What’s New

RSS feed for the Java glossary

2008-09-04

• new email address: I have switched from telus.ca to shaw.ca as my IAP Internet Access Provider. This meant dropping my roedy@telus.ca account. I have a new corresponding one at shaw.ca. The mindprod.com email accounts continue to work as before.
• Sunbird Appointment Scheduler: Some notes on the Mozilla Sunbird appointment scheduler.

• Look and Feel: Links to many new free Look and Feels to customise the look of your Java applications and Applets.
• Sound: Tips on how to produce sound in Java by several different techniques. Includes code to generate sound in the background.

• VerCheck: Yet another new version of Vercheck. Now the sound works in application and Applet mode in Vista under beta JDK 1.6.0_10. Vercheck monitors about 60 applications to see if a new version has been released. You can add your own apps to it.

• VerCheck: Vercheck monitors about 60 applications to see if a new version has been released. You can add your own apps to it. The new version lets you append a description to each application. It also generates the HTML for the utilities page.

• trackstick: If you marry a USB thumbdrive to a GPS (Global Positioning System) unit you get a trackstick aka personal tracker. These can be used for tracking movements.

• LCD Flat Panel Monitor: Notes on connectors for LCD Flat Panel Monitor connectors.
• appointment calendar: Some notes on electronic appointment calendars.
• Kensington lock: A Kensington lock, aka K-slot is a simple lock system for laptops and monitors. The lock fits into a reinforced slot in the laptop. The other end is attached to a cable which is looped around some permanent object.

• Internet Setup: A card you can ask your IAP (Internet Access Provider) to fill in to help you configure your OS and Internet applications, and help you talk to the IAP’s tech support people.
• PowerBoost: Even when you sign up for slow speed Internet access, your cable modem is capable of much faster access. A command from the IAP office chokes the modem’s speed down. PowerBoost is a feature from Shaw cable where they open the speed full throttle for 30 seconds after you visit a new website or start downloading a new file. It lets you download small files very quickly. If you download a large file, the first 30 seconds proceed at high speed, then it drops back down to the rated speed.
• ACPI: Advanced Configuration and Power Interface is a specification for BIOS features to allow a desktop computer go into various power-saving modes of sleep.
• JitterBug: The Jitterbug is a line of Samsung cell-phones for technopeasants. They are stripped down of features and made as simple as possible to use.
• PortableApps: PortableApps is a suite of Windows applications designed to be portable on a Thumbdrive so you can take the app and all your data and settings with you from machine to machine. This also means backup restore is much simpler.

• transcription: Listening to an audio or video recording and typing out the words spoken. To do this efficiently you need software such as Transcription Buddy and a foot pedal.
• PADGen: PADGen generates program description files used to accompany distributed freeware and shareware. The entry gives instructions on how to replace PADGen’s defective template so that it generates HTML summary files that pass HTML validation.

• Thunderbird: Some tips on the Thunderbird email program and how its stores its data. This information will be useful if you have to recover with a backup or repair a corrupted set of files.

• Site Down Service: A student project outline to set up a service that notifies users of ETA status when I website goes down. In the same way Montastic does, it monitors the client’s site to see if it up. If it is not, it emails the webmaster asking what to do. The webmaster can then send a digitally signed message giving the ok to switch the website over to your server.
• Bookmark sync: Student project outline to create a bookmark synchronisation program. When you add a bookmark to one browser, or change its properties it should as soon as possible be reflected in all your other browsers. Similarly, there should be a way to delete a bookmark from all your browsers, but probably not as a direct side effect of deleting it from one.
• the outage: The mindprod.comwebsite was down for about 10 hours Sunday morning. My ISP guy was on vacation, so it took much longer than usual to rectify the problem. Had you been using the Replicator, you could have accessed your own up-to-date local copy of the mindprod.com website during that outage. The source code for the Replicator is available so that viewers of your own website can maintain local mirror copies of it also. The Replicator does not require any server-side support. You can host it on a vanilla no-servlet static HTML-only website.
• timesources: The many ways you can find out the accurate current time. In particular, how to make Vista’s time-correcting mechanism work correctly.

