Intimidated by higher ranking of opponent?

Lately I don't play chess at all, but when I do I like to win (Doh!). My chess knowledge and playing skill are very weak so I'm ranked pretty low on the FICS.

Thanks to my FICS formula I don't have to play with players that are unbeatable for me. To make progress I just can't play only with weaker players (and I'm not referring to rating progress, but rather skill progress) so my formula (you can check it issuing "vars whp" on the server)  allows for chess players with rating difference of less then 200 points (it's ratingdiff<200) to play with me. I'm ashamed to admit, but even that 200 points is intimidating for me when I play with stronger players. Luckily I'm not the only one as there are many chess players answering "yes" to Do you get psyched out by rating? question on chess.com forums.

Easiest solution is just not to know rating of your opponent so to succour my (and probably some of your) weak psyche and relieve the tension that n-hundred points of Glicko rating poses on our games I'll hide rating information from chessboard in Tonic. Of course it will be optional.

Tonic drops support for ICC

Since ICC doesn't allow guest logins for a long time (one of posters in forum thread about fairness of chess servers on forumrybka.net states that it had happened August 2006)  and I don't have any interest in ICC I decided to delete all files related to it from Tonic's project. This deletion will help make Tonic's download file smaller and will make interface for login a little simpler.

Tonic's code is still in kenai.com git repo, but I'm going to make mirrors of it at Sourceforge and Github since kenai is going to be shut down at some point in the future in favor of java.net.

I've got even less time, but I've got big hunger for coding and I'll do my best to make a release soon. Nothing big, just some cosmetic changes and smaller download files.

Touched Tonic's code

It's been a long time I've touched anything related to Tonic.

Today I've moved code from Sourceforge's subversion to kenai's Git repository. I've chosen Kenai because of their Jira instance. I really like Jira's look and feel and out of so many bugtrackers it suits me best. I've chosen Git because I'd like to give someone an option to clone Tonic's code easily and I'd like to learn Git more. I use it to store my Vim config and plugins (those are kept as submodules +branches for my little additions to snipmate snippets) on Gitorious. Git seems to be complicated, but there's a lot of answered questions about Git on Stackoverflow and thanks to lots of smart and knowledgeable people I can handle it for my simple needs and I sometimes even enjoy it.

I've got some simple ideas for Tonic. I want it to be smaller for download, change some of icons, have nicer ui (better layout, replace table showing moves with list), work on the bughouse support, make it friendlier to Linux directory structure.

[Edit 03.05.2011] I've forgotten to mention two posts that helped me migrate from subversion to Git:
http://www.jonmaddox.com/2008/03/05/cleanly-migrate-your-subversion-repository-to-a-git-repository/
http://help.github.com/changing-author-info/
Big thanks to authors!

Read about JavaFX 1.2, port to 1.3, know about 2.0

As I mentioned in my last post I was asked to review JavaFX 1.2 Application Development Cookbook. Since JavaFX 1.2 is quite old I decided to use 1.3 and port code found in book along the way. Until chapter 4 which is about components and skinning in JavaFX I hadn't any big obstacles. I was hitting Shift+F6 in NetBeans and everything was running fine. First recipe FormDemo of fourth chapter failed to run due to some compile error in Deck class which wasn't even used in FormDemo (I hadn't got time to dig why this is happening) so I decided to port this custom control to 1.3. Below is code that gave me a chance to learn something new about creating controls in JavaFX.

override function create():Node {
        stack.effect = if(enableReflection)Reflection{fraction:0.35} else null;
        stack
}

I knew this is the way you created CustomNode in JavaFX, but Control would have to be a different beast. Its online documentation doesn't tell anything about extending. Searching gave me some interesting information on JavaFX forum and I was directed to CustomNode doc which says, that overriding create function is the way of dinosaurs. Now one should override children variable.

JavaONE 2010

...

And all the above and all the work done by author of the mentioned book and numerous people working on JavaFX Script libraries, components, books, sessions and docs will become deprecated in a year, because Oracle decided to drop JavaFX Script from JavaFX 2.0 release. Instead you will be able to write against JavaFX libraries in Scala, Groovy, Jython, JRuby and plain old Java and there will be WebPane at last. It's a shame JavaFX Script is going to go out of JavaFX platform, but I guess it didn't see a lot adoption, developers wanted more integration with their favorite languages and Oracle being very pragmatic decided there's no point in pushing new language. I felt something was wrong with Tor Norby when listening to JavaPosse and now I know why. I don't think Oracle will tell a word about JavaFX Authoring Tool. There's no need for such a tool in corporate environment. I haven't heard anything about Mobile either, so I guess there's no future for JavaFX Mobile, too. I also wonder what will happen to JavaFX Production Suite, since it produced FXZ files, that were JavaFX Script files zipped. There's also JavaFX Composer affected by depracating FX Script. I'd like to see JavaFX Script being like FXG in Flex 4.

