> Since when were you not allowed to create Swing objects outside of the event thread?
> Now they say you're only allowed to do Swing-related work within the event thread.
That's because Swing is not a thread safe API. The EDT is responsible for executing any method that modifies a component state, including it's constructor.
I know that many tutorials (even some of Sun's older ones) show this, but if you check some of the more recent tutorials, they will show that even main() should create Swing components from within the EDT.
> Which is the same way they do it in every other framework. Swing is slower than the others and now it is all Swing users fault?
I wasn't blaming swing users, but from past experience most don't follow the Swing event model, even when it's documented well. Virtually all are creating swing objects outside of the Event thread (EDT).
> I can understand that for very large operations but if I have to create a thread for every event driven operation, I am done for.
No is did not say for every operation, I said for the expensive ones like file or network IO. When swing appears slow 99% of the time its because of something in the background holding up the Event thread.
> Multi-threaded programming is just hard.
Sure it can hard if you have to handle concurrency, but what I was trying to say here isn't that hard.
Making the Action (running inside the EDT) invoke some code within a thread Executor or thread pool is only a couple of extra lines. Making state changes to a swing component to display the result is a couple of extra lines (using SwingUtilities.invokeLater()). That's not hard at all...
> Perhaps he felt that he wasn't paid enough for that?
As for if he wasn't paid enough, that didn't come into the equation. Yes he was a junior developer, but he refused point blank to learn which the other junior developers (not just the Java ones) were eager to do.
The main problem with unresponsive Swing apps, is that most developers do everything within the Event thread, so the app is unable to respond in a reasonable manner.
If Swing developers remember to move intensive operations off the Event thread and into a background thread, then Swing app's are really nice and responsive. It's not that difficult, but for some reason most developers are either unable to, or unwilling to do this simple task.
Believe me, I've seen the source of plenty of Swing app's that have been written with everything in the Event thread and the developer (one of whom I had employed at that time) refused to do this because they couldn't be bothered.
As for the look and feel, it's getting better but it still has a long way to go.
I gave up on television some 16 months ago as all that was on when I was home was those crappy con^H^H^Hgame shows.
BBC Radio is worth the cost of a license fee, but (as they abolished the radio license decades ago), I'm not going to pay for a TV license just for radio.
All I have to put up with is the regular "Your are watching TV illegally" letters that TV Licensing keep sending me.
Back in late 1994 I wrote a small application which generated Star Charts served via email.
Based on a simple set of commands describing where in the sky to centre the chart, the field of view, limiting magnitude, objects to include etc, and it would generate a Postscript file of the generated chart based on those commands.
It was built up using both bash and perl, and the commands fed to it directly from sendmail, so when you sent an email to it's own email address, you received a response with the required generated map or a set of errors if you made a mistake.
That is true. Over the last six months I've been doing interviews for a single developer position, and the one common question I've asked as about java.util.concurrent. In some 20 interviewees, only one had a vague idea what it was.
Here we use it quite extensively because it's the best way to handle parallel code and shared data structures.
It's probably the most useful things in Java 5 & 6, and the least used.
Back in the late 90's when I used to work in local Government here in the UK, we had a power blip which set off the alarm on the Mainframe's UPS. I was in the machine room at the time and the noise was horrendous.
Anyhow, I went over to the UPS to press the mute button, but because I was distracted by the noise - and the fact that the power off button was next to it, pressed the wrong one. It was nice and quiet for a few seconds until the effects of the noise dissipated, followed by a lot of swearing - the mainframe and most of the other servers were dead.
It ended up taking most of the day to bring that old beast back online, but one good thing did come out of it - we discovered that the office next door were powered by the same UPS and we were wondering why the UPS was struggling, all their PC's were plugged in to numerous extension leads into a couple of non-standard plugs they found to plug into.
I prefer the register's request for Will it blend:
"Full marks we reckon to Blendtec, which has found this entertaining way of punting its products. Here's a challenge for the company: A boxed copy of MS's Vista - Will It Blend?"
The only one I've seen so far is a video screen billboard within London Charring Cross station. Occasionally you would see a section of text saying something like "Enable bluetooth to get....". Can't remember what it was advertising.
