Java With Jiva

Free support for SS11

If you haven't moved to Sun Studio 11 yet, you're missing out on a lot. SS11 is has an excellent compiler, world class tools and now the best support available for *free*. Its for a limited time only, but should help get you started on your projects

Dust Bunnies
I opened up my computer case last night and noticed that it was practically full of dust. A few sprays of compressed air (especially on the CPU heatsink) and that cleared it up. The amazing thing is that my CPU temperature dropped from about 45C to about 39C. Not bad

Meetings are bad for you

I knew it! According to the Education Guardian, too many meetings are bad for you! Good thing I only have two meetings I have to attend all week!

NetBeans 5.0rc1 is out

The great people over at Netbeans.org have released NetBeans 5.0rc1. Its got bug fixes, and some improvements like web services applications for J2SE, so you don't need a bulky J2EE container.

The latest RC1 brings NetBeans that much closer to the final relase later this month. The bug fixes I feel are going to be what most people look forward to, as beta2 had its fair share of issues.

If you haven't used NetBeans before, you should definitly download it and check it out. You'll be impressed with the performance, usability, and features that NetBeans provides. To top it all off, its free!

Chileans elect their first woman president

Chile elected their first woman president, and yet the United States of America has yet to elect anything but a white man as president. Heck I'd be happy with a guy that wasn't like all the others, and was different somehow (black, poor, whatever).

Chile is in a long line of countries that are really Democratic giving real power to the people. Alas we as the founders of Democracy can't do anything but the status quo. Are we slaves to material things that we don't see what's going on to the rest of the world? When will we wake up?

Sun almost bought Apple

The Register has an article about how Sun almost bought Apple and almost merged two other separate times. I thought about this for a while, and I think the resulting company would have been ill-suited towards competing in the computing world

Sun traditionally does servers, and does them quite well actually. And traditionally Sun's GUI interfaces are unappealing and simplistic. Of course much of this is changing as GNOME becomes the default interface for Solaris, and tons of opensource software is being ported to work properly on Solaris. But had Apple and Sun merged I think it would have been much worse for both companies, with both companies weaknesses hurting products.

New work for Java Next

I'm starting to get back into the groove of working after my vacation. Mostly fixing bugs, and thinking of new performance improvements. If you have any suggestions or ideas feel free to leave a comment and I'll look into it. I'm also going through Java forums, helping people with their questions and helping any way I can. Its a bit of a slow time as we wrap up Java 6 and start work on the next version of Java.

Vacation

Wow, that was a long vacation. I'm back from my six weeks of weddings, visitng family and in-laws and other such things. I'll fill in something here later when I'm not so tired

XBOX 360
Last night I got to play with an XBOX 360 at the local Target. I must say its very impressive, the game they had was Call of Duty 2, and wow the graphics are amazing! I loved the original Call of Duty on my computer, so the second one was just as engaging. Except that the controls had me confused for a while, strafing and moving are done by the small analog joysticks at the bottom of the controller. IMHO its not the easiest control, especially for FPS games. Personally the mouse + WASD keys are the way to go! I'm definitely gonna have to see about getting an XBOX 360 after the holidays!

Amazing Flight Sim and its FREE!

Check out FlightGear Flight Simulator, its an OpenGL based flight simulator. It's very realistic, and the graphics are just awesome! Check out the screenshots!

Hardware Standardization

A couple of days ago I was recalling my first computer. How it was a mish-mash of hardware that really didn't fit together. It had two IDE hard drives, but the CDROM used a Matsushita interface that connected directly to my SoundBlaster (mono!). And the first time I installed Windows 95, I had to fiddle around with 16bit DOS drivers so that I could access my CDROM. All that's changed of course, and now its near impossible to find a motherboard that doesn't support at least four IDE drives, some that support eight or more!

Of course there's ethernet cards! I remember having to worry about setting up IRQ's, IO Base, and all sorts of issues to get ethernet cards to work properly. Windows 95 made that a bit easier, but under DOS is was a near nightmare! Especially if a game (Duke Nukem 3D was my favorite!) only worked with IPX and not TCP/IP, it was even harder to get it working. Ahh the good old days

What I really like about Hardware standardizing on one or at most two interfaces is that things have a tendency to just work. I especially like USB devices, plug in and it works. External drives, cameras, and other gadgets work without drivers in some cases.

ABC's Lost
Wow, did you guys see that last episode of Lost? So that's what happened to the other 22 folks (the Tail-ies as I like to call them, cause they were in the tail of the plane!). I had a suspicion that Boone's distress call was answered also by the survivors of Oceanic 815, but tonight's episode confirmed it. If you don't watch Lost, then its definitely something to pick up on DVD and start watching.

Sun T1 (Niagara) announced!

The new T1 processor from Sun has 32 threads, 8 cores and uses 70 watts of power. In term of power usage, Intel has long since moved to 100+ watt processors, and in terms of performance the Sun T1 is ahead of the game. Think of the savings in power! You can replace at several Intel Xeon boxes with one Sun T1 box! It lowers your power consumption, decreases rack space usage, decreases manpower required. Basically your TCO decreases, while performance goes up! Not a bad return on investment!

If you look at Sun's commitment to the environment, you'll notice that the Sun T1 is just part of the equation. Sun Ray Thin Clients can also be used to decrease noise, heat, power while giving every employees the best environment available.

So before you buy that big, heavy, power hungry Intel machine think about the total cost, from OS support (Solaris ROCKS!), to space requirements, and cooling. Remember Sun got there first!

LEXUS
Hey I learned something new! Apparently Toyota's Lexus devision actually stands for something! Luxury EXport to US = LEXUS. Neat!

Java 6 HotSpot Client Gets Faster
If you grab the latest version of Java 6 you'll notice that there is a new version of the Client compiler! Since Client is the default compiler for all 32bit platforms, this effects all users of Java! What's new with the Client compiler? Well how about this:

• Linear Scan Allocator - Faster register allocations, with less spills to memory
  
• SSE/SSE2 support
  
• Static single assignment form
  

If you are running Java 6 builds, upgrade to the latest B59! If you're not running Java 6, give it shot!