Joakim

Richard Stallman talk in Oslo - impressions

Joakim — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 17:58:22 +0000

Richard Stallman talking in Oslo. Taken by Gisle Hannemyr. (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)

Earlier this week, on the 23rd of february, one of the biggest advocates for free software was at Storsalen in Chateau Neuf in Oslo: Richard Stallman. Founder of the Free Software Foundation, initiator of the GNU project and creator of the original emacs. His talk was titled “Copyright vs. Community in the Age of Computer Networks - Free software and beyond”.

Summary below:

Copyright, developed in the age of the printing press, was designed to fit with the system of centralized copying imposed by the printing press. But the copyright system does not fit well with computer networks, and only draconian punishments can enforce it.

The global corporations that profit from copyright are lobbying for draconian punishments, and to increase their copyright powers, while suppressing public access to technology. But if we seriously hope to serve the only legitimate purpose of copyright-to promote progress, for the benefit of the public - then we must make changes in the other direction.

As an introduction, Richard Stallman will speak about the goals and philosophy of the Free Software Movement. The GNU operating system which he launched in 1984 is used by millions of users in conjunction with the kernel, Linux.

He did a brief introduction to to the four freedoms of free software:

Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.
Freedom 1: The freedom to study and modify the program.
Freedom 2: The freedom to copy the program so you can help your neighbor.
Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

Then he mentioned, briefly the history of GNU and where Linux fits in it. Namely the GNU/Linux naming controversy. Then the real talk started, doing a quick and disputable history of copyright history from people copying text and manuscripts, to the modern printing press and age of computers. He made it clear that copyright differs from patent law and other related laws. So the talk would be focused on copyright. He then moved on to criticizing the entertainment industry such as record companies and other companies that develop and maintain DRM (Digital Restrictions Management [sic]). At the end, he changed in to his alter ego- Saint IGNUcius of the Church of Emacs. Which brought up quite some laughs. Then there was an audience Q&A.

It would be easy to dismiss Stallman as a raving mad hippie, talking about “the corrupt megacorporations” and undemocratic governments supporting their activities and limiting the freedom of the user. However, he has had such an impact on the development of free software that he is not dismissable. He brings up very many valid points and examples of companies that create software or otherwise make works that benefit the society, unaccessible or restricted.

As games is one of the large competitors to music and film in this generation, in my opinion he should have mentioned more about DRM in games (even though most games are proprietary and thus, an evil that should not be used). Malware such as StarForce and SecuRom, restricting the gamer’s freedom to play the game when he or she wants to and otherwise infringing on all four freedoms of software.

I think the Q&A could have been a panel debate instead. One of the questions from the audience came from the notable Håkon Wium Lie (CSS, web standards). The panel could have consisted of such people and maybe representatives from the government. Notably the school system (how can free software make elementary school pupils free?), NRK etc. The result was that the Q&A was abit messy. Gisle Hannemyr, the debate leader had to cut alot of people short. Some questions (and answers) were very interesting, but some were kind of a waste of time for all parts.

All in all, it was an interesting talk and I felt the audience was at periods quite enraptured. The copyright debate is an important one and highly relevant as the pirate bay trial is ongoing.

Image at the top is taken by Gisle Hannemyr and licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

Useful Swing libraries for look and feel, layout and data binding

Joakim — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 05:15:22 +0000

Recently I’ve been looking into Java Swing development. Last time I touched this was probably 3 years ago, during an undergraduate course. We made some basic GUIs to create family trees and lines pointing to children, parents, siblings etc.

Now, Swing has evolved quite alot since then. Especially with the advent of new libraries to make development easier. I remember some things to be issues with vanilla Swing. Namely, the look and feel, the overhead and complexity of creating layout, and updating the domain model in a way that didn’t break the MVC pattern.

Model-View-Controller (MVC) is an architecture pattern to seperate business logic (Model) from GUI elements (View). In addition, keeping the business logic seperated from the domain model, but it’s not the main point. The Controller acts as a mediator between the user’s actions and the business logic. Typically in a Swing application, it will react to certain events, process and check user input and then pass it down to the business logic.

When looking around for libraries, I had some criterias. There had to be good and easily accessible documentation and less overall overhead than vanilla Swing.

First I tried the GUI builder in Netbeans 6.0 (formerly Project Matisse), which is a very powerful tool for creating Swing desktop applications with little coding overhead. It has a simple drag and drop visual interface. In addition it can bind domain objects to some fields with the beansbinding library. However I found it to be cumbersome to use, customizing code took too long time and anyone that did not use the GUI builder would have had a hard time understanding the messy generated code.

