TecSpy.com Michael Erskine's Domain

Last night I was out in the garden making a brazier (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazier not to be confused with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brassiere :) ) out of a 25L motor oil drum (found in the street) mounted on the tubular steel legs of an Ikea stool (also found in the street). I cut the top off by hammering a flat-ended screwdriver through the steel top near to the rim at 1cm intervals then cutting through the remaining spots, again with a screwdriver and hammer. There was some motor oil left in (you can never empty these things with the plastic spout) so poured this out and saved it to fill my oil can (there was probably about 400ml). I bolted the leg to the bottom of the drum with some long steel bolts I recovered from the timber of a cabin bed frame (found in the street!).

I was pretty chuffed to hear that Battle of the Year was going to be televised on Eurosport. I'm watching it right now: it's the semifinals and... well, the commentators are just pathetic - why can't they just shut up? The breaking is the only thing that should talk. We don't need a pair of idiots yapping over it - especially when they have ABSOLUTELY nothing useful to add. Compare this travesty with the BOTY DVD where its got the stuff you want. Eurosport seem to do this with anything slightly different - they get someone from the sport who can't commentate and some commentator who knows nothing of the sport and they just talk crap all the way through what would otherwise be entertaining in its own right. I'm gonna wait for the DVD again this year!

I'm writing this entry from a completely solid-state machine thanks to Alistair for donating a 32Mb compact flash card for me to play with. Actually it isn't properly finished yet and I still rely on Knoppix for a good web browsing experience! The machine is a Via EPIA 5000 Mini-ITX board that has been propping up my monitor for the past few years. My wife has been using this machine to boot into Windows 2000 on those occasions I'm not there to demonstrate the free alternatives available on our family Linux box but I've decided it should be put to better use as a media streaming device since it is completely silent with a 12V DC 75W ATX power supply and in a stylish G-Alantic case with front-munted USB ports and a little IR window. I've set up a CF to IDE adapter that I bought some years ago for $20 with the 32Mb CF and after attaching a temporary CD drive and booting an old Knoppix CD I was able to use cfdisk and mke2fs to create a single ext2 partition. This partition will be mounted read-only by the way since we don't want to unduely hammer the flash and I haven't got to grips with JFFS2 yet! The read-write parts of the system will be in ramfs: /var, /home, /tmp and some others using up a small part of the 512Mb of RAM available. Using grub-install I was able to make the partition bootable. I'm going to use a kernel and modified initrd from a Movix2 iso - http://movix.sourceforge.net/ - once it is downloaded! Updates soon.

Hmm, lots going on: at my partner's gym in Nottingham and trying out a public internet machine with IE 7 on it and the thing seems to render my site OK! I'm mildly impressed :) I was less impressed with the Java 6 update 10 beta (http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/ea/6u10/6u10beta.jsp): I desparately wanted the Nimbus look and feel (http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/ea/6u10/nimbus.jsp) for beautifying my ugly Linux deployments but testing yesterday with the standard Swing Set 2 JNLP left me a bit sickened - poor performance, random silent crashes, processes left in background that I could get at with JConsole but with no window! All on Kubuntu 7.10 with nv driver so not exactly off the beaten track there! I'll be trying it out with the accelerated i810 X driver later today. Still on the Java front I've been doing a lot of Swing Application Framework stuff and I've got to grips with resource injection, Actions and some of the other beansbinding lovelyness includign the use of the EL expression language - neat.

If Eclipse could contain Matisse and manage Java Application Framework projects like NetBeans can then I doubt I'd ever use NetBeans again. There's some work being done out there (mostly by commercial companies) to allow more integration between the two platforms but in the meantime I tend to swap back and forth between the two, copying source files into my Eclipse workspace from my NetBeans projects. This works well but can be annoying.

So I spent some time tring to make NetBeans treat an external source directory as a particular package as I'm sure was possible in the versions of Sun Forte way back. Anyhow, no avail! So I'm back to copying files into my Eclipse workspace with a little script!

I've listened to a lot of people (suffered a lot of fools) rambling on about how their chosen software is so much better than the competing software when they have limited or no experience of working with the competitor. KDE vs. Gnome, Vi vs. Emacs, Scheme vs. Perl, yadda, yadda, yadda.

If I want to build a Swing GUI, I'll do it in NetBeans, if I want to refactor, I'll do it in Eclipse. Until each project is able to work with its competitor's plugins (and thus end the Java rich client platform war) that is what I and many other Java developers will do.

In brief: I will not be dictated to by software fanboys. I think I can choose for myself.

Apache Log4j - http://logging.apache.org/log4j/index.html - I live here!
Jakarta Commons Logging (JCL) - http://commons.apache.org/logging/ - tried but denied!
java.util.logging - http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/logging/overview.html - an attempt to crush log4j? Looked exciting: always there (1.4 up), similar to log4j, but I never used it on purpose.
Simple Logging Facade for Java (SLF4J) - http://www.slf4j.org/ - now we're talking!
Log-bridge - https://log-bridge.dev.java.net/ - I haven't used this one yet but it makes sense: the Swing Application Framework should use this to decouple from the 1.4 logging but at least the 1.4 is always available (well, for a decent platform!)

After demoing Frets-On-Fire at NLUG on a wireless keyboard and getting truly annoyed with the lag, I finally played the real thing at a friends' house and then my eldest daughter bought a second hand Guitar Hero II. Now I'm sat up late trying to get five stars on every song - damn you!!!!

Snow on trampoline this morning - the freezer is now full of snow people and animals, alongside those from previous years. That bastard Heston has finally died - if there's any justice he is now suffering a million firearms related deaths in hell. I will NOT be competing in the Olympics (again) - this time it's because of Tibet rather than not being selected for my sporting prowess. The outlook for this afternoon: sewing at the Sumac Centre.