I'm sad that JavaFX Script is going away. I really like the ease of literal objects creation, binding, animation syntax. Maybe it will be fully open sourced (yeah, I know it's Oracle, but I can dream, right?) someone will pick it up and make it as yet another language running on JVM?

Anyway, Oracle is really strengthening Java in RIA space. Especially opening JavaFX libraries to other languages and creating WebPane are great moves.

How is JavaFX's outlook now

JavaFX's main strength often touted is that it's cross-platform. "See JavaFX play on all the screens of your life" is direct quote from JavaFX's website. Java now is cross-platform on computers, but mobile JavaME is different version in many aspects (libraries, language level stuck at 1.3), then there's also BD-J, Java for Blue Ray players which has it's own set of libraries. And there's Java Card All of them don't even share same level of Java the language, let alone libraries and tools. JavaFX aims at gathering again those target platforms to WORA mantra with common profile which omits for example javafx.ext.swing package and for good reasons - nobody wants to drag that ball and chain into their revolutionary mobile device, right? The three screens would be your iPad, iPhone, AppleTV, err... Sorry I've meant your TV, Windows computer (preferably, because JavaFX is best supported on Windows) and Windows Mobile 6.5 phone.

The problem is JavaFX is available only on desktop: yeah, there was one or two TV shown on stage last year at JavaONE, but I doubt JavaFX TV will survive. Putting Youtube and other Internet sources of content on TV makes sense, but apps? We'll see soon with Google TV, but again it is separate box. TVs are for audio and video output, period.

Where will JavaFX find its home on the smallest of the screens? Windows Mobile? Yeah, right. I used future tense so that doesn't count. Maybe Windows Phone 7? It should be released with some powerful hardware that surely would easily cope with animations, effects and all the richness you can imagine. No. Two words: Microsoft Silverlight.

Symbian or Meego? This would be a pleasant surprise (and big surprise regarding Meego). I know that Nokia is still working on Symbian's Java runtime, but I haven't seen anything about JavaFX Mobile implementation. There's possibility. And there's Nokia's contender in space: Qt Quick.

Blackberry is possible too. Not very exciting platform yet it is doing quite well in US market and in segment that is of interest for Oracle. Still there's no word about JavaFX landing on RIM's handsets.

Anyway Blackberry is going to be crushed by almighty army of Android devices which will rule the world in short order. So let's put JavaFX on Android. It's open, it's free and it's being sued.

Let's summarize. JavaFX is nice on desktop, almost non existent on TV. There's beta JavaFX Mobile implementation for Windows Mobile (one phone, HTC Touch Diamond) as for others: Blackberry: no, no info on future introduction. iPhone: nope. Windows Phone 7: Microsoft Silverlight. Symbian: maybe, there's Flash Lite, there's Silverlight, there will be Qt Quick soon. Big opportunity to compete. MeeGo: would be surprising, Qt Quick will be there soon. Android: now that Oracle sued Google over VM technology I don't see JavaFX on it.

I really like JavaFX and certainly would like to see it on my mobile (Symbian based). We'll see what future holds. 

Quite a surprise for me

I've decided to break the silence, because something really nice happened to me. A few day ago I were contacted by Packt Publishing to write a review of book: JavaFX 1.2 Application Development Cookbook. I agreed to do it. Although now JavaFX is at 1.3.1 and there were some breaking changes (that you can read about in JavaFX 1.2 to 1.3 migration guide) I hope to find that book informative.

Even less time ahead

Hello, as you can see I've been quiet for long time now. It's mainly due to me not finding motivation to write anything although so much have happened in "IT world" and I was/am excited by several things. I guess I had a feeling that my weblog is useless for me and for everyone else and what I have to say isn't that important, maybe it is this way, but I still can have my say. And I will. So I shall write. About Open Company, about E text editor, about JavaFX, about IntelliJ IDEA, about good and bad ui, about Flash Catalyst, about ... And I will have fun doing it. I hope you, my dear reader, will have some fun too and sometimes will find some useful information while reading my blog.

