Monday, 26 August 2002

JVM Links Getting away from Sun. I went on a hunt to see if I could find an opensource Java Virtual Machine that woudl run on OS X. I haven't found one yet, but what I have found is interesting. Opensource JVM's Jikes RVM A free, self-hosting virtual machine (written in Java!) The Jikes compiler rocks. I can't wait for the JVM to work on OS X. Kaffe They're working on adding in a bunch of the new 1.4 features but, from the basic documentation it isn't really rady for everyday use even on the 1.3 level. Wonka Can't seem to see anything particularly special about this one. SableVM "SableVM implements many innovative techniques (3 flavors of threaded interpretation, bidirectional object layout, spinlock-free thin locks, sparse interface vtables, low-cost maps for precise garbage collection, ...)" There are other JVMs listed on Kaffe's links page. Looking at all of these one thing sticks out in my mind... There are a lot of people out there coding the same thing on different projects. Each one reinventing the wheel. If only there were some way to combine the effort of all these people we would have a woking opensource JVM for every major platform in no time. [weblog.masukomi.org] IBM's Jike's Research VM looks HellaInteresting. As to actually getting a diverse bunch of people with different intentions to actually work together on the one project - errr. Maybe some of the fragmentation in projects is due to lack of knowledge as to who else is working in the same area, but frequently these splits are due to differing goals and personalities. 4:18:40 PM

Gotta love QOTD William Feather. "Beware of the man who won't be bothered with details." [Motivational Quotes of the Day] [dws.] True. 3:25:33 PM

Barracuda Just had a quick glance through some Barracuda (Enhydra's page templating tech), specifically the Struts vs Barracuda, and it looks like it has matured since the last time I used XMLC (back in early '00, before the Olympics ...), but I am concerned as to the state of Lutris. From what I had heard, Lutris' main funding had moved elsewhere. Thoughts? 2:08:37 PM

Ahhh a moofie I want to see Upcoming movie. The trailer for upcoming movie "The Transporter" looks interesting. And the story was written by Luc Besson, the director of unforgettable "La Femme Nikita" and "Le Grand Bleu". [Krzysztof Kowalczyk's Weblog] This looks good... 11:39:52 AM

HellaUseful HTML Codec. added an HTMLCodec class to org.masukomi.tools (java package) that will convert strings to and from HTML entities and will optionally convert all the basic chars (a-z, A-7, 0-9, etc.) which, for some strange reason, none of the other clases out there seemed to handle. [weblog.masukomi.org] I wish I had this about 6 months ago ... 11:37:10 AM

LaTeX to the rescue LaTeX and PDF.... The AcroTeX website is a pretty nice resource for folks wanting to do advanced PDF generation with (La)TeX. I'm a big fan of using LaTeX for documentation. I attempted to use DocBook way back when, but was unimpressed with the output produced by FOP. Using the dsssl stylesheets and jade produces beautiful output, but I decided that if I need to have TeX installed, I might as well use it natively. XML is not a fun way to mark up technical documentation. Try this: write lots of docs in plaintext. Convert to PDF. Would you rather insert the occasional section{...}... [bob mcwhirter] I love latex. I abused it when I was math student. Man was it fun. 11:21:22 AM

One for the shopping list American Gods by Neil Gaiman. [4 mentions.] [onfocus.com : Weblog Bookwatch] Do yourself a favour, read this book. 11:20:14 AM

Best of a bad lot Krzysztof Kowalczyk's Weblog: Aggregation is not enough.The way you define problem determines how you'll approach solving it. Sometimes that makes a big difference. Let me give you an example: writing RSS aggregators is now en vogue (I see a new one every day). But those programs never go out beyond solving "I want easily aggregate RSS feeds". But is getting RSS feeds really a core problem? No. The problem is bigger (and less well defined): we want to get new information on topics of interest to us. RSS feeds are a partial solution, but it has weaknesses. You have to actively look for feeds that match your interests. RSS feeds usually cover more topics than you're really interested in but the burden of filtering uninteresting news is on you. What would happen if people tried to write "news gathering/filtering software" instead of "RSS feeds readers"? In my opinion we would get better software. Practical tip: before solving a problem think a bit to find out if there isn't a larger problem wanting to be solved. Partially I agree, this kind of application can still be significantly improved, but I'm not expecting any breakthrough in the field of automatically filtering relevant contents, and I think that news aggregators offer a huge advantage today. Here's why. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog] I desperatly want what Radio does, but better integrated into my normal web-cruising routine. RSS aggregators have problems, namely the spread of RSS feeds, but it is the best solution so far. Hmmm. 11:19:41 AM

AI, Go, Sim*, and all that jazz Sims, BattleBots, Cellular Automata God and Go. Sims, BattleBots, Cellular Automata God and Go (via /.) When computers came along, I started learning programming and realizing the computer was this great tool for making things, making models, dynamic models, and behaviors, not just static models. I think when I started doing games I really wanted to carry that to the next step, to the player, so that you give the player a tool so that they can create things. BAO (Bruce Artwick Org.) is part of MS and SSI is now part of UbiSoft. [Nothing and Some More] Good interview 11:00:57 AM

DB Refactoring Database Refactoring. An interesting article about refactoring database schema, and a catalog of refactorings.  It still concludes that rectoring databases used by multiple apllications is difficult and not well understood though. [Steve's Radio Weblog] Hmm nice. 11:00:13 AM

Hip Hip Hooray Happy birthday to me. [Joe's Jelly] Happy Birfdie Joe :) 10:59:46 AM

Many names Zillamania. An answer to *Zilla, thanks Brent. Explanations of Zillaness. Does anyone know where *zilla originated? I thought that Mozilla, the open source web browser, was an original name. Since then I've seen Bugzilla, Davezilla, Clagnut changed to Clagzilla, now A Klog Apart has been changed to A Klogzilla Apart. Does anyone know the origin of these *zilla terms? [Blogfish] Well, the browser that became Netscape was always called Mozilla IIRC. As to the recent fad of blog renaming, it all comes down to Toho Vs Davezilla. Toho being a clueless bunch'o'lawyers representing the owners of the Godzilla franchise. Call it a touch of civil disobedience. [Brett Morgan's Insanity Weblog Zilla] Ooooh, I want to be disobedient. Someone should change their name to Starzilla or *zilla. Maybe I could be BlogZILLAfish. [Blogfish] Hmm. Brent. Brad. I wonder what other names I could adopt? :) 10:26:44 AM

© Copyright 2002 Brett Morgan.

[Macro error: Can't call the script because the name "nextDayLink" hasn't been defined.]