I found three libraries that solved my needs for customizable look and feel, easy layout and data binding. Below I will briefly outline what each library offers and give a very simple example.

Substance

Substance aims to create a fast, solid and extensible library for visually appealing Swing applications. There are alot of options to tweak around with, but the most basic use is given below:

UIManager.setLookAndFeel(new org.jvnet.substance.skin.SubstanceMagmaLookAndFeel());

This sets the look and feel, Magma.

Jgoodies Forms

Jgoodies Forms facilitates the layout process and makes it better. It has powerful features for creating precise, flexible and more readable layout code.

private JComponent buildPanel() {

    initComponents();

    FormLayout layout = new FormLayout("$lcgap,p,$lcgap,150dlu,$lcgap",

    "$lgap,p,$lgap,p,$lgap,p,$lgap");

    PanelBuilder builder = new PanelBuilder(layout);

    CellConstraints cc = new CellConstraints();

    builder.addSeparator("BookRegistration", cc.xyw(2, 2, 4));

    builder.addLabel("Name", cc.xy(2, 4));

    builder.add(nameField, cc.xy(4, 4));

    builder.addLabel("Author", cc.xy(2, 6));

    builder.add(authorField, cc.xy(4, 6));

    return builder.getPanel();

}

Which will produce something like this (inside a JFrame):

Intitially the FormLayout might seem like some mumbo-jumbo. But when you get to know it, it starts to make sense. It is very powerful and you can create almost any layout with it. The PanelBuilder has alot of helpers for boilerplate code, such as adding labels and seperators that goes with other typical JComponents.

Jgoodies Binding

Jgoodies Binding main goals are to stream-line the development process for data-binding and assist in seperating the presentation layer from the domain layer.

public class Book extends Model {

    public static final String PROPERTY_NAME = "name";

    public static final String PROPERTY_AUTHOR = "author";

    private String name;

    private String author;

    public Book() {

    }

    public String getAuthor() {

    return author;

    }

    public void setAuthor(String author) {

        String oldAuthor = this.author;

        firePropertyChange(PROPERTY_AUTHOR, oldAuthor, author);

        this.author = author;

    }

    public String getName() {

        return name;

    }

    public void setName(String name) {

        String oldName = this.name;

        firePropertyChange(PROPERTY_NAME, oldName, name);

        this.name = name;

    }

}

/**

* BookApplication class

*/

private void initComponents() {

    nameField = BasicComponentFactory.createTextField(presentationModel.getModel(Book.PROPERTY_NAME),false);

    authorField = BasicComponentFactory.createTextField(presentationModel.getModel(Book.PROPERTY_AUTHOR),false);

    nameLabel = BasicComponentFactory.createLabel(presentationModel.getModel(Book.PROPERTY_NAME));

}

Notice that the Book-class extends the binding-library Model. It is an abstract class to make it easier to change bean properties. Whenever a bean property is set, it fires a property change to notify any listeners that the bean property has changed. The BasicComponentFactory can automagically create various Swing components to listen on ValueModels.

Putting it all together

When all is put together, it looks something like this:

Here, the name in the Book object is bound to the name JTextField (by referring to PROPERTY_NAME). The JLabel at the bottom listens on any changes and updates itself accordingly.

The many GUI builders out there opts for rapid GUI layout and construction. But in my opinion they suffer from clunky, uncustomizable and hard-to-read generated code. It also makes the project highly dependent on the GUI builder in question. Which is why I have presented three handy libraries for easy, maintainable and cleaner Swing GUI development.

World Without End - Review

Joakim — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 07:00:21 +0000

Unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end. Amen. (Ephesians 3:21 , King James Bible)

World Without End cover

A few days ago I finished the book World Without End by Ken Follett. It is the sequel to Pillars of the Earth (1989) and takes place in the same fictional town of Kingsbridge. The characters in World Without End are descendants of the main characters in Pillars of the Earth.

The book follows the lives of four main characters. Caris, an unconventional girl of her time. Merthin, a boy who is ahead of his time. Ralph, a boy who lives to fight. And Gwenda, a girl who has found the love of her life. These children witness a mysterious murder when playing in the forest, that will connect them to secrets that are best buried.

