I recently entered a contest to write a JavaScript program that did something interesting with HTML5 in less than 10 kilobytes, including HTML and CSS files. I decided to do a program that calculates the Mandelbrot set using Web Workers and displays the results using Canvas. I had originally written a C program that calculates [...]

I’m currently working on a distributed application in Clojure that has a master/slave architecture. Being the lazy bastard I am, I wanted to use an existing library that would make this as easy as possible. I considered using a DHT library for Java, such as JDHT or Bamboo but finally decided on a P2P library [...]

I have had an application running on Google App Engine written using the Java SDK for about 2 months now. The server side of the application is written in Groovy, and the client side is written in Flex. Although the Java SDK is early access, I have run into some problems that are making me [...]

3D support for Java is made particularly difficult because Java is cross platform and writing a library that abstracts away the differences of writing native 3D applications in Linux, OSX, Windows, etc. is not an easy task. One solution to this is JOGL, which uses Gluegen to generate JNI bindings for C libraries. In the [...]

I recently had the problem of internationalizing a hybrid Java Web Start / Java Applet thick client Swing application. Java internationalization is typically done by using ResourceBundle to load a property file containing key to value map whose keys are the names of the messages to be looked up in the file and values are [...]

I recently wrote a gift list management site for my family using Grails. Grails made it simple, the entire site was done in less than a week. That was version 1 of the site. In version 2 of the site, I rewrote the Ajax’d GSP’s using Flex 3, since I spent over 16 frustrating hours [...]

Sun recently released the JavaFX 1.1 SDK so I decided to give it a try. I decided to write a PaiGow game. Here is the webstart link: The availability of binds and triggers make the JavaFX scripts very clean. The animation API is also very easy to use. The reference on the website was also [...]

Overview of a simple image BGR to grayscale converter written in Clojure.

This is an overview of building an Ajax search form using Grails and jQuery. Grails makes generating JSON from domain objects and collections objects extremely simple. jQuery and jQuery-jtemplates is an easy way to parse JSON and render predefined HTML templates with the results, rather than having to parse JSON and generate HTML on the [...]

Let me start by saying that coming from a Java/C# development background, I found unit testing in C++ to be a real pain in the arse. JUnit and NUnit are the de facto unit testing frameworks for Java and .NET development. They are simple, easy to use, well documented, and have a decent community around [...]

This is a small walkthrough of a simple login screen written with the Google Web Toolkit on the front end, and Groovy and Hibernate on the back end. The entire source code can be found here. For the purposes of brevity we will look at only parts of the code. An IntelliJ 7 project file [...]

I recently had an 800GB Seagate FreeAgent drive crash on me using CentOS 4.0 and Oracle 10g. Until I saw this post I thought the problem was the NTFS-3G driver CentOS uses. I was unable to mount and format the drive under Linux so I had to plug it into a Windows XP box and [...]

One of the main complaints with most if not all Linux Distributions is the user experience and overall look and feel of the Desktop and GUI applications. Apple and Microsoft have added an enormous amount of eye candy to OS X and Vista and the difficulty in getting the same or better results in Linux [...]

Internet browser “wars” have been going on for a while, at least since the Internet Explorer vs. Netscape war of the 90s, which Microsoft won by a land slide. These days there are more than 2 browsers competing and by my measure it’s not getting any easier to get a web application to look and [...]

In case you haven’t heard yet, Sun has open sourced Java under a version of the GPL. This includes the Java HotSpot virtual machine. I checked out the code for the vm used in the jdk1.6.0 and the first thing that I noticed is that it is written in C++, not C. For some reason [...]