Inspired by Jamie Zawinski's WebCollage perl program I've implemented something similar, though not as impressive functionally, in Java. An example of the output is here.

It's structured as a three stage processing pipeline hooked together using property listeners. The stages are:

• An image source. This chooses a number of images to create a collage from. It has an images property that changes when it makes a new set of images available.
• A collage creator. This waits for changes to the image source's images property and converts the images into a collage. When the collage is ready the collage creator's collage property changes.
• One or more collage receivers. These take collages and display them or save them as files. They listen for changes to the collage property of the collage creator.

Currently I've implemented two image sources. They both read images from a directory. One produces a single set of images, the other produces images every n seconds. I intend to write an image source that chooses random images from web pages, using Google as a search engine to select them.

There are three collage receivers. One displays the collage in a window, one saves the collage as a png file, overwriting the previous contents, and the last saves the image as a png file under a unique name in a directory.

The algorithm for producing the collage is currently fairly simple. It starts with a list containing an initial rectangular area the size of the collage to be produced. An image is randomly drawn somewhere in the rectangle with the clip area set so that it does not spill too far outside the rectangle and blending used to combine it with the background. The remaining area is then divided into rectangles by walking clockwise round the image. The original area is removed from the area list and the new rectangles added. Then the largest area in the list is chosen and the process repeated until the list is empty. I'm thinking about attempting to rotate some images in the future, as this might make the collages look less blocky, though it will make the calculation of the remaining areas more difficult.

As the code uses java.awt.Toolkit to load images it needs some sort of display to work. This presents a problem for headless unix systems. I'm going to test using Xvfb in this situation. An executable jar file is here, use java -jar collage.jar, and the source is here. If you use java -jar collage.jar --help you should get some help on the options.

Thought provoking piece from Andrew Orlowsk in The Register. His contention is that Wall Street, or capitalism in general at this point is rewarding effecient distribution instead of innovation; that's why Dell is rated higher than Sun even though Dell is an just efficient shifter of boxes while Sun comes up with new things now and again. He's worried that investors/financiers no longer understand that technological innovation can take time. In persuit of the quick payoff investment now goes to commoditized distribution models, such as Dell, in preference to research that will bring about real innovation.

Quote: You don't need to be a card-carrying Communist to appreciate that capitalism has gone seriously wrong, here. It's all but killed the goose that laid the golden egg.

Anyway, I've been contacted by the owner of the hamster site who doesn't want me to slander his character and website. I don't really know what to say. If the whole page was a sort of joke/troll, then I've certainly been taken in, so ha ha ha, it worked. On the other hand if it wasn't a troll, and it was an accident that the hamster floated off, I still think it wasn't very nice to the little dude, "ass", to fly him in a plastic bottle under some balloons.

So maybe I'll amend my description to say that I think it's just sad what happened to "ass", and it's sad that the people that flew him don't seem to think so.

By the way I found this via TheInquirer. The picture in the left hand column always links to something weird.

From the O'Reilly Network weblogs: XML complexity as war of attrition [September 24, 2002]

As Simon says, if you have lots of developers a good way to beat off the small upstarts is to make them spread their limited resources across a range of targets. If you can convince potential customers that these things are must have features then the small developers are always playing catchup; implementing features just so that a customer can check a box on a RFQ for something they will never use.

As well as complication and extension of existing standards another technique is software churn. Every three years introduce another platform or technology, convince people to switch, which should get rid of some competitors along the way, and then do it all over again.

Perhaps the time is getting ripe for another disruptive markup technology :) The functionality in XML is starting to outstrip what people need. An upstart now has a chance if it offers to some class of users some features where it beats XML. Possibly easy to write by hand or targeted to some particular XML use, or having a simple macro facility (though you might as well use SXML in that case and get full scheme support). I don't know what's coming next but when complexity reaches the level it has with XML people are going to want a simpler solution to deal with 80% or less of their problems leaving full XML for the rest.

If this, Hamster Balloon, is real the people involved, who foolishly posed for a photo with the evidence, should be charged with animal cruelty. Apparently they thought it was funny, I don't.

