INightmare

Maybe it's time to:

Dirmi Maven repository

Monday, February 28, 2011 7:15:18 PM

Today I have setup maven repository for Dirmi. A nice bidirectional remoting sollution, intended to replace RMI.

Sharing it with the world.

URL: http://inightmare.org/maven2

Including into your project:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.cojen</groupId>
    <artifactId>dirmi</artifactId>
    <version>1.0.6</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.cojen</groupId>
    <artifactId>cojen</artifactId>
    <version>2.2.1</version>
</dependency>

I hope you'll find this useful.

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Wednesday, February 2, 2011 6:23:53 PM

Enjoying http://www.googleartproject.com/

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HTML to drop version numbers: did Neil overreact?

Friday, January 28, 2011 8:37:47 PM

web, standards, html

Today I read the post by Internets highly respected author Neil McAllister where he responded to WHATWGs plans to drop HTML version numbers. You can read the whole article here.

He claims that dropping HTML version numbers will cause troubles for web application authors. Cite: "Once they do, their customers will end up with a browser that supports some form of HTML as it was specified at some point in time. Without so much as a version number to go by, it will be virtually impossible for the customer to understand -- or even express -- just what form of HTML that actually is."

Why would anyone care? It's not the standard version that matters, but separate features! And it's a common practice to check for the presence of the feature rather than supported HTML version. New HTML spec comes out once in few years, but separate features may show up any time. Why not start supporting it before its done? Lots of HTML5 features are already being used and users benefit a lot from those.

My suggestion is to complete separate feature standards and rely on that, rather than a whole pack of them.

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Google profile

Wednesday, December 1, 2010 9:30:35 PM

google, profile

Google Profile page shows:

Your profile is not yet eligible to be featured in Google search results
To have your profile featured, add more information about yourself.

Add more info to my profile | Learn more

But it's Google Search I learnt from that I have this profile.

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Fastest browser on Ubuntu (Opera, Firefox, Chromium, Rekonq)

Sunday, October 24, 2010 5:17:41 PM

linux, firefox, Ubuntu, rekonq ...

Today I decided to run a SunSpider test on 4 popular browsers for Linux. Tested on my Asus F3Ka laptop. Here are the results:

Opera 10.63 - 1300.2ms
FireFox 3.6.11 - 3002.0ms
Chromium 6.0.472.63 - 1096.2ms
Rekonq 0.6.1 - 1678.4ms

It seems that FireFox is really behind all the other browsers. Unexpected I would say.

5 comments

Computer power consumption (AMD Phenom + nForce)

Thursday, October 21, 2010 7:53:24 PM

AMD, computer, nvidia, power ...

I'm running a server in my room and one day got curious, just how much power does the thing consume. Got a power meter from a friend and started testing.

System configuration

CPU: AMD Phenom 9600 Black Edition (4 x 2.3Ghz)
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 7025 (the monitor was not plugged in)
RAM: 2 x 2GB DDR2 800Mhz (running at 533Mhz I believe)
Motherboard: ASRock N68C-S UCC (nForce 630a chipset)
Additional cards: VIA Rhine III network adapter
HDD: Samsung SATA drive
Power supply: 420W

Server runs Debian 5.0.

Measurement instrument

Results

Booting up showed around 90W of power consumption, when it was done loading it dropped to 63W. That's how much it uses when idle and running all 4 cores at 2.3Ghz.

Full load test

Ran a 4-threaded application (a continuous loop which performs some simple math). All cores ran at 2.3Ghz. After I tested it with 4 cores I began turning cores off one by one. Here's the result:

Num cores	1	2	3	4
Power consumption	84W	103W	125W	148W

Idle test

Turning off cores when CPU is idle didn't help much. Went from 63W to 61W.

Full load at 1.2Ghz

1 core: 73W
2 cores: 82W
4 cores: 102W

So one core takes ~10W of power when running at 1.2Ghz and full load.

1.2Ghz vs 2.3Ghz

So how much does the scaling help? Going from 1.2Ghz to 2.3Ghz adds about another 10W per core.

Conclusion

AMD+NVidia platform is amazing. Drawing 62W when idle... WOW. My Asus F3Ka laptop with Turion TL-60 (2x2Ghz) uses 44W on wifi, full brightness when idle at 2x800Mhz and 80W at full speed. The difference isn't all that big. What can I say, AMD did a fine job.

4 comments

The Framework

Friday, August 20, 2010 7:55:48 PM

programming, framework, play, java ...

I always thought world needs a fast MVC framework for Java. As flexible and nice as say Ruby on Rails or Grails, but where controller actions where written in a faster languages such as Java. Current Java MVC frameworks (suchs as Struts or Spring Web MVC) are far from the beauty the former frameworks provide.

But... Today I was enlightened by my friend, who showed the Play Framework:

http://www.playframework.org/

The answer to Java web developer prayers. Thank you.

2 comments

Photoshop on the browser

Monday, June 7, 2010 8:04:53 PM

adobe, photoshop, image editing, export ...

Canvas element became a huge addition to HTML5 standard. It's something Web lacked and needed at least a decade ago. Combine the lack for canvas with lack of native video, audio and vector graphics support and you'll see what Web hole Adobe has been plugging with it's Flash technology.

Now the canvas is here (some demos can be seen here) and it might be the technology that might bring some other products like Photoshop and Fireworks online. As canvas content can be exported to an image.

I also always thought... Why isn't there an Online Dreamwaver? That is kinda possible for quite some time.

1 comment

KUbuntu 10.04

Friday, May 14, 2010 9:29:57 PM

linux, Ubuntu, kubuntu, ati ...

Yesterday was the day when I upgraded to KUbuntu 10.04. Installation went without any problems. And the quality stroke me.

The good part

ALSA has finally detected my audio card correctly and I didn't need to specify the model manually. So jack sensing finally works correctly.
All of my hardware was found and works correctly. Even the WiFi.
Also KUbuntu seems to start a little faster, on my Asus laptop with 2Ghz Turion and 2GB RAM it takes me to complete working desktop in less than 50 seconds counting from power on. KUbuntu looks elegant as always, though nothing really changed in the UI.
After the first boot it showed a popup message which suggested installing few proprietary packages such as Flash and some codecs.
Also Ubuntu seems to use the opensource radeon driver for ATI cards. But that will be also mentioned in...

The bad part

All went smooth accept occasional crashes of the whole system. Testing some things led me to make a conclusion on whose fault it is - X server. Radeon driver has some issues with 2D acceleration, but that is easy to solve. You need to generate xorg.conf (as new X server doesn't need that by default).

Stop kdm:

sudo kdm stop

Then build Xorg configuration

sudo Xorg -configure

This will create xorg.conf.new in your home directory. Copy that to /etc/X11/xorg.conf

sudo cp /home/username/xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Open up configuration and find the line: Driver "radeon"
Add this line below:

Option     "RenderAccel"    "False"

Reboot and crashes should be gone.

The end

Enjoy the distribution, though nothing really new, but the release is more stable and hardware support is better.