• bottom up: Bottom up is a strategy for designing programs.
• top down: Top down is a strategy for designing programs.

• HTTP: New version of HTTP package. Now supports accept-charset, accept-encoding and accept-language. Fixes bugs in gzip support.
• Text Speak ⇒ English Translator student project: Have you ever received an email from someone with a cell-phone who texted you a message with his thumbs? “plz tell me wot u wanna l8r dew 2nite.”. To the uninitiated, it is unintelligible gibberish. Your job is to write a program to convert it into standard English.

• OLPC: ONLP stands for One Laptop Per Child — Nicholas Negroponte’s project to get an Internet-connected laptop in the hands of every child on the planet.
• cosmetic changes: I have made a number of cosmetic changes to the mindprod.com website. The default fonts have been changed to those that render most sharply on Vista. For users on other platforms, the fonts will appear the same. All numbers and dates have been set in monospaced fonts to make them easier to read. Applets now use the new Nimbus look and feel if you have JDK 1.6.0_10. On the Mac they now use the native look and feel so that copy/paste will work with the option key rather than the control key ⌘. On Vista, Applets use the new cleartype fonts for a crisper look. The style sheets have been redesigned to prune down their size, which should mean slightly faster page loading. Book referrals now let you buy books through any of the eight AbeBooks international stores. Each of them is in turn affiliated with hundreds of small bookstores.
• Macintosh: A overview of the Macintosh, primarily aimed at Java programmers interesting in making their multi-platform code behave properly on the Mac.
• CAS: CAS is Central Authetication Service, a Java-based protocol developed at Yale for enterprise-wide authentication of users by applications.

• Macintosh: A overview of the Macintosh, primarily aimed at first-time buyers.

• AlphaComposite: java.awt.AlphaComposite is a class that lets you combine two images in 12 different ways to blend them together with variable transparency.
• Macintosh OS X fonts: A font sampler of the fonts commonly available on the Macintosh under OS X.
• renameTo: A list of the reasons File.renameTo fails.

• wallpaper: A high resolution image used as the background for a desktop.
• new version of Submitter: New version of the mini PAD Submitter submits PAD files to 18 sites. The response from the sites is now somewhat easier to understand.
• new version of SetClock: SetClock now uses www.pool.ntp.org to find nearby timeservers with a fallback if ntp.org is down.
• new version of Fontshower: New version will display a list of fonts you can copy paste to get a list of all fonts available to Java on that particular computer.

• Dreamweaver: Adobe Dreamweaver is an HTML editor that lets you see both the rendered text and the tags.
• Spry: The Spry framework for Ajax is a JavaScript library to let you put a bit of intelligence in the client, rather than relying totally on the server. It lives in the same niche as Applets.

• Transcription Amanuensis Student Project: Project outline to design a utility to help you transcribe videos and audio files more efficiently than current transcription software allows.
• malvertisement: An advertisement that spreads in a virus-like way. For example a webpage runs code that inserts the URL of an advertisement into your clipboard. It hopes you will accidentally paste it somewhere that others will see it.
• SVG: Scalable Vector Graphics. W3C’s file format for exchanging images stored as vectors an opposed to pixels. Eventually it might become for images what HTML is for text, a way of compactly sending images around the Internet to be displayed in browsers. It is officially recommended by W3C. It uses XML to mathematically describe an image.
• USB connectors: Tips to ensure you insert USB cables the right way up the first time.
• foot pedal: A foot pedal is invaluable for doing transcriptions of audio or video recordings by letting your hands do nothing but the transcription typing. In contrast, mouse controlled software takes your hands off the keyboard. Using the keyboard to control the audio may confuse the editor program you are typing into. It is amazing how fast transcription goes with the foot pedal. The entry describes what to look for when buying a foot pedal, installing, care and feeding, and various caveats.

