September 30, 2004
Java 5!
After months of waiting, Java 5 is available for download!
Release notes are here. In particular, language enhancements are detailed here, such as generics, autoboxing, enums, vaargs, metadata, etc, etc.
Lots of new things, it's going to take a while to digest :)
Subversion 1.1.0 Released!
Subversion 1.1.0 has just been released!
Lots of new features and fixes detailed in the announcement email. :)
September 27, 2004
Eclipse Visual Editor!
The Eclipse Visual Editor has recently been released, providing a nice environment for drag and drop style WYSIWYG GUI creation. In particular SWT and Swing GUI's are supported, with a range of features listed in the new and noteworthy release notes.
September 20, 2004
Australian Football Grand Final!
So, after a heavy weekend in Australian football, 2 teams have emerged to play against each other this saturday in the 2004 Australian Football Grand Final.
Port Adelaide and the Brisbane Lions will have it off to see who will be premiers this year. Brisbane will be fighting for their fourth premiership in a row.
This will also be a non-victorian Grand Final played at the MCG, with both teams coming from outer-state, which many are saying shows the true national aspect of the game.
Brisbane have a lot of grand final experience but are also carrying a few injuries from the weekend match against Geelong. Port have made it to the finals but in the past have failed to find their legs, so it's shaping up to be a good competitive match between the two teams :)
Update:
After a long friday 'all-nighter' I managed to see the game at MacGowan's Irish Pub, just around the corner from where I live - at 6am Frankfurt time. :)
The match was great, certainly a high quality grand final in comparison to previous years. Both teams fought quite hard for the match, but the winners in the end were Port Adelaide, 17.11.113 (that's goals (6 points), points, total score) to 10.13.73, who'll be taking the premiership back to South Australia.
There were great performances from Bradshaw, and Aka on Brisbane's side, and Tredera, Pickitt, and Wanganeen for Port Adelaide, with also a bit of 'biffo' during the match :)
In the end I think Port went for the ball harder than Brisbane and made each goal count, they certainly caught Brisbane off-guard during the first quarter and made them work hard to even the scores during the second. Star performances from Voss and Lynch were missing (in fact Voss missed most of the first quarter) and Brisbane missed a few too many goals that were needed to keep pace with Port. In the end, Port were able to keep their momentum going throughout the game to win the match.
It's been a big season of change for AFL this year, so next season promises to be a great one - looking forward to it already :)
September 17, 2004
Graphical User Interface Gallery
Came across this really interested website today that shows the evolution of GUIs from various perspectives.
For example, check the evolution of the 'Open File' dialog, or the various installation 'Welcome' or first experience screens :)
September 07, 2004
Feather Linux!
Looking for a Linux distribution that's Debian based and will fit on a 64mb USB memory stick ?
Have a look at Feather Linux :)
CPU frequency scaling!
Last night I did some experimenting with CPU frequency scaling on my Inspiron 8500. The Inspiron 8500 is a Pentium 4-M notebook that supports multiple CPU frequencies. When you disconnect the power, CPU speed drops to 1.2Ghz, when it's on the main line, CPU ramps back up to 2.2Ghz.
This can also be controlled via software as well, via the cpufreq_userspace governor. I've installed the powernowd package and it includes a daemon that monitors CPU activity and appropriately sets the CPU frequency depending on the work load at hand.
Currently it's set to the 'aggressive' algorithm, which sets the CPU speed to maximum whenever CPU use goes above 80%, and decreases it by 1000 Mhz when it goes below 20%. This results in the system running at 1.2Ghz most of the time (eg. when it's idle or doing light work) which keeps the heat down and the fan low/off most of the time, but can quickly step up to 2.2Ghz when the computing power is required :)
$> while ( true ); do cat /proc/cpuinfo ; sleep 2; clear; done processor : 0 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 15 model : 2 model name : Mobile Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 - M CPU 2.20GHz stepping : 7 cpu MHz : 1196.886 cache size : 512 KB fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 2 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe cid bogomips : 2368.23
processor : 0 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 15 model : 2 model name : Mobile Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 - M CPU 2.20GHz stepping : 7 cpu MHz : 2194.292 cache size : 512 KB fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 2 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe cid bogomips : 4341.76
I guess this is one of the reasons why I personally like Linux so much, as (if you want to) you can learn how so many low level things work which are often taken for granted on other operating systems.
Brightside!
Last night I stumbled across Brightside, a little gnome application that adds mouse edge desktop flipping and hotspots to your desktop!
This is something I was used to using in the old WindowMaker days back in University. Brightside allows you to do much more too, you can assign other commands to mouse hotsopts like increase/decrease volume, enable DPMS blanking, etc. Top stuff.
September 06, 2004
Starck Mouse!
The new Microsoft Starck Mouse looks really nice, almost space age :)
Pity it's not a Bluetooth mouse :(
September 01, 2004
GMailFS!
If you've got a GMail account, you can turn your 1 gig of network storage into a remote filesystem and mount it under Linux using GMailFS.
Most system calls such as read, write, open, close, stat, symlink, link, unlink, etc, are supported so many unix applications will be able to operate on files stored directly on GMail :)
Tar file support in Eclipse!
A few weeks back I submitted a patch to add tar file import/export support to Eclipse, currently there's a vote going on to determine how many people would like to see it included in the default IDE distribution. So, if you'd like to see tar file support, please add your vote :)