Joseph D. Darcy's Sun Weblog

Friday June 13, 2008

Cheesy X-rays

When flying recently, I was slightly concerned after when my carry on bag was selected for extra scrutiny after going through the X-ray machine; the culprit: cheese. I was bringing back four bars of 1 ¾" × 1 ¾" × 6" cheese I haven't been able to find in California. My bag also had some batteries and electronics in it. The cheese packaging was swabbed and analyzed and I went on my way. I thought this was a little silly, but I moderated my view when I was catching up on back issues of Science News during the flight and read an article that said cheese and plastic explosives can look the same under X rays. The new and improved X-ray system being discussed will be able to tell apart C4 and four cheese!

OpenJDK 6: Sources for b10 published

On May 30, the OpenJDK 6 b10 source bundle was published. Notable fixes in this build include:

• Clarifications and corrections to the build instructions (6644659, 6682167, 6563616, 6611685, 6597857)

• Fixes related to building cryptography (6683078, 6644659)

• 2D bug fixes (6604044, 6636469), including a fix from Andrew Haley and Keith Seitz of Red Hat to correct color management related regression and JCK failures (6523403).

• Replacing the encumbered sound engine with Gervill (6702956)

• Updating time zone data to 2008c (6707643)

• Collections fixes (6691185, 6691215)

• Start of addressing the copyright/licensing concerns raised by Debian (6695553, 6703931)

• Deleting or modifying regression tests to be more appropriate for OpenJDK (6673853, 6602426, 6704655, 6705893)

With the removal of the binary plug for sound, the only remaining plug in OpenJDK 6 is for SNMP support. Work continues to address the remaining copyright and licensing concerns in the code base. Some regression tests, such as those in networking and javax.script, should probably be modified to more easily accept configuration options without having to modify the source of the tests; discussion on how best to do that has started.