• petty cash box student project: Student project to create a miniature ATM to control the petty cash for an office.
• registration key generator student project: Student project to create a scheme to create registration keys for software and to check the key validity in registered software.
• registration key: When you register software, often the vendor will give you a piece of gibberish that when you enter it into your program unlocks various features and embeds your name into it. Essentially this is the customer’s name encrypted and ASCII-armoured. This entry gives you an outline of how to create a registration key scheme for your own programs.
• HTTP: Overview of how HTTP communicates with a server, what information goes back and forth.
• Net Transport: Net Transport aka NetTransport aka Xi Net-Xfer is a shareware program from Xi Software in China useful if, for example, if you want a permanent copy of a video presentation, rather than just view it online. It lets you download files by various streaming protocols such as MMS and RTSP, cloaked RTSP, RTMP, RTMPT, Flash, BitTorrent, eMule, RN5 authentication, SSL and SSH encryption. It understands Russian dolls such as .asx, .smi to acquire real URLs. Works on Windows.
• Make your own Loopback Audio cable: How to make your own audio cable to use as a loop back plug to record output to the computer speakers.

• FileTransfer new version: FileTransfer lets you copy files on disk or on the web. It now lets you configure the read and connect timeout.
• Replicator new version: The Replicator replicates and maintains a mirror copy of the mindprod.com (or any other Replicator-supporting) website on your local hard disk. The timeouts have been extended to be more forgiving of network congestion.
• Nimbus Look & Feel: How to us the new Nimbus look & feel, available only with JDK 1.6.0_10+. The Canadian Mind Products utilities that use Swing now use the Nimbus L&F if you are running Java 1.6.0_10+.
• wayback machine: The web is Orwellian in that the content is constantly changing with no record of what it used to be. People say things, , change what they said, or retract them with no trace they ever said them. The wayback machine is a service of web.archive.org to take periodic snapshots of websites and save them for posterity unmodified. It has 85 billion web page snapshots archived.
• embedded editor: Student project outline for an embedded text editor for Java.

• constellation: A grouping of files to be processed, for example to be searched, indexed, tidied, macro-expanded…

  A constellation has a way to specify which drives, directories and files to include and which drives, directories and files to exclude. This may be handled with lists, wildcards and/or regexes.

• credit cards: Credit cards are obsolete. They are absolutely preposterous when it comes to security. Giving someone your credit card number is even more foolhardy that giving them a blank cheque. Here are five reasons why.

• JDisplay: JDisplay colourises listings for display. It now has a processor for vanilla text files.
• Brokenlinks: Brokenlinks is a tool to help you find and track broken links on your website, namely URLs that no longer point to anything useful. It is a back end to the Xenu Link Sleuth broken link detector that compensates for Xenu’s weakness of overwhelming you with reports of links that are not really broken.

  Brokenlinks retests ostensibly broken links and maintains a database of link integrity history. It partly compensates for various bugs and deficiencies in Xenu.

  For more details check out the Brokenlink manual.

• comparison shopper: Student project outline for a collaborative comparison shopper that works to compare prices at various stores while you shop. It uses EVDO data cell-phone network, and UPC readers or possibly, ordinary cellphones with cameras.
• virtual inventions: New product ideas, mostly revolving around the kitchen sink.
• downloading video: If you are watching a video or audio and want to download a copy in case the original is retracted, or if you need it to create a transcript, what do you do if there is no download button?
• broken links: I have finally whittled down the list of broken links on the mindprod website from over 600 to 0. I use Xenu and a backend tool I wrote myself (not yet released to the public) to find the broken links. My automated tools cannot detect all problems. Sometimes a link that used to point to something important now points to a parking website, or some unrelated page. If you find any of these, please let me know.
• histograms: What a histogram is and how to compute one.

• naked DSL: A communication line that does nothing but ADSL.
• PEM: Privacy Enhanced Email certificates.
• new version of MimeCheck: MimeCheck now checks the various certificate MIME types and extensions.
• new version of Quoter: Quoter now handles inserting/deleting tags/entities in both HTML and XML
• new version of Entities: Entities now handles inserting/deleting tags/entities in both HTML and XML
• Awkward Characters in XML: XML has several different schemes for handling awkward/reserved characters. One of them is similar to HTML entities, but with a set of only 5 entity references.