Anyhow, if you were driving by that billboard you would get arrested, but only for driving throught the center of a rail station;-)
They will pester you but if you can prove that you have rendered it incapable of receiving a broadcast, and detuning the receiver is enough, then you are not technically breaking the law.
It's hard to do on "idiot" proof sets, but it can and has been done.
Although someone else replied "build your own" that's not that easy to do with a laptop. Mine had Win-XP preinstalled on it. Only lasted the time it took for me to get the machine home and reinstall with SuSE (now Gentoo).
I think that a lot of Microsoft's statistics include both machines that have had another OS installed, machines tho's owners have loaded an earlier version when upgrading hardware (some prefer 95/98 rather than XP - or have legacy apps that will not run with XP) or people who have replaced XP home with XP pro.
I doubt that their stats include that some of these desktops have effectively got multiple licences on them.
A lot of it was fairly standard stuff. Some of the struct's from the exec.library I've seen in quite a few projects (Both Open and Closed source) and they all look almost identical.
Re:The AMIGA's Real Legacy.....
on
Amiga Sells AmigaOS
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I think you are correct. Quite a few of us either started out programming on the Amiga, or like myself found the Amiga the best thing at the time to pickup languages like C, Rexx (ARexx was a brilliant scripting language) etc after hacking in assembly on earlier machines.
Even now, I still occasionally code in exactly the same way as I did back then, mainly because it works so well.
I still have 3 Amigas, but sadly don't have time (or room) to use them:-( One of these days I'll dig one of them out, just for a bit of nostalgia...
I'm not sure about France and IANAL, but when I looked at trademarks late last year for a UK or an EU trademark you had to register it under one or more classes, and the trademark would only protect you against products that also fall under those classes. If a product fell under a different class to one you registered, you were not protected.
Software development fell under class 38 or 42 (can't remember which one).
When working in UK Local Government a few years ago, we moved from an obscure ICL email system to Exchange 5 then 5.5.
In the documentation that came with Exchange back then was an example on how exchange sites could be linked together with a domain structure identical to what you said. They even used london.domain.com and sydney.domain.com in those examples.
Coming late into this (I was asleep when this as posted), but reading the patent it was filed in 1999?
Well, in 1996 I had an account with Demon Internet I had the domain maidast.demon.co.uk where my account name was maidast. In 1998 they started giving free webspace for www.maidast.demon.co.uk as well.
Beagle 2 wasn't funded by ESA either, they just piggybacked for the trip.
There was a lot of publicity by the Beagle 2 team over the last few years to get the funding. The UK government only put in (I think) 2 million after they had the promise of other institutions would pay up (and I'm not sure they have got the money back yet).
The mission is almost entirely privately paid for.
The only link with NASA is that they will be relaying the first signal to see if it landed ok, and ESA agreed to allow Express to be used as a relay for NASA's rovers.
I've just seen the first picture taken by Mars Express of Beagle 2 just after it separated.
I think this is the first time a spacecraft has taken a picture of another outside of earth orbit (ie the only previous ones are manned missions in either Earth or Lunar orbit).
The oldest is a Research Machines Z80 (Blue/White cased cassette based version not the black floppy based one) dating to 1979.
However it wasn't my first (only bought it in 94) - that was the TI-99/4A back in 1981 which was a 16bit machine! I then went down to a ZX81 as I could do more with that.
Still I wished I had the knowledge then as there was a hardware hack for the TI as it's graphics chip had a video in pin and you could (in theory) mod it to act as a genlock and overlay graphics over video (which was why in TI Basic you could set the background colour to transparent).
Yes, they were all Z80 based (the first processor I wrote Assembly for).
The Jupiter Ace was a Sinclair ZX81 clone (the major difference was a white not black case), and having Forth instead of Basic as interesting. It's still a machine I'm trying to get my hands on for the collection I have of 80's computer history.
As for the Spectrum, there was a very good book called "The Complete Spectrum Dissassembly" where someone dissassembled the entire rom. Priceless when programming on that machine as you could use all sorts of useful features from within the rom - including it's RPN based calculator (as you can tell I'm a Forth fan;-) )
I can image the employer claiming ownership of
work done in their time, but how can you claim
anything on what people do in their own time.
