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Code
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Wednesday, 10 March 2010 00:55 |
Last month, we (that is, I and Stefan, a fellow student at WU) shipped (as part of our bachelor's thesis) a smallish integrated library system for the institute we study at, the reason for the project being that the old, Access-based solution was unwieldy and did not allow multi-user capabilities or online catalog browsing. I did most of the code and Stefan did the unit testing and data migration. It was a fun project to work on for a number of reasons, mostly because I got to try a ton of new technology (new to me, that is).
We build the application using the Spring Framework, using Spring Security for authentication, Spring Web Flow for the more complicated page flow definitions, Apache POI for Excel import and export, and Compass (backed by the industry-grade Lucene) for indexing and search. I was especially happy with Compass/Lucene because it was so easy to integrate with the application but provided such rich search capabilities.
No word from the institute so far about whether or not they plan on using the application, but as per agreement with the institute, the code was open-sourced (modified BSD license). We are hosting it on SourceForce now. You obviously can't use the university logo that's part of the distribution (come to think of it, I should probably replace it with a generic logo), but the other components are all documented (we use the Phoenity Aura icons that should be familiar to users of Firefox, apart from all the third-party software).
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Gaming
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Monday, 01 March 2010 19:32 |
As many owners of the older, "fat" PS3 are doubtlessly aware of by now, the PS3 is experiencing technical difficulties today due to what appears to be a bug or hardware defect in the internal clock. The exact extent of the problem is not known thus far, although the SCEA and SCEE blogs have been overrun by a small but vocal (and rude) minority of user complaining. The problems include not being able to access the Playstation Network, not being able to sync trophies, and not being able to launch some downloaded games. I've also had my clock reset to January 2000, which seems to be a common symptom.
It's a fact of life that software bugs happen. The Playstation's operating system is also not your average Tetris clone that can be debugged in thirty minutes, no matter how many engineers you put on it. So it's a bit disheartening to see all the hate and bashing directed towards Sony going on at the official blogs and forums. Cursing at Sony is not going to make the problem go away. Calling them "damn Japs" hardly seems appropriate, even if the people working on the fix were not likely to be your average Europeans and Americans (SCEE/SCEA are international companies after all). Sony hardly needs customers like those, so I hope they do good on their promises of switching to XBox and vote with their feet.
Perhaps even more disturbingly, I see many comment like this one: "this caused me a lot of stress – you owe me free movies and games for life sony! :\" writes poweredbyzen on the US Playstation blog. Similar comments appear on both sides of the pond. Let me clue you in. Sony does not owe you shit. First of all, you are generating stress for yourself for nothing. So what if the PS3 is not working for a day or two? It would be a nice gesture if they offered some freebies for the inconvenience, but where does this attitude of entitlement come from?
Anyway, how hard can it be to wait a day for a fix? Yes, it's sad that the PS3 is not working today, but it's not the end of the world. It's a nice day out - go out and get some fresh air.
Edit:
It seems that Sony decided to take the easy way out. While they claimed to be working on the problem, they actually didn't do anything, or at least anything visible (except post on Twitter). The problem resolved itself on midnight of the following day.
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Code
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Monday, 16 November 2009 09:17 |
The answer: a lot. To be precise, somewhere over 80 gigabytes of audio and video, procedurally generated and raytraced. Color me impressed. Yes, I know this isn't new, but damn.
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Tech
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Tuesday, 03 November 2009 05:25 |
My university offers free access to certain Microsoft software through Microsoft's Educational Software Download Access. Among the offerings are Windows XP Pro SP3 in English (useful for running games), MSDOS 6 (that takes me back to the good old days) and, perhaps most important, Windows 7 Pro. Unfortunately no Office 2007, but I guess we can't have everything.
Since I hardly have any time for it this week, I decided that I just have to try out Windows 7 on my laptop (Sony VAIO VGN-S4XP) to add to the time pressure. It was a pleasant enough install - unlike Windows XP, you get a graphical partition manager here. I guess Microsoft is taking notes from the Ubuntu crowd (or from Apple - never tried installing MacOSX, but I bet it has a graphical installer, too).
Once installed, the interface looks prettier than XP, granted, but the control center is pretty convoluted in its navigation. This is coming from a person who skipped right over Vista, so some of the concepts might be new to me, but it just doesn't click with me when trying to access the top level view gives me two different and slightly incompatible views. Right out of the box, my wireless card went undetected. After plugging in an ethernet cable and connecting to Windows Update, at least that part was fixed. Less luck for other components, though.
First, the graphics driver wouldn't update. NVidia directed me to the manufacturer's site, but Sony only has XP drivers (not even Vista) and a couple of helpful links reading "click here for Windows 7" and "read this before contacting us about Windows 7" which all lead to black and white "proxy error" server error pages. So I'm stuck with a 1024x768 resolution in the middle of a widescreen display, with around 1/4ths of the monitor in fashionable black.
The audio manager downloaded through Windows Update threw some compatibility errors, too, but at least the sound worked. Rather loudly, I might add, since the laptops function keys do not, well, function, making the status bar the only way to regulate the sound. The touchpad is also broken. The mouse moves, but the right part which is meant for scrolling might as well not be there.
I'm not particularly sure if I'll keep it or not. With a proper graphics driver I could go about looking at whether it can run games properly, but no dice. I'm sure as hell not going to overwrite my desktop's first partition just to check - that copy of Windows XP already has all the games I need installed, and I don't use Windows for anything else these days. Right now I'm burning Ubuntu 9.10 in order to dual boot it on the laptop (which used Ubuntu 9.04 exclusively before), following with replacing the Ubuntu on the desktop. The thing about Ubuntu is, all those issues I mention do not exist. It detects and supports proper screen resolution, I can scroll with the touchpad, audio doesn't give me trouble, even my scanner works after coaxing xsane a bit.
Update: I didn't have any problems installing a fresh copy of Ubuntu 9.10 alongside Windows 7 on the laptop, but apparently, a lot of other people did. Thanks to Kamil for the info.
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Social
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Sunday, 01 November 2009 03:11 |
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I finished reading The Gathering Storm yesterday and let some time pass to get over the euphoria and let it all sink in. This post will contain major spoilers for the newest Wheel of Time book, so don't read if you haven't caught up with Randland yet. More after the break.
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