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Lire accepted for the Open Source Contest @ ACM MM

Although its quite some time ago that I got the acceptance mail I forgot to blog the good news: Lire (Lucene Image Retrieval) has been acccepted to be presented at the ACM Multimedia within the Open Source Contest track. As it is a contest I assume we have chances to win something?

Finding duplicate code …

I recently found myself in a scenario, where I tried to figure out how implementation clusters have been implicitly created within a group of students. All of them were given a task (with 4 sub tasks) for a whole semester. Everyone was meant to do the task alone, but collaboration was allowed. However I needed to know who helped whom and – of course – who helped whom with source code.

A colleague had a similar problem and he pointed me to PMD CPD (= PMD Copy & Paste Detector) . This tool works lightning fast and has a GUI Also its open source -> respect!

Links:

• http://pmd.sourceforge.net/cpd.html

QT Jambi: Deployment and Web Start

I’m still having this strange idea to use QT Jambi one day for a Java project of mine Jambi is a pack of Java bindings for the QT framework. Therefore one can use the QT GUI classes from within Java and need not to rely on the Swing, AWT or SWT toolkit. As it maps to native code it is also expected to be faster than Swing or AWT. Like QT it can be used for GPL based open source development fro free.

While the demos look fine I had some doubts regarding the applicability for deployment. Jambi definitely relies on the QT libraries, which – not surprisingly – depend on the target platform. So different pre compiled libraries have to be included for different platforms. For the open source windows edition the whole pack has 26.4 MB (compressed < 6 MB), which is not more but a reasonable addition compared to the size of a standard JRE (compressed < 20 MB). A minimal set for using the GUI (core, gui and mingw) has about 17.3 MB.

So my conclusion: It’s definitely usable. While you cannot create QT applets with Java, web start is possible. However if in a specific scenario – especially web start – size matters then you need think about compression (e.g. with jars).

Related links:

• Jambi reference documentation
• Jambi application deployment documentation

Small Games for Kids – New Release

Besides the two already existing games (GuessWhat and Soundmachine, more information here) I added a new one called SoundVis. The main idea is to animate a kid to make sounds by for instance clapping or yelling. The louder the sound the bigger the blue circle in the center gets. While this sounds trivial it is great fun Note that the microphone has to be functional. A simple test is included in the start screen of SoundVis.

Installation:

Find the new package (including source, licensed under GPL) here. Use 7-zip to unzip them. Launchers (.exe files) for windows are included. Linux users might peek at the included batch files to get a clue how to start the games.