I've had this once before where a previous employer caused me to pull out of a big name Open Source project because they didn't like me doing anything in my own time. Saying that, I only stayed there for a couple of months after that, as I was that pissed off with them because of it.
Unless of course you copy some idea from work and make your own version of it.
That's the worst one, and the hardest to keep away from as well. At least in my current contract I've not got that problem - most of the stuff I've done I already done before, so a good 20% of it is already mine, and open sourced as well with the CVS on sourceforge, so if something did go ary I just show them the file dates and cvs logs;-)
I'm not sure what the bulb costs are at the moment, but since I've bought my Sony CS5 last February, I've used only 10% of the bulb life.
It's nice watching DVD's and certain TV programmes on the "big screen" but I tend to use it only if a programme deserves it, hence the low 200hrs useage in the last 10 months.
The only downside I have with it is the amount of electricity it uses - about a days worth of normal useage in about 4 hours.
Saying that I did a rough calculation back in March and it worked out at 0.15 quid (UK) per hour for the bulb, and ~ 0.50 quid per hour in total.
Re:Digital Rebel vs 10D for Astrophotography
on
Digital 35mm SLRs?
·
· Score: 1
I'd doubt the would as the 300D is targeted at the EOS-300 (film equivalent) beginner market. As such I'd doubt the Mirror lockup function will appear for it.
I've been playing with my D30 for astrophotography for a while now and I'v have been slightly dissapointed with the results, but I've not had enough time to play with it, so the quality may be partly me.
The imager on it seems to be more sensitive to light pollution especially in the red wave lengths, so I need to sort out a filter - hopefully then the image quality will improve.
I'd advise the 10D, but that said on ebay there are D30/D60's going for a nice price, D30's are going for around 500 quit, D60's around 700 second hand. [sorry don't know the current Stirling/US$ rate]
Slashdot Mirror
> Since when were you not allowed to create Swing objects outside of the event thread?
> Now they say you're only allowed to do Swing-related work within the event thread.
That's because Swing is not a thread safe API. The EDT is responsible for executing any method that modifies a component state, including it's constructor.
I know that many tutorials (even some of Sun's older ones) show this, but if you check some of the more recent tutorials, they will show that even main() should create Swing components from within the EDT.
> Which is the same way they do it in every other framework. Swing is slower than the others and now it is all Swing users fault?
I wasn't blaming swing users, but from past experience most don't follow the Swing event model, even when it's documented well. Virtually all are creating swing objects outside of the Event thread (EDT).
> I can understand that for very large operations but if I have to create a thread for every event driven operation, I am done for.
No is did not say for every operation, I said for the expensive ones like file or network IO. When swing appears slow 99% of the time its because of something in the background holding up the Event thread.
> Multi-threaded programming is just hard.
Sure it can hard if you have to handle concurrency, but what I was trying to say here isn't that hard.
Making the Action (running inside the EDT) invoke some code within a thread Executor or thread pool is only a couple of extra lines. Making state changes to a swing component to display the result is a couple of extra lines (using SwingUtilities.invokeLater()). That's not hard at all...
> Perhaps he felt that he wasn't paid enough for that?
As for if he wasn't paid enough, that didn't come into the equation. Yes he was a junior developer, but he refused point blank to learn which the other junior developers (not just the Java ones) were eager to do.
The main problem with unresponsive Swing apps, is that most developers do everything within the Event thread, so the app is unable to respond in a reasonable manner.
If Swing developers remember to move intensive operations off the Event thread and into a background thread, then Swing app's are really nice and responsive. It's not that difficult, but for some reason most developers are either unable to, or unwilling to do this simple task.
Believe me, I've seen the source of plenty of Swing app's that have been written with everything in the Event thread and the developer (one of whom I had employed at that time) refused to do this because they couldn't be bothered.
As for the look and feel, it's getting better but it still has a long way to go.
Agreed.
I gave up on television some 16 months ago as all that was on when I was home was those crappy con^H^H^Hgame shows.
BBC Radio is worth the cost of a license fee, but (as they abolished the radio license decades ago), I'm not going to pay for a TV license just for radio.
