This note’s for you

Around christmas last year, I bought a Super T-Amp and a pair of Axiom M3 speakers. What can I say, I think I’m addicted by that T-Amp technology now :-). Some weeks ago I ordered an upgraded TA-10 amp from audiomagus.com. It takes some time to burn in before the amp comes to full bloom, and now it is really ‘ripe’. I’m really excited about this great sound that this little amp gets out of the speakers. The Super T is already great, and this amp is similar, only better in everything. Wider soundstage, more detailed sound, better dynamics. It’s just as if the musicians are in the room. Which is strange for orchestral music It has the same limitations as the Super T though: needs efficient speakers (mine have around 90db/w/m and it is just enough), no remote control, only one input, etc. But this is exactly right for me, I tend to follow the KISS priniciple here too. I also recently bought a used Sony DVP NS900 CD/SACD/DVD player for 150€, a reference player back when it was released. Together this makes a hifi setup for 600-700€ that sounds like something that is around 5x - 10x the price.

There are two downsides you have to be aware of if you plan on such a setup: First, it reveals many limitations of not-carefully-produced CDs (or every media for that matter). For example, I already spotted a couple of clipped passages on Johnny Cash’s ‘American IV’, and Norah Jones’ ‘Feels Like Home’ CDs, which are otherwise great sounding albums. Too bad that pop/rock CDs are often not well produced, with added compression etc, only to get more bang effect on cheap hifis.

The other ‘downside’ I experienced is, that this new setup changed my musical taste quite significantly. For example, I could never stand classical music. Now I know why: it ain’t no fun listening classical music on a bad hifi. Everything gets muddied up and distorted. Now I see that classical music can be much more interesting and rewarding than rock music (my god, if you told me that I would write something like this some years ago, I would have hit you over with something ) Similar with female voices. I seldomly bought female singer’s CDs, and I was never really excited about them. Now I listen to Norah Jones, Fiona Apple, Cat Power, etc more than anything else, and they sound soooo beautiful :-). I don’t want to say that changing or adding to your musical taste is a bad thing, or a disadvantage, but it is something you should be aware of before buying some good audio gear.

That said, the most important thing is to keep listening to music, and not technology. The net is full of audiophile babble and chatter, and it seems to me that many so called audiophiles see audio tech as a kind of status symbol. Recently I saw speaker cables for 4000€ in a hifi shop. WTF?? The T amps are pretty good at bringing down audio quality back to earth.

… goes in small but significant steps. Mouse dragging works now, as well as gradients (dunno, this seems to be gratis with the rendering pipeline, I haven’t implemented one bit for gradients). I can run real Swing apps already, and the things that work show awesome performance. I really think Escher’s performance is a killer, because it avoids JNI calls almost completely, and doesn’t need the buffer pipeline for that (like the OpenGL pipeline). It simply talks efficiently with the X server directly. Obviously, one missing piece is transparent images, I will add that next. Code is still on my server, as we still have no OpenJDK project yet.

The last couple of days I spent going through the AWT peer interfaces and cleaning them up (get rid of all the duplicate and deprecated stuff there), and have now started to document the stuff. The first results can be found here. For now I only have ButtonPeer to ComponentPeer, but I will add the missing stuff during the next couple of days, and I will also add all other classes that are necessary and/or helpful (like Toolkit, GraphicsEnvironment, and some internal classes).

I’m also very excited about Mario’s work with JOGL and Escher. This is so amazing to see (start) working.

This guy is always good for a surprise. In the past he has made records in a very wide variety of styles (and still be true to himself). Country, folk, rock, blues, punk, soul, grunge, electro, you name it - and he surely does something completely different. He’s always been very conservative with technology (except some funny experiments in the 80s), insisting on analogue recordings and media whenever possible, etc. Why am I telling you this, and do so on an otherwise Java-centric blog? Well, Neil Young joins Rich Sands Green for a keynote at JavaOne. The article claims that they are going to announce an interesting media project. This sounds really weird. This old analogue fanatic doing some digital multimedia stuff? With Java? OTOH, I really think he must be seriously interested in this, he has never been the guy that you can pay into talking about something which is only interesting for any company. So, this is going to be interesing. I really hope somebody makes a video of it. I wonder what that project is all about? A free replacement for javax.sound? I doubt that Neil Young would have any interest in this. Makes me wonder if all this has anything to do with Mario Torre playing Neil Young at last FOSDEM, while presenting his javax.sound implementation?

On a related note, I will hopefully attend a Neil Young concert this summer (July, 9th) in Oberhausen. Would be fun to meet people there.

To celebrate all this news, I have a Schmankerl for all Neil Young fans and everybody else. I hope the RIAA won’t kill me for this. Here I have for you Sample And Hold. This is a very special and song. (And very unconventional for him. Back then, Geffen Music sued Neil Young over 3 million $$$ for unrepresentative music.) While it seems to hide under a wall of digital sound, it is still one of the most emotional and touching songs. It is about his heavily disabled son, trying to learn stuff on some machines. This version is the LP version, on the CD they released a completely different mix (but I like the LP version a lot more). After all this news, I wouldn’t be surprised if Neil Young released a techno or industrial album this year :-D.

Keep on Rocking In the Free World!! Yay!