I'm getting nostalgic and emotional, but please forgive me - my wife born a son two days ago. We are all healthy and happy. I'll try hard to find moments for writing :).

Anti-name-butchers measures

If you listen to JavaPosse podcast a lot you had heard hosts several times butchering names. It is just so hard to know pronunciation of every language in the world.

I thought it would be nice to create simple app to gather audio for names and tame those name butchers at JavaPosse and all over the world. Of course I haven't got time to make it, but I stumbled upon pronunciation feature on IBM My developerWorks. I think it is an idea worth spreading and stealing. So think about it, ask your community/social portal to protect your name against name butchers.

MediaUnsupportedException no more

Since the JavaFX's launch I had problems with media. At first JavaFX 1.0 on my home computer crashed JVM when trying to play anything. I filled a bug RT-2530, which was assigned and moved to appropriate category shortly after, but I've never heard from assignee anything. I guess it was because of amount of work in other areas and lack of votes for my bug. I went through intall-reinstall cycle of anything that came to my mind that could be related to media. One thing I wasn't intending to do was reinstalling Windows - I hate it as a solution and I didn't believe it is a cure for all bad. Anyway, I checked my friend's computer that have almost the same hardware as mine. That system didn't play media either. Nothing helped.

With JavaFX 1.0.1 things got slightly better - playing media with JavaFX gave me MediaUnsupportedException. So I went to JavaFX's JIRA and tried to find any bugs related to media and gave some of them, which I thought were similar to mine, a vote. At least I showed Sun's people there is a problem. Unfortunetly I was of a few that voted in JavaFX's JIRA at all. Maybe it is Sun's bug parade bad fame to be pleaded guilty for it?

Then after JavaFX 1.1 I searched again, because it still couldn't play video/audio with JavaFX. Flash worked fine and so did Silverlight. One day someone pointed me to release notes for JavaFX SDK stating that problems with built-in audio cards and missing audio drivers might cuase MediaUnsupportedException. Doh! I reinstalled DirectX (even tried to downgrade it), installed-reinstalled-tweaked codecs, installed On2 Flix encoder to check whether my machine can play fxm files, but I didn't updated my audio drivers! My mobo is nforce2 based with Realtek chip responsible for sound. I've installed new drivers for my built-in audio card. Rebooted and voila. I can now enjoy full power of JavaFX.

I have to say there is still a lot of work for JavaFX to be done, to make it competent rival of Flash and Silverlight, but it is a great start. I've started JavaFX course at javapassion.com and I like JavaFX Script. I also was astonished by video puzzle example from javafx.com. Is it possible to make similar app in Flash or Sliverlight (sorry I don't have time to digg through search engine results)? Anyway, as I said JavaFX has a long way ahead to go to really fly or shine - look at comparison to other RIA technologies at shinedraw.com to see discussion what it might do better in future to please its users. In comments I tried to respond to Terence problems with JavaFX (I almost fully agree with his points), but the conversation has gone the other way due deployment problems. In short Terence decided to wait for next releases to get deeper into JavaFX. I won't wait. I go and see what else JavaFX has for me. And what can I do to make it better.

Update: It seems I misread release notes title - it is for JavaFX preview release, even if itsn't relevant anymore it still inspired me to try to update my audio drivers.

NetBeans Nimbus kumbaya

I am happy to see Nimbus related NetBeans' bugs are hunted and some of the squashed already.Here is a link to umbrella bug report for Nimbus uglinesses and glitches in NetBeans. For those that won't follow a link - this bug depend on 23 issues of which 7 are opened as I am writing this post. All fixes, except one related to NetBeans not adjusting font size through --fontsize option, are scheduled for 6.7 release. Thank you NetBeans' developers.

The ugly tabs are gone. Me likey! Screenshot is from build 200902231401.

I'd like to see module that would allow to change colors of Nimbus, but is it even possible to do it at runtime? Blue is sad and cold. Good for super hot summer though :).

Some rough edges of nimble couple

I've been using NetBeans 6.5 for some time with Nimbus laf that came with Java 6u10. I have to say I like Nimbus, I am using it and not going to switch back to Metal or Windows. BTW I've always liked the former more, because of good looking toolbar and editor tabs. Anyway, there are two things, for now at least, that annoy me in NetBeans working under Nimbus (I believe these are NetBeans issues) - the colors of editor tabs and their inconsistence and ugly usage of border around editor pane. Look at the picture below.

