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Visual VM is Part of Java 1.6 Update 7

Java 1.6 u7 was released recently by Sun. While not bringing major changes it brought along some bug fixes and solved some security issues. However there is one main addition: The VisualVM. This is a really great developer tool: It connects to running VMs and shows “some statistics” about them. Besides memory usage and threads information it also allows to do some basic profiling. In my opinion Sun did a good job on including VisualVM in the package! Not that this thing is build on the NetBeans Platform

Links:

• Java 1.6 u7 release notes

Lire: Submission to the ACM Multimedia Open Source Contest 2008

I recently submitted Lire and LireDemo to the ACM Multimedia Open Source Software Competition 2008. As I’d really like to go there I hope it will judged as relevant contribution and a demo at the ACM Multimedia is requested. Note that I’ve integrated a new feature in LireDemo for the ACM Multimedia submission: Now its easier to test Lire by just indexing random photos from Flickr. By just hitting the “Index” button without giving a directory of images the download will start automatically.

Links:

• Submission files (~800 kB)

LIRE v0.6 released: New Image Features

The new release contains three additional features: (i) Tamura texture features, (ii) Color and Edge Directivity Descriptor (CEDD) and (iii) a configurable color histogram implementation. While the last one was integrated for comparison only the other two provide additional improvements, especially the CEDD feature. Furthermore a FastMap implementation was included in the release for optimization of the indexing process in a later release. Also some bugs were fixed in the MPEG-7 EdgeHistogram descriptor provided in the cbir-library jar file and in color-only search. Note that due to the increased number of features the extensive document builder, which extracts all available features, needs significantly more time for extraction than in the last release.

Links:

• Download Lire & LireDemo

Lire SVN build for Java 1.5

Due to requests I took some time and built a Java 1.5 version instead of the 1.6 versions. A simple compile with 1.5 wouldn’t help as I use the swing layout classes of NetBeans (now integrated in Java 1.6), so imports have to be re-adjusted and the library has to be added. Furthermore I created an explicit build target in Caliph to create a 1.5 version of the cbir jar file. This snapshot works fine with MacOS (as far as I’ve heard) and on Windows.

Files:

• liredemo-svn-2008-05-29-jdk1.5.tar.bz2 [670k]
  
• liredemo-svn-2008-05-29-jdk1.5.zip [884k]
  

Lire development: a big next step ..

While it has been quiet for some time around Lire, recently development has been pushed forward. I switched to SVN for development and integrated simple RGB color histograms as a feature for comparison with the MPEG-7 features. Savvas Chatzichristofis (or on facebook, his image search engine) contributed the CEDD feature, which works great! Marko Keuschnig and Christian Penz contributed implementations for the Gabor texture feature and the Tamura texture features, where the latter is already in the SVN. I also integrated the new features in LireDemo. A new version – already compiled – can be downloaded here: liredemo-svn-2008-05-29-jdk16.tar.bz2 Note that Java 1.6 is required.

NetBeans 6.1 Released

The new NetBeans IDE 6.1 has been released 2 days ago. Changes are more incremental than fundamental, but it features now support for JavaScript and code completion for JavaDoc. Furthermore support for MySQL has been added. Release notes can be found here.

Computer Games: Parallax Scrolling & Sprites

Currently I’m preparing for giving my talk next Friday in the computer games lesson on multimedia issues in games. To underline my words and slides with some code I also coded some easy little Java program visualizing sprite animation and some star field background. The coding was great fun – the third scrolling shooter I coded … always a pleasure

However there is one thing I found out while coding: Ready to use sprite animation image stripes are hard to get. There is a little tool called simple explosion maker” that came handy and the SpriteLib of Flying Yogi is rather cool, but I miss the great deal of online creative commons content. Perhaps one could point me there

Related links:

• Simple explosion maker – A simple tool for rendering explosions.
• SpriteLib – GPL-ed sprites of Flying Yogi

Java SE 6 Update 10 Beta – A Desktop Release?

Java has been around a long time now and had a lot of success – at server side at most. Issues that still wait for being solved are discussed with each release, one of them is desktop integration. Swing is nice – at least since NetBeans integrated the Matisse GUI editor – but has looked awful for a long time. With Java SE 6 update 10 Nimbus found its way into the Java SE: Nimbus is a vector based look and feel and can therefore support many resolutions in arbitrary steps. Furthermore it is claimed that it is D3D accelerated and therefore a lot faster than standard L&Fs. That was interesting enough for me to take a look at the beta release

In the middle of below image you find the Nimbus theme, surrounded by JGoodies Plastic (on the left) and the standard XP one on the right (a click on the image reveals the full resolution version). What I found out is:

• Nimbus takes a lot more space, there is more empty space in between combobox items, etc.
• I didn’t manage to remove all borders from buttons, as can be seen in the top button row with white background.
• Focus and progress is painted nicely, it looks appealing.
• the menu items in nimbus look strange in combination with the icons, the gap between icon and text is too small.

NetBeans 6.1 Beta :: Blogging Contest

With the release of NetBeans 6.1 beta Sun started a blogging contest. Until April 18th, 2008 one can test NetBeans 6.1 beta and blog about it. After blogging you need to submit the URL to netbeans.org and your review will be judged. I’m looking forward to submitting as I definitely want to have a T-Shirt

Related Links:

• NetBeans 6.1 Beta Blogging Contest

My new EEE PC

With some luck I grabbed an Asus EEE PC – a white one, the last in stock – at the Saturn market on Wednesday. As I always wanted to own a subnotebook my expectations were quite high, but I have to say: I’m impressed! The EEE comes with a whole lot of software (OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Kontact, Konqueror, … even Java JRE 1.5) and can be customized without end. I installed several games, the VLC media player and the Opera browser, which works really fine with the page zoom feature.

On the photo you can see the EEE along with my PSP. This shows how small this thing is. Also the weight is impressive, but best of all: It can decode MPEG-2 (DVB transport streams) and H.264 without dropping a lot of frames. That’s really cool as the CPU runs only at ~ 600 MHz.

While my colleagues are already queuing to do some multimedia tests I’m looking forward to testing the Java capabilities of this device. Full 1.5 mobile java runtime … sounds great to me