Another day, another non-existent problem solved Seriously, the font problems I’ve seen yesterday have been kindof bad luck. Wrong font has been chosen by the pipeline, one that doesn’t render smooth as bold font. Plus some small problems in OpenJDK and/or FreeType regarding rendering this font, etc. Today I tried the Font2DTest program of OpenJDK and most fonts look just fine:

This is Bitstream Vera plain without anti-aliasing. Pretty smooth. The font we’ve seen yesterday has been FreeSans bold:

Which also looks slightly crappy with OpenJDK’s default pipeline:

BTW, it’s really amazing how well Swing applications already work. There are only very few glitches (no mouse drag yet for example) and performance seems reasonable (not quite on par with the OpenJDK X11, but still). And all this with minimal effort on my side, I really only implemented a handful of primitives and a little infrastructure. Yay OpenJDK Java2D architecture!

Today I finally solved a non-existant problem, and can finally show some stuff from the OpenJDK challenge work:

The demo already works quite well and performance is reasonable. Of course, there are still many quirks and etches, and the fonts look like crap. Not sure yet, why the fonts look so ugly, I have to find this out. This is using OpenJDK rendering pipeline and does all the rendering in pure Java (over Escher).

As Mario already mentioned, there has been some Escher goodness during the last couple of days. Both of us have been working on fixing Escher’s GLX implementation (which became broken after my big overhaul of the protocol transport layer). Today I went through the large parameter stuff in GLX, which is so horribly weird, I think I have some gray hair now Makes you wanna put a // NEVER EVER CHANGE THIS CODE AGAIN in there. Anyway, this means that textures are working now, I think this is pretty cool and the last big broken thing:

Phew. I think now we can start with the JOGL layer on top of Escher, which hopefully enables us to run Jake2
:-D.

A while ago, our (Mario and me) project proposal for the OpenJDK Innovators Challenge has been accepted. Today I’d like to announce the actual project, codenamed Caciocavallo. This project will cover a couple of things:

• An implementation of the AWT Toolkit interface (java.awt.peer and a bunch of classes in java.awt), that doesn’t make use of Sun internal classes.
• An implementation of the AWT Toolkit interface that subclasses Sun internal classes and reuses most of the infrastructure. (This is named Caciocavallo-NG)
• Patches to OpenJDK to enable the above Plus better documentation, etc.

The toolkit implementations will be based on the great Escher library. So far we have (somewhat) working prototypes for both the ‘external’ and ‘internal’ implementation (that’s how I call them). Also, I reworked a significant portion of Java2D, to separate SunGraphicsEnvironment and FontManager. So far, the FontManager class was a final class, with most of the platform dependent font stuff in the subclasses of SunGraphicsEnvironment (urgs), and some more platform dependend stuff in FontManager itself (uuuuuurrrgs: look into FontManager.populateFontFileNameMap()). I changed it so that FontManager is an abstract class, with platform specific pieces in subclasses. SunGraphicsEnvironment doesn’t have any font stuff anymore. Works like a charm already.

Until the project is setup within OpenJDK (soon), all the code resides on my server. There’s caciocavallo and caciocavallo-ng (the external and internal toolkit implementation respectively) and a HG patch queue (what a nice feature of HG that is!!) for OpenJDK.

BTW: I spotted a fun part in the affidavit (new word learned) of The Challenge:

I understand and acknowledge and hereby waive and release any and all rights, demands, losses, liabilities, claims and causes of action whatsoever which I may now or hereafter be entitled to assert, including, but not limited to any death, injury, loss of enjoyment or other harm or loss of any nature whatsoever caused by, contributed to, or arising out of any prize awarded to me in this Contest.

I guess this means I can’t sue Sun when I get a heart attack from the price money, or when I don’t enjoy hacking OpenJDK anymore afterwards. Too bad Ok, now on with hacking (so many things to work on parallel, I need some clones of myself)

Today I had problems with my Wordpress installation on my Debian server again. Somehow, somebody managed to get access to my Wordpress install and disable all the plugins, especially the Askimet plugin. Immediately, I got swamped with spam. I suspect that the Wordpress package in Debian stable is not really well maintained and vulnerable, so I upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 by backporting the unstable package. This was a very smooth process.

This is how it should work:

echo "deb-src http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian unstable main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update
apt-get build-dep libphp-phpmailer
apt-get source -b libphp-phpmailer
dpkg -i libphp-phpmailer_1.73-6_all.deb
apt-get build-dep wordpress
apt-get source -b wordpress
dpkg -i wordpress_2.5.0-1_all.deb

Following that, I went to the wp-admin page, performed the DB upgrade and everything was fine. Very smooth. (I did a mysqldump before thought, just to be sure)

are going on right now, I don’t even have the time to blog for a while. Mario’s now working for aicas, which is super cool. Our proposal for the OpenJDK Innovators Challenge has been accepted (yay), which means we will be working on OpenJDK’s AWT, Java2D and Swing stuff in order to make porting GUI backends easier. We also dive into JOGL development, now implementing a JOGL layer on top of Escher. There’s a load of other stuff to do as well, the Jamaica 3.2 release is coming close, the Mercurial transition inside aicas has to be done, the Jamaica/OpenJDK integration too, customer stuff, etc etc. I feel slightly over-worked :-/

To make matters worse, my car decided today to go bonkers. Well, we were thinking about buying a new one anyway, so maybe we have to short-circuit that process now. Also today, Madeleine and Alba have become ill. What a shitty day. Luckily, a postcard from a friend of mine in my mailbox saved my day.