• The Windows Help Bug: In Vista, Microsoft dropped support for the old .hlp Windows help files. They wanted authors to convert their programs to the new Vista .chm format and issue new Vista versions. Most authors did not bother and help for old programs stopped working in Vista. What do you do?
• java.util.Collections: java.util.Collections is a giant grab bag of useful methods, ironically most which don’t work on Collections.
• reverse order sorts: How can you easily flip back and forth between ordering/sorting in standard order and reverse/descending/inverse order?
• downloading Flash: If you are watching Flash video and want to download a copy in case the original is retracted, or if you need it to create a transcript, what do you do if there is no download button?
• serialization alternatives: You don’t like Java serialization? Here are 13 alternative ways to persist objects.
• JSON: JSON is simpler, more compact alternative to XML.
• New Version of Entities package: The new version of the Entities package gives you precise control of how you want the nbsp entity handled. Methods have been renamed to make the distinctions clearer. Old methods have been deprecated.
• Advertising on the mindprod.com website: mindprod.com does not accept ads directly to place on the website. However, you can place them via Google Adwords. I offer free rotating advertising space to environmental groups, however.
• Google Adwords: Overview of how Google’s Adwords and Adsense works to automatically select ads to post on various websites.

• Kindle: New information, good and bad about the Kindle, the hand held, book reading device that downloads books using the EVDO cellphone network.
• Mini Pad Submitter: The mini PAD submitter now automates submitting your PAD program description files to 19 websites including SoftSea.
• Browser Keystores: It is possible for Java to get at the certificate keystores of the various Mozilla family browsers using a tool called JSS (Network Security Services for Java). Java automatically accesses the Windows/Internet Explorer keystores when validating code-signing certificates for Applets and Java Web Start.

• New version of HTML Macros: New icons for the site, and slightly different headers and footers. It is now set up that you can modify the icons just by replacing the images in images/navigate. The precise sizes are no longer burned into the program. Quotations implementation tidier, uses less RAM by using disk caches of tidied quotations. Image dimension finder now caches previous results. Get rid of hard coded icon sizes in the code. You can now change the website navigation icons just by placing new png images in the image/navigate directory. It now dynamically detects the dimensions of each icon/image and caches the results so it does not have to keep rechecking.
• New version of Amper: Converts & to & in HTML files, but does not convert it when the & is already in an entity e.g. < ϑ é

  The main use for this is to pass HTMLValidator verification of your HTML, which is very picky about &, especially inside URLs.

• blogosphere: The inertia of too many users using too much existing software with nobody in charge is prevented the protocols and security provisions of the public newsgroups from evolving to handle various threats from vandals. The Internet is reacting by switching to privately-operated blogs. The same problem is bedevilling the public email system which is collapsing under its load of spam.
• Browsershots.org: Browsershots.org is website that will run your web page, possibly containing Applets, on dozens of different browsers, then let you view screenshots of what they looked like. This helps you make sure your web pages and Applets render properly on many browsers. It takes a while to get the results. They actually run your page on Linux, Windows, Mac etc. under the actual browsers.
• New Java Glossary Look: Hopefully the new navigation icons will be clearer. There is a legend to explain what they are for. They will help you navigate around the website more quickly than doing it manually with only the browser buttons.
• New mindprod.com Website Look: Hopefully the new navigation icons will be clearer. There is a legend to explain what they are for. They will help you navigate around the website more quickly than doing it manually with only the browser buttons.

• PNG Images: There are two style of PNG image transparency. Unfortunately Internet Explorer 5 only supports one of them.
• Default CSS Fonts: The five default (aka desperation, logical) fonts in CSS: cursive, fantasy, monospace, sans-serif, serif
• programming rules of thumb: I have been programming professionally for 45 years. Here are four rules of thumb for computer programming that I have learned from painful experience.

• RSS feed overview: Overview of how RSS works to keep visitors informed of changes on your website. It includes sample feed files in RSS, RDF, FeedBurner, and Atom with annotations. It is a bird’’s eye view that will not swamp you with details.
• HTML Macros RSS feeds: There are now three new macros for generating RSS feeds by embedding macros in your html that are collected, sorted and grouped, in both HTML and RSS2 feed. RSS defines a RSS feed item
  RSSBegin defines the beginning of a group of RSS feed items to sort and group by day
  RSSEnd defines the end beginning of a group. It generated the HTML page you are looking at, as well as a traditional RSS feed.

