialog in OS X (Applications/Utilities/Java/Java Preferences in case you’re still looking) enough people must have found it by now for…
September 2008
1 post
Google Chrome and Java Applets →
Well, loathe as I am to add yet another blog post to the insane amount of Chrome related items that were blogged and reported last week, I did notice something interesting with regard to Chrome…
August 2008
2 posts
Compiled JavaFX in Swing applications - again →
I posted a while ago about problems I was having integrating a compiled JavaFX widget into a Swing application - theoretically it should have been possible, as it’s all Java and Swing, but I hit a…
JApplet and the Swing EDT →
So, everyone knows by now that doing anything relating to Swing controls when you’re not running in the Swing Event Dispatch Thread (EDT) is a big no-no. Unfortunately this is very easy to do, as…
July 2008
3 posts
JavaScript and Groovy service functions in... →
As discussed in the Using AltioLive with JavaScript whitepaper (http://developers.altio.com/developer/library/JavaScriptwithAltio.pdf), Java 6.0 has built in support for dynamic scripting…
Swurl →
Yet another social web aggregator site, to compete with FriendFeed and Socialthing, but Swurl does present the aggregated information in a really cool timeline format, which for me gives it the edge…
AltioLive and Applets at JavaOne →
As I mentioned at the time I was interviewed on video about AltioLive and Applets at the Altio booth at JavaOne. If you can stand to see a slightly ‘relaxed’ man talk about Applets for 10 minutes…
June 2008
4 posts
www.falstad.com/circuit/ →
This is an electronic circuit simulator - you can modify and add components like switches, transformers and logic gates and see how they behave in the circuit. If I was more of an…
Hudson CI game - again →
Despite the impressively fast fix to the Hudson CI game issue with awarding points for breaking a build, I hadn’t got around to installing the update before I broke the build yesterday and…
Using Java 6 Update 10 features in AltioLive →
I’ve just posted an item on the Altio developer’s blog about using the new features of Java 6 Update 10 in AltioLive applications. You can read the whole thing here: http://tinyurl.com/42ntx2 The…
Cross-domain unsigned applets →
Wow, I completely missed this in the Java 6 Update 10 release notes: it is now possible for unsigned Java applets to connect to servers other than the one it was served from, which means you can…
April 2008
2 posts
we have to talk
Got an email from Sun on Friday: my submission for a technical session at JavaOne 2008 has been moved from ‘alternate’ status to ‘accepted’, which means in about 4 weeks time I have to present it. I’m not sure there’s a word that adequately describes the mixture of excitement and sheer terror I’m currently feeling :-)
March 2008
4 posts
Updation? →
Someone at work used ‘Updation’ recently and I scoffed at it, then looked it up and realised it’s a ‘real’ word: seems clumsy and unnecessary to me.
Metropolitan Police Service - Counter-terrorism... →
The phrase ‘Orwellian’ gets used a lot, but it’s a pretty apt description of this staggering new campaign by the Met. I take a lot of photos in London, like millions of other people, so it will be interesting to see what ‘suspicious’ photographic behaviour catches the Police’s beady eyes.
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Blind rocker Healey... →
A sad day - one of my inspirations for playing the guitar, Healey was a fantastic guitarist and seemed like a genuinely good guy.
February 2008
2 posts
http://www.switchedonlondon.com/ →
Ah, they’re doing this again in 2008. Last year’s was interesting (and damn cold if I remember) but could have done with a bit more to it somehow. My pics from last year http://www.flickr.com/photos/raindog/tags/switchedonlondon/
January 2008
7 posts
what comes around
A few years ago my situation changed quite radically, to the point that I found myself driving on long family holidays with bored, noisy and argumentative kids in the back of the car. After getting back from that first holiday experience I immediately phoned my Mom and apologised to her for every single car journey we’d been on when we were kids where my brother and I were singing annoying...
“Our primary concern is passenger safety and while the couple are very welcome to...”
– BBC NEWS | England | Bradford | Dog leash Goths ‘hounded off bus’
unaccustomed as I am to public speaking...
