Dr. Sass and other things

*Update*

/me is famous - I figure out in "Postmodern Sass Appreciates" in Sass's blog :D yay !
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Was reading Postmodernes Sprachspielen (Sass) - really nice and relaxing !
There is an inherent flow to the "stories" and the way she links the posts.
Got there from Tim Bray's site - usually I follow tech links from his page (his WS-* post was very "interesting" ;-) ) , but Sass has been absolute fun to read !!

I enjoy hacking at Netbeans : recently for the past 6 months or so , had to stay away from it 'cos of lot of other things ...
Got a chance to do that again this weekend when I was trying to author a new project type which will essentially be an extension to the j2se ant based project.
Final analysis after 4 days of continual hacking and learning - will to do a ground up design and impl - simply cobbling together something will be brittle and not very usable in this case : especially since that might very well end up being in our next release.

It is always amazing fun to look at netbeans codebase : and the stuff that you learn - really nice !!
I always find something new or interesting or cool in there - add to that the fact that the latest versions (I was messing with NB4.2 dev branch) are damn fast having a much lower mem footprint makes it more fun to work with
I found a really neat hack in their code - what they called a Trampoline.
In case you are interested : it is in the files : org.netbeans.spi.project.ui.ProjectOpenedHook and org.netbeans.modules.project.uiapi.ProjectOpenedTrampoline in the "Project UI API" project.

While we are mentioning java , take a look here to know more about generics and how it works under the hood - even if you are not a java programmer , you will find some of the idioms interesting.

One of my first posts in this blog contained a description of a simulation which is a superset of game of life (you will need to scroll way down to get to point 3) - I elaborated more about this in a comments to Noufal's blog (cant find that link) ... and he ended up starting an impl of this , while shamelessly , I did not try to pursue towards the impl side for this - last week , thanks to Vipin, I came across this link.
It is remarkably similar to what I initially described ... though possibly the intent and the directions are different , the fundamental idea without the frills is pretty similar !

By the way , opentools has some neat tools in there now - please download it , use it , hack/develop for it (absolutely brilliant if you do so !) , contribute to it in anyway you can. Thanks.
In case you have any suggestions , complaitns , fixes , etc - please mail me , or the aliases there and we will make sure that we will do something about it.

And finally, switching teams. I will be leaving the Java Studio Enterprise team and joining the Instant Messaging team next month.
Considering that I have absolutely no idea about the various IM protocols , clients , etc - it is going to be very very interesting times ahead :)

Some updates

Haloscan does not seem to preserve comments after some date it seems .... was flipping through the archives and found most/all the comments missing.
Might be a config problem too - though I doubt it.
Going to phase it out and move to blogger commenting - maybe will ask for the comment template from Kousik : really like to read the comments on his site - just click and voila you get it there itself ... no need for popup's / new page !

Changing the template , and removing the "test results" from a previous post - way too much time is being spent in picking up those images.

Vipin gave me two really cool links !
idlethumbs and Sparth

The second has some really phenomenal artwork ... had me spell bound for a while !
I really enjoy art but I cant really understand the concept of colors , lighting , shadows , etc when it comes to me trying to draw , paint , make a decision on shirt color (if it fits - should be cool right ?) , ....
That is why I get people like Vipin (a.k.a guru) to do my artwork : else everything I make would be solid rectangles in green or brown in a black background with white obstacles :)
The collusion detection , physics , kinetics (well , what little I will manage after all this new reading up I have to complete) : would work - but visually it would be the worst thing on the planet !
Speaking of which I should start collaborating with Vipin again ... this OpenGL book I am reading is really nice and I am going to start attempting to use JOGL too.
Check these benchmarks out - 241 fps for a JOGL q2 version as compared to 245 fps of q2 id release - really cool !
The java is "slow" argument is beginning to not cut anymore :)

The first site is worth digging into just for the really cool reviews !
If you have watched Top Gun - read this : hilarious :)) This is better than the one maddox put up here

I am getting addicted to CounterStrike - no , the situation is still under control , I just play 45 mins - 1 hour online, but the urge to play it more and more is increasing ... must kill , where is my shotgun (yep - really cool weapon , though nothing beats a sniper rifle :) )

Speaking of opentools - finally I will checkin the code this week after Rajesh (a.k.a archi) gives the "go" to what I sent him ... most probably he is going to rip it apart , in which case - next week :)
The current flaws in the design is mainly on how to compose multiple processor chains ... not possible as of now.
What I am planning is to have abstract definitions of module/processor/acceptor/etc , and then use these to compose higher order chains (just like in WSDL , BPEL , etc) ... let us see how it goes : even for now , the base checkin is not really trivial and has some nice features ! ... but more is in the pipeline !


Note to self :
1) Stop using "etc" so much
2) I should try to minimise this sort of unstructured rambling - what I do is , "ok , I need to put something up on the blog" (today it was about the comments) , and then it keeps developing from there ... the more I think while I type the prev thought , the more I find things to write about and in the end , it is this huge pile of unreadable blob. Focus boy , focus !!