Hopefully the selected tab will get less saturated to make it less agressive and more readable for the eye and border at the top of editor pane will long enough to reach its ends :). It will make tabs look more natural, more finished. For now it seems like tabs are alien to the rest of the NetBeans ui. They look more like buttons, because of this line issue.

I know glitches I've mentioned will not make you scream in the middle of the night sweating, but refining those would please my aesthetic needs :). Of course I am not the only one pointing those issues. Just search for "nimbus tabs" in nbusers@netbeans.org mailing list and you would see polished look does matter to developers.

Bad Picasa and bad Google Earth!

It was a pain for me to discover today that two fine pieces of software from Google - Picasa and Google Earth doesn't allow me to write with diacritical marks. Both programs have assigned actions for keys combinations that normally would have allow me to write letters with diacritical marks. It is unfortunate, but even more unfortunate is I can't change those shortcuts. This plainly sucks! 

I wanted to report both of these issues only to find there is no issue tracking neither for Picasa, nor for Google Earth. Grrr! So the only way to tell Google to fix it is to use Forum? I will not leave this bug as it is - I want to use Google Earth and Picasa with pleasure, not with anger :).

I think that good solution is to let user to change those shortcuts. I understand that changing it now, when both software is quite long on the market, isn't an option. I would be more to happy to do it, if Google had fixed this bug. 

Am I alone there? JavaFX media playback problem

The wait is over. Let the wait for next version begin! 

As said in This Ain't Yours' Dad's Java podcast good folks at Sun worked very hard to get 1.0 out. Now they have lot's of feedback (good and bad, but hearing in Java Posse #221 people cheering JavaFX and Joe Nuxoll's warm word about it at Devoxx conf shows that Sun's done good job).

For me JavaFX isn't painless experience - and I am not talking from developer perspective - I haven't yet coded any JavaFX - when I tried to run any JavaFX sample involving media all I got was java.exe crash. At first I thought it was problem with my system so tried to reinstall everything what could be fault: DirectX, SP3, codecs. No luck. So I filled bug report at JavaFX issue tracker with id RT-2530.

Surprisingly I haven't yet seen any votes or have found similar stories. Some people were getting UnsupportedMediaExceptions, but no crashes apart from vague "it's crashing firefox".  If you have similar problems to mine please vote! You should first register which is free and easy.

Waiting for JavaFX

Last year's October I was looking at AIR and Java weight - I just checked deployment issues - the size of the download needed to get the platform. The other one is resource consumption and I think both AIR and Java have kind of the same, huge memory consumption (thwirl takes about 45 MB), and to both hardware accelerated graphic is comming so CPU will be relieved.

So I just touched the surface of the platform succes factor. I mentioned also if the platform wants to succeed in the consumer world uber cool apps is a must. They have to be slick and sexy. As is Milpa :) which gives it enough credit to make people wait for Java's cold starts. Seriously there are apps worth downloading JRE - Azureus, Limewire, Spark, BlogBridge, Freemind, but none of them can compete with slickness factor of Kuler, Buzzword, ADC Desktop or Nickleodon's Jigsaw Puzzle Game or BlackBookSafe. You might find some nice looking Java app in Bruce Eckels' post's comments (nice thread btw) and in Swing Sightings (which is death btw?). Java seriously needs some marketing love for RIA or FRCA (filthy rich clients apps).

I like the way Adobe markets AIR (apart from cool name ;)) - for developers it is a little shift (from Flash, Flex or html/css/ajax) and for consumers lots of nice looking, polished, useful and net connected apps developed by known companies (AOL Xdrive Desktop Lite, eBay Desktop). Of course being an AIR app doesn't ensure being a great one, but the ones I've seen are all good looking (probably more designers were involved). I wonder what apps will we see when JavaFX emerges from development. Will there be any great companies involved (think eBay, NYT, AOL)? We will know soon.

One company for sure is developing its product using JavaFX - Malden Labs.

Some shiny spark from the Sun

As you can see I haven't written anything for some time. Well I've certainly read a few bits of information, opinions and rants... Forming some opinions which I hope to share. Someday.

Today, or tonight rather, reading of some post of Sun's employee (he is blogging on blogs.sun.com) made me sit to write once again. First of I've noticed his post about free midlet games. Free as in steal! I come from a country where when I say I don't play cracked games the eyes of people hearing this are huge as saucers of astonishment, but I am sure many of those people would be as astonished seeing this kind of post on the blog on the corporate server. I don't think that this makes any good for Sun. I am not sure if same goes for shameless FUD spreading about Android. At least I hope nobody is believing uncertain and doubtful in the post about problems surrounding Android adoption - such as any new (or not so new too) technology on Earth!