All I have to put up with is the regular "Your are watching TV illegally" letters that TV Licensing keep sending me.
Back in late 1994 I wrote a small application which generated Star Charts served via email.
Based on a simple set of commands describing where in the sky to centre the chart, the field of view, limiting magnitude, objects to include etc, and it would generate a Postscript file of the generated chart based on those commands.
It was built up using both bash and perl, and the commands fed to it directly from sendmail, so when you sent an email to it's own email address, you received a response with the required generated map or a set of errors if you made a mistake.
That is true. Over the last six months I've been doing interviews for a single developer position, and the one common question I've asked as about java.util.concurrent. In some 20 interviewees, only one had a vague idea what it was.
Here we use it quite extensively because it's the best way to handle parallel code and shared data structures.
It's probably the most useful things in Java 5 & 6, and the least used.
Back in the late 90's when I used to work in local Government here in the UK, we had a power blip which set off the alarm on the Mainframe's UPS. I was in the machine room at the time and the noise was horrendous.
Anyhow, I went over to the UPS to press the mute button, but because I was distracted by the noise - and the fact that the power off button was next to it, pressed the wrong one. It was nice and quiet for a few seconds until the effects of the noise dissipated, followed by a lot of swearing - the mainframe and most of the other servers were dead.
It ended up taking most of the day to bring that old beast back online, but one good thing did come out of it - we discovered that the office next door were powered by the same UPS and we were wondering why the UPS was struggling, all their PC's were plugged in to numerous extension leads into a couple of non-standard plugs they found to plug into.
I prefer the register's request for Will it blend:
l end/
"Full marks we reckon to Blendtec, which has found this entertaining way of punting its products. Here's a challenge for the company: A boxed copy of MS's Vista - Will It Blend?"
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12/24/will_it_b
The only one I've seen so far is a video screen billboard within London Charring Cross station. Occasionally you would see a section of text saying something like "Enable bluetooth to get ....". Can't remember what it was advertising.
;-)
Anyhow, if you were driving by that billboard you would get arrested, but only for driving throught the center of a rail station
You'll be surprised.
Here in the UK, the Police are not allowed to enter your property with out your permission or a warrant.
However, not many people know that certain agencies are permitted, at any time.
HM Customs & Excise can without notice, but even British Gas and the Post Office are permitted to enter your home.
I was surprised when I found out about the Post Office - gas I can understand for gas leaks etc.
There's another couple I can't remember off hand that have that permission, so I'm not sure about TV Licensing, but I'm pretty sure they can.
Not exactly true.
They will pester you but if you can prove that you have rendered it incapable of receiving a broadcast, and detuning the receiver is enough, then you are not technically breaking the law.
It's hard to do on "idiot" proof sets, but it can and has been done.
I was thinking the same thing.
Although someone else replied "build your own" that's not that easy to do with a laptop. Mine had Win-XP preinstalled on it. Only lasted the time it took for me to get the machine home and reinstall with SuSE (now Gentoo).
I think that a lot of Microsoft's statistics include both machines that have had another OS installed, machines tho's owners have loaded an earlier version when upgrading hardware (some prefer 95/98 rather than XP - or have legacy apps that will not run with XP) or people who have replaced XP home with XP pro.
I doubt that their stats include that some of these desktops have effectively got multiple licences on them.
A lot of it was fairly standard stuff. Some of the struct's from the exec.library I've seen in quite a few projects (Both Open and Closed source) and they all look almost identical.
I think you are correct. Quite a few of us either started out programming on the Amiga, or like myself found the Amiga the best thing at the time to pickup languages like C, Rexx (ARexx was a brilliant scripting language) etc after hacking in assembly on earlier machines.
:-( One of these days I'll dig one of them out, just for a bit of nostalgia...
Even now, I still occasionally code in exactly the same way as I did back then, mainly because it works so well.
I still have 3 Amigas, but sadly don't have time (or room) to use them
I'm not sure about France and IANAL, but when I looked at trademarks late last year for a UK or an EU trademark you had to register it under one or more classes, and the trademark would only protect you against products that also fall under those classes. If a product fell under a different class to one you registered, you were not protected.