First impression is that World Without End is quite the brick. It weighs in at 1111 pages in the hardcover version, being justified that it delivers the story with no extra fluff or padding. The inside of the front cover features a map over Kingsbridge, and the cathedral grounds. Most of the events happening in the book take place in Kingsbridge, so it is quite handy to have some points of reference, even for those that read Pillars. Alot has changed in 200 years. The book also stands on it’s own feet, you don’t have to have read Pillars before picking this one up.

The personalities and traits connected to the main and support characters are apparent early on, and most don’t change much during the course of the book. But it doesn’t make them static or uninteresting. Some characters live the status quo of their social station, others go up against the system and the church. Some characters you love, some you despise, others you hate. In all of this, there is a power struggle, where lords rule over the peasantry, kings rule over lords and God rules over all mortal men and women. All of these small and large struggles are tied in to a truly engrossing plot.

Medieval life is illustrated down to the most painstaking detail. It shows how they lived, what clothes they wore, what they ate, how they bred and so on through all social classes. This level of detail is sometimes abit too much, but it does give a feeling that you are in a living, breathing medieval town.

The historical perspective is the most interesting one. It’s obvious that the author has consulted historians for events that could tie-in with the plot and characters. Historical events are taking place right before our eyes. The book depicts a phase in the Hundred Years War, namely the Edwardian War, where England and France are torn in to a war over the french throne. We get to see the devastations to the french countryside by English-led troops and it all culminates in the Battle of Crècy.

The coming of the Black Plague is something that haunts all the characters in Kingsbridge. The author depicts how futile the current medical knowledge is, where Humorism is practiced by the monk physicians and blood-letting the cure for most ills. The book draws a vivid picture of how society is depraved by the deaths of so many people, but yet the story shows that some will not let this happen.

Ken Follet has successfully painted an epic masterpiece, written on a thriller canvas and framed in a medieval setting. The rich and colorful cast of characters combined with a level of detail makes this a book that appeals to everyone. The engrossing plot and subplots evolving around real historical events makes it an instant classic, even for those not interested in history. Summed up, this is a book that is not to be missed and a must read.

New semester

Joakim — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 21:48:09 +0000

Study desk

It’s that time of year. Holidays and New years is over, and your mind wanders into a vacation-like dream state. But in the back of your head, you know everything will soon return to normal. The start of the semester is when normality is restored. Wake up.

I’ve found a possible master thesis at Simula research laboratory within the field of interconnection networks, simulation and vizualisation. Visualisation of Network Simulation Traffic. When looking around for a possible thesis, I wanted to combine my knowledge and passion for the Java programming language, and combine it with the field of networking and high-performance servers. In the process learning new things and extend my knowledge. I’ve sent some mails saying that I’m interested and got some articles and books to read, which I found interesting and exciting. Especially when you think about what the present and future requires from high-performance computing and storage, for a broad spectrum of application areas.

Choosing a master thesis is not easy for many. For some it falls really easy, if they have a very small and specific personal interest within their field of science. For others it’s not too clear. Some think that they need extensive knowledge of the topics used in the master thesis to take it. Of course an healthy interest is important, but would a master thesis be any fun if you knew everything beforehand? It would be like doing a chore, not exploring or extending your existing knowledge. What advice I got, was to find what you are interested in, show interest in a research group that does research within that field and just go for it. One has to learn and fill the gaps anyways, the reason why we go to universities.

This semester I will be attending one course at the University of Oslo, and two at the research institute at Kjeller.

UNIK4280 - Performance analysis. Basic introduction to simulation, measurement methods, queue theory and stochastic systems (random). Not many attending the course, so it will be intimate, but I think it will be useful things to know.

UNIK4660 - Vizualisation of scientific data. Basic introduction to computer graphics and how to visualize scientific data using various algorithms. I dread the mathematics in this course, as I’ve not a strong mathematical background. I’ll just have to pick up and read extra about it. Very relevant for the possible master thesis. Looks like great fun to be had.

INF5050 - Protocols and routing in the internet. Covers basic topics within internetworking. Not very relevant for the master thesis as most of that happens on the link-layer and is an entirely different architecture. But handy knowledge and it looks like an interesting course.

As a side dish, I will be a teaching assistant in the master course, INF5750 - Open Source Software Development. It gives some extra cash and I’ll be able to help other students with tools and frameworks such as maven, subversion, eclipse, Spring, Hibernate, jUnit etc. Pretty trivial stuff when you’ve had some hands-on time with them, but still a learning curve. Except for Spring. I don’t if anyone knows the entire Spring framework, it’s very big.