• yak shaving: The term yak shaving has seven different meanings. Now that tendency of the projects to unravel in a recursive way has a name.

• installing root certificates: Where to find SSL and code signing certificate authority root certificates and how to install them.
• compile timestamp: How a Java program can determine when a class was last compiled.
• Java Property File Syntax: The various rules for composing Java user Property files with examples.
• Entities: new version for converting Unicode ⇔ HTML entities.
• Entities: improved HTML cheat sheet entity list.

• iPaper: light weight, faster replacement for PDF files
• HTML Static Macros: source code released to the public. Allow you to embed macros in your HTML that expand to clever boilerplate.

• digital cameras: What to look for then you buy a digital still or movie camera.

• HTML Static Macros: manual released how the static macros used to generate the mindprod.com website work.
• HTTP: new version of methods to use the HTTP protocol with GET,POST,PROBE,FETCH.

• TakeCommand: documentation on how to use JPSoft TakeCommand/4NT redirects, pipes and tees.
• distributing Java source: various ways of distributing Java source code, including a version control systems, the Replicator and ZIP files.
• screenscraping: Gleaning data from programs or websites that don’t provide official means to export data.
• Speeding Up HTTP: Techniques to speed up page fetching from your website, using techniques like gzip, space compaction, chunk encoding, and comment stripping.

• Estimating StringBuilder size: How to monitor that you have reasonable estimates for initial StringBuilder size. Benchmarks on my own code showed this gave a 10% speed improvement.

• JDK/JRE release: Sun has released version 1.6.0_07 of the JDK/JRE

RSS feed for various ethical concerns

2008-09-07

• sentimental males: Women scorn shabbily dressed males, or men who drive old cars. They fail to understand that men are sentimental about clothes and cars.

• male happiness: Musings on what it takes to make a male happy.

• Roedygrams: Feedback on my Greatest Gift essay. How to create a gift for your parents in a few hours that they will cherish to their graves.

• Why I Despise Most Americans: I get email all the time from Americans claiming to be puzzled why I despise America. Let me spell it out more clearly why. America has done seven outrageous wrongful things in the last few years. My fury has nothing to do with being American per se.

• stress: Some off the wall musings about stress.

• Response to Iraqi War Images: Feedback from a vistor to the mindprod.com website on the Iraqi war images posted there.

• The Nose Ring: Some off the wall musings how hormones control you like a pig with a ring in its nose.
• Give Up!: Give up! Don’t waste another millisecond trying to get love or parenting from someone who doesn’t love you or want to parent you. It doesn’t matter if they logically should want to or should feel morally obligated to or have done so in the past.

• separation of church and state: The important of the separation of church and state both to the church and the state.
• Iraq war is none of Roedy’s business: Feedback from a vistor to the mindprod.com website who claims webmaster Roedy Green has no right to comment on the Iraq war on the grounds he is a Canadian, and has not killed any one serving in the armed services.

RSS feed for the Gay and Black glossary

2008-07-26

• beaver: definition of the slang term beaver.
• discrimination: New glossary entry on the term discrimination in the context of gay liberation.

On 2007-01-05 I got a trial set of new glasses. The magic of them is that now I can see in 3D. Up to this point I have seen the world in 2D, as though it were a photograph. I feel a bit like a kid wandering about staring at things and watching the magical 3D effect. The odd thing is they also create fake 3D when I see text on a contrasting colour. It looks as if the text is jumping out at me. I think this is caused because the lenses are so thick they bend red and blue light different amounts.

In 2007-04 I my energy returned for a while. Previously I could barely stay awake 8 hours a day. I am not sure what did it. Possible suspects:

• Cutting out bread entirely from my diet. I have diabetes.
• Drinking more coffee.
• Disinfecting the bathroom and kitchen daily.
• Return of longer days.

On 2007-09-09 I learned that my CD4 counts had steadily climbed from under 200 to 630 mg/l, a record high. (High is good.) I am doing some experiments to determine which, if any, of my medication are responsible for low energy, nausea and diarrhea.