Software development fell under class 38 or 42 (can't remember which one).
When working in UK Local Government a few years ago, we moved from an obscure ICL email system to Exchange 5 then 5.5.
In the documentation that came with Exchange back then was an example on how exchange sites could be linked together with a domain structure identical to what you said. They even used london.domain.com and sydney.domain.com in those examples.
Well, in 1996 I had an account with Demon Internet I had the domain maidast.demon.co.uk where my account name was maidast. In 1998 they started giving free webspace for www.maidast.demon.co.uk as well.
Surely this is prior art?
Beagle 2 wasn't funded by ESA either, they just piggybacked for the trip.
There was a lot of publicity by the Beagle 2 team over the last few years to get the funding. The UK government only put in (I think) 2 million after they had the promise of other institutions would pay up (and I'm not sure they have got the money back yet).
The mission is almost entirely privately paid for.
The only link with NASA is that they will be relaying the first signal to see if it landed ok, and ESA agreed to allow Express to be used as a relay for NASA's rovers.
I've just seen the first picture taken by Mars Express of Beagle 2 just after it separated.
I think this is the first time a spacecraft has taken a picture of another outside of earth orbit (ie the only previous ones are manned missions in either Earth or Lunar orbit).
I just dug out my old Philips CDD2600 and it says it was manufactured in February 1997, so it's almost seven years old.
The oldest is a Research Machines Z80 (Blue/White cased cassette based version not the black floppy based one) dating to 1979.
However it wasn't my first (only bought it in 94) - that was the TI-99/4A back in 1981 which was a 16bit machine! I then went down to a ZX81 as I could do more with that.
Still I wished I had the knowledge then as there was a hardware hack for the TI as it's graphics chip had a video in pin and you could (in theory) mod it to act as a genlock and overlay graphics over video (which was why in TI Basic you could set the background colour to transparent).
Yes, they were all Z80 based (the first processor I wrote Assembly for).
;-) )
The Jupiter Ace was a Sinclair ZX81 clone (the major difference was a white not black case), and having Forth instead of Basic as interesting. It's still a machine I'm trying to get my hands on for the collection I have of 80's computer history.
As for the Spectrum, there was a very good book called "The Complete Spectrum Dissassembly" where someone dissassembled the entire rom. Priceless when programming on that machine as you could use all sorts of useful features from within the rom - including it's RPN based calculator (as you can tell I'm a Forth fan
I've had this once before where a previous employer caused me to pull out of a big name Open Source project because they didn't like me doing anything in my own time. Saying that, I only stayed there for a couple of months after that, as I was that pissed off with them because of it.
Unless of course you copy some idea from work and make your own version of it.
That's the worst one, and the hardest to keep away from as well. At least in my current contract I've not got that problem - most of the stuff I've done I already done before, so a good 20% of it is already mine, and open sourced as well with the CVS on sourceforge, so if something did go ary I just show them the file dates and cvs logs ;-)
I'm not sure what the bulb costs are at the moment, but since I've bought my Sony CS5 last February, I've used only 10% of the bulb life.
It's nice watching DVD's and certain TV programmes on the "big screen" but I tend to use it only if a programme deserves it, hence the low 200hrs useage in the last 10 months.
The only downside I have with it is the amount of electricity it uses - about a days worth of normal useage in about 4 hours.
Saying that I did a rough calculation back in March and it worked out at 0.15 quid (UK) per hour for the bulb, and ~ 0.50 quid per hour in total.
I'd doubt the would as the 300D is targeted at the EOS-300 (film equivalent) beginner market. As such I'd doubt the Mirror lockup function will appear for it.
I've been playing with my D30 for astrophotography for a while now and I'v have been slightly dissapointed with the results, but I've not had enough time to play with it, so the quality may be partly me.
The imager on it seems to be more sensitive to light pollution especially in the red wave lengths, so I need to sort out a filter - hopefully then the image quality will improve.
I'd advise the 10D, but that said on ebay there are D30/D60's going for a nice price, D30's are going for around 500 quit, D60's around 700 second hand. [sorry don't know the current Stirling/US$ rate]