To sum it up, it’ll be a busy semester!

Added books

Joakim — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 11:59:08 +0000

I got a nice book shelf for christmas (previously they were in a big box in the corner of my room). So I added all my books to the library (Now Reading plugin).

Currently on the book stack:

World without End by Ken Follett (currently reading). The previous book, Pillars of the Earth was a very entertaining book about the people that built the cathedral in the fictional english town Kingsbridge during the middle ages. This time, we are taken back to Kingsbridge 200 years after the first book in a time of conflict and grief. Namely The Hundred Years War and Black death.

A Quiet Belief in Angels by R.J. Ellory. A mystery novel about the killings of young girls in a rural community. Reviews have been very favourable and I love mystery/thrillers books, looking forward to reading this.

Cruel and Unusual (A Dr. Kay Scarpetta mystery) by Patricia Cornwell. The fourth book in the very popular Scarpetta series. I’ve always had a knack for any kind of book series. The reason why this caught my eye was because the books are more about crime forensics (inspiring the CSI tv series).

The Missing Person’s Guide to Love by Susanna Jones. I stumbled upon this when browsing Amazon. It is praised for beautiful and intelligent writing. I bought it pretty much on impulse so I don’t know much about it.

The Book With No Name by Anonymous. Judging by the back-cover, it seems to be like a Quentin Tarantino film. One says that you shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover. But that’s the main reason why I bought it.

Eve: The Empyrean Age by Tony Gonzales. The first novel set in the EVE-Online universe. It is about the events leading up to the Factional warfare expansion. Why the Amarr empire, Caldari state, Minmatar republic and Gallente republic go to war that throws the universe of New eden into the greatest conflict known to man.

No authentication tab on network connection in XP SP3 for 802.1X authentication

Joakim — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 09:36:05 +0000

So, I got home yesterday. Turned on the computers and to my horrification, neither could connect to the internet. Not entirely sure why, but probably the gateway released my IP and authentication since it had been inactive for a a few weeks.

I also upgraded to XP SP3 on the computer I usually authenticate with before I left for the holidays. However when I tried to fix the problem, the Authentication tab on the connection was gone!

Now, I couldn’t troubleshoot the problem either, because well… :p

Anyways, my main computer does not have XP SP3 so I set up the 802.1X authentication there. After some googling the problem was a change in XP SP3: Changes to the 802.1X-based wired network connection settings in Windows XP Service Pack 3

Basically they split the authentication for 802.1X into two services: Wirless Zero Configuration for wireless and Wired AutoConfig for wired ethernet.

To get authentication tab back on the connection:

Go Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Services

Right click Wired AutoConfig, click Start. That should solve the problem. Silly indeed.

18 days left until Darkfall release.

Happy New Year!

Joakim — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 09:09:47 +0000

Happy New Year!

As the last two years, we’ve gathered at Johan’s parents place and had our new years celebration there. Like last year, we had turkey with garnish (potatoes, broccoli, green bean thingies, gravy). It was a great success.

New year promises:

Eat more bacalao
Make a budapest roll
Do even more coursework

21 days left until Darkfall release.

Site update

Joakim — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 21:58:39 +0000

Updated WordPress to 2.7 (latest as of 2008-12-28). Updated all plugins.

Added a 2.7 compatible version of Rob Miller’s Now Reading WordPress plugin. Had to do some minor adjustments to the templates because of the new theme I have put in, though. The plugin adds a virtual library to WordPress, very handy to keep track of stuff when books start piling up.

And yes, I am still alive! Very stressing semester the last one was. Will try to keep it more up-to-date whenever I have time.

Welcome to my Home on the Web

Joakim — Sun, 11 May 2008 03:29:01 +0000

This blog will obviously be about me and what I do.

No philosophical rants, silly lists or anything, just random thoughts from an informatics student. Problems encountered when developing PHP and Java and how to solve them, Games (especially MMORPGs - a fascinating topic) and board games (they are socially superior to any computer game out there) and otherwise unimportant everyday stuff (diary style).

Even though I am norwegian, the blog will be in english, so it will be understandable to both my friends and any english reading lurkers.

My old (norwegian) site hosted by the University, which I maintained for two years, broke down due to the removal of the Oracle DBMS server. RIP IFIORA.

The blog will definitely look better, once I have some more wordpress plugins up and going and customized the theme abit. Too bad some plugins don’t work due to restrictions in my cheap host.