…there’s a chance I might have to speak in front of a large roomful of people at JavaOne in May. And speak knowledgeably as well, which is always a challenge for me. I submitted a proposal for a Technical Session paper back in early December, and am just waiting on the ‘yay’ or ‘nay’ from the JavaOne folks, which is going to be any day now. The thing is I am...
meeting your heroes
Last night I went to see Mark Oliver Everett, Mr E from the Eels, my favourite band, do a solo gig and book reading in support of his biography: ‘Things the grandchildren should know’. It was a great show, with most of the songs sounding as good or better when sung by just E on the guitar or piano. A lot of them had more emotional impact when played after a reading from his book,...
I miss Douglas Adams
In 1999 Douglas Adams said: “Computer people are the last to guess what’s coming next. I mean, come on, they’re so astonished by the fact that the year 1999 is going to be followed by the year 2000 that it’s costing us billions to prepare for it.” From Stephen Fry’s ‘Dork Talk’ column in the Guardian, 12/1/08
Cool flickr-based photo slideshow →
December 2007
2 posts
Texas science ed. officer forced to resign by... →
This is depressing, particularly as I finished reading ’ The God Delusion’ last night.
ill-health as a health regime
So, I’m emerging from a 4 day ‘coma’ after a particularly nasty bout of the flu. This isn’t the usual man flu, this was the real deal: went to bed Thursday night, and emerged again late on Sunday afternoon for the first time. Mind you, it has had benefits as a pre-Xmas detox, as I haven’t had any caffeine, alcohol or even an awful lot of food for 4 days now, so...
November 2007
10 posts
“But I got into this business so I would not have to dress up. That was kind of...”
– Jeffrey Zeldman Presents : Facts and Opinions about Zeldman
Weird Amazon shit (#2) (check out the comments) →
Weird Amazon shit #1 (check out the comments) →
“An incredibly cool building and a new word learned - that’s a productive...”
– Architecture: Accordion-Shaped Building to be Squeezed into City of London
“You can’t have the bottle full, and the wife drunk.”
– The old Italian version of “you can’t have your cake and eat it” apparently, which I quite like.
If Only We’d Used ANTS Profiler Earlier... →
Remember kids, always tidy up after yourself and unregister your listener objects: garbage collection does not absolve you of the responsibility for checking for your own application’s memory leaks!
gap in testing
I found a problem with the Ipod Touch this morning, which was obviously overlooked by the California-based designers, marketeers and product testers: you can’t operate the damn thing while wearing gloves! It’s November, it’s London, gloves are required - touch screens don’t work well when you can’t touch them properly.
'tis the season to abandon your principles
I don’t have many principles, but I do have a few establishments that I prefer not to patronise, for one reason or another. McDonalds is an easy one, as the food is rubbish and I don’t like the company’s business practices. Starbucks is another one, but purely because of their business practices - they tend to ‘infest’ areas, resulting in streets with multiple...
definition
annoying: Ordering a DVD of a classic sci-fi film from the 50s that you haven’t seen for years and then having it be on TV a few days later.
“The British Comedy Awards are like Britney Spears getting out of a taxi. You...”
– Taint of scandal puts Ant and Dec out of the picture - Times Online
October 2007
9 posts
Questions hang over taser death →
Not the first reported case of police being Taser-happy, but the first that has resulted in the inevitable consequences of treating a potentially lethal weapon as an alternative to physical restraint, which by all accounts wasn’t necessary in this situation anyway.
t-shirt idea
If anyone is looking for a London-centric t-shirt design, how about one that simply says “No, I don’t want a bloody free newspaper, now f**off!”.
missing the point
Whatever your reason for going to the gym, surely one of the benefits is that it makes the little things in life easier: walking to the shops, climbing the stairs and running for the bus are all made easier by increased fitness. My gym is down 3 flights of stairs - it takes no time at all going down or up. Why is there always a queue of people waiting for the lift at either end of the stairs when...
Poke the Penguin →
The Restaurant - Winners →
Gah! Can’t believe they won - she never stopped crying the entire series!
Gah! Can’t believe I watched this entire series!