What really saddens me is that those posts apeared on the java mobile and embedded community site. I've find it quite unfortunate that such a low value posts can find their way to such a prominent place.

7 years old bug nimbly squashed?

When I've read that 24th build of Java 6 update 10 (aka Consumer JRE) is out I decided to see how will Tonic look in Nimbus Look and Feel. I checked it few time earlier and it didn't look good - at first try I couldn't even run Tonic under Nimbus, second time it was better, but not good enough - internal frames' icons were to big and combo boxes were to small. But one thing remained the same.







Could anyone tell me if this Nimbus' look of text pane (it is all black in other lafs) is a solution to Background attribute in JTextPane is not resolved to the parent style bug?

Anyway, Nimbus looks good and is shaping nicely although I've noticed there is a 1 pixel shift between button and combo box in the UI on the screenshot (if you think I am silly to mention 1 pixel shift, you should read from someone more respected - JGoodies creator's presentation (slides 46-53)). Surely there will be a lot of work done by Java 6 update 10 final release.

Not a BigMistake

I am not a native English speaker so I for sure make a lot of and a little more mistakes. I just wanted to say that spelling errors can happen to everyone. Even if he is really paying attention. I think that spotting this kind of bugs is hard because our brain is compensating a lot of things. For example there is hypothesis it is smart enough to get the meaning of the word even if letters aren't exactly on theirs places. And you can test it yourself - Raeidng scarblmed wodrs.

While looking for a that link I've found something more scientific - article about conditions influencing reading rates. Long overall, but there is "Conclusion" paragraph.

So there it is directly from developers.sun.com

Harsh truth?

This a cite from a /.

"The fact that its a crappy feature makes me think it must have originated with a developer.

Developers and User Interfaces don't tend to get along well; you need to go out on the street and grab a couple of people wearing matching outfits and get them to draw your UI on a napkin or something."

Of course it is more funny then true, isn't it?

This was comment to story about Pidgin being forked because of developers didn't wanted to bend to user needs. It was all about flexibility of the Pidgin. The controversial feature wasn't allowed to be turned off.

By the way, do you imagine Apple's designers bending to users' needs?

Enabling software assembling

Some time ago I wandered through Google results pages seeking for 'better sourceforge' (well, actually I was looking for 'sourceforge sucks'). I knew about Google open source hosting, JavaForge, Launchpad and several others, but I was looking for more mostly of curiosity. It was worthwhile - I've found Assembla. Nice place with very good free offering: they are giving 500MB for you space which might include wiki, svn, mercurial or git repository, assembla's or trac issue tracking software and some other useful tools enabling you to exchange ideas, knowledge and code easily. 

I like Assembla's team aim for introducing new and constantly improving tools (when I've stumbled at Assembla for the first time they offered only svn hosting, now there are mercurial and git to choose) and they constantly improve their own Tickets issue tracker. 

Assembla isn't a charity driven venture (but it is ad free site, not counting their offerings of course) - they have commercial hosting and service offering as well. If you want you can also write up nice profile; list all your skills and achievements and whatnot - Assembla enables staff or job finding also. 

Hopefully you will find Assembla useful. I have to say that I was surprised that there are so many people providing hosting for open source projects. I was even more surprised to see that one company from Poland was offering it. It is good to see that open source is getting support from all over the world :).  

Pulp entertainment with a smell of Java

For some time I've been visiting one website to kill some time. I'd like to share with you my impressions about Milpa.

It is a logic game. Quite addictive, not only for me - after the game you can see your placing on the high score list. I guess scores are kept for one day. When my play is weak I get to around 1000, so there is quite a lot of people playing Milpa everyday. No wonder! Art is nice and simple, so are sounds and animation. Game play is equally good.

If you tried the game you should probably know it is a Java applet. Of course I am not the first who wanted to share his experience about Milpa. Very addictive browser game is a better title for writing about it, that's for sure. One thing that struck me when I read linked web log entry was that its author thought it was Flash game. And not even one mention it loads too long, or puts browser into freeze.

Author of the game, David Brackeen created pulpcore open source framework, which Milpa is founded on. Pulpcore news feed indicates there are some people involved in making it better. Maybe you'll find it worthwhile to check it?

Cheers and don't give the skull a chance to eat your vegetables ;)!