On Friday it was announced that HP was going to bundle WebLogic with its UX11i server. BEA and Hewlett-Packard Team Up Against IBM. The article says this will be extended to all of HP's platforms in the future.

On Monday HP announces that it's going to join with Microsoft to promote .NET. Microsoft, HP Promote .NET Strategy. I suppose you're allowed to wager on both horses but I always thought only the bookies won in those cases. On the other hand, I suppose HP does have to hedge its bets so that they come out of the J2EE vs .NET "war" ok whoever "wins".

spamradio produces programming by having a computer read spam email over a background of ambient music. Sounds very strange.

A parallel idea inspired by this. What about paranoid radio? Use the postings in some of the wackier usnet groups as source material. Have several voices, with changing volume levels, but generally all whispering, read several of these at the same time. The overlapping voices and the strange content could make for a pretty interesting effect.

Related to the programming languages for smart people discussion here's the original paper talking about how much harder it is for the unskilled to correctly assess their skill level. Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments

On LtU an interesting thread. Michael Vanier: LFM's and LFSP's.

• LFM (Language designed For the Masses)
• LFSP (Language designed For Smart People)

The complete article being discussed is on Paul Graham's site. This is the other end of the scale from the Programming for the masses topic. Is there a difference between languages designed for the mixed ability corporate team and the uber-programmers? I think the answer to this is yes. Would it be possible to design a language usable by both groups? More difficult to say.

There is a basic psychological issue that I think is related to the LFM and LFSP language design issue. You've probably read of Dr. David A. Dunning's research that suggests that incompetent people have the most difficulty in recognizing their incompetence. This is an observation anyone who has worked in the mixed ability corporate development team can understand. A single language with different levels might suffer because the incompetent would more rapidly "progress" to the expert level than the more competent, who were more cognisant of their limits. Perhaps this is part of the problem Michael mentions with C++ and is the reason the dangerous features get used by people who don't really understand them. I really don't know how to handle this rather basic people problem.

Here's a copy of the New York Times article about the research. I looked through quite a few google results and this is a good reference, not just something someone made up.

Pretty funny one under the topic of Is UnitedLinux Violating The GPL?.

Some thoughts from Dan Bricklin, the co-creator of VisiCalc, about why regular people don't routinely program. Why Johnny can't program

I found this via LtU where there is already an interesting discussion.

One reason I'm interested in this is because I've worked for companies developing various products where part of the pitch was that you didn't have to be a programmer to develop using the product. The range of success in actually implementing this was none to some. To use these "end user" or "you don't have to be a programmer" systems I've seen the user still has to understand the concepts of variables standing for values, conditions, and loops, among others.

So, is it possible to remove these requirements, or are they fundamental, and are there users who are unable to understand them? Is there a portion of the population who will never be able to program, or is that just elitest thinking and it's matter of presenting the information correctly? On the other hand as you make it easier and easier does it cease to be programming? Is "programming" a VCR really programming.

Wow. Editorial coverage for Linux in The New York Times. The New Challenge to Microsoft is a pro Linux piece touting the benefits to consumers and governments of wider Linux adoption.

From the New York Times, so free registration required, an article Up, Down, In and Out in Beverly Hills: Rats about rodents in Beverly Hills. The species is actually Rattus rattus, the rat believed responsible for the spread of the plague, and in the generally gently humorous article is the following wonderfull quote about it:

It is less aggressive and well suited to the California lifestyle, preferring a vegetarian diet.

Speaking of the plague, when it first arrived in England it killed 30-45% of the population between 1348 and 1350. It completely wiped out some villages. Yet Medieval society survived, wages for surviving peasants went up slightly and in fact life for the "lower orders" probably improved. With demand for labor outstripping supply people were able to negotiate more freedom of movement and status.

Would modern society survive that sort of death rate? How many people does it take to keep America functioning? Certainly record company executives, barristas, lots of programmers, marketing specialists, and lots of other jobs could be done without. How do you run an oil refinery though? Where do you get the oil from? How many people to run a hydro electric station? A chip fabrication plant? Looked at from the other point of view, what percentage of the population would have to die for society to collapse, if the death rate was evenly spread? Of course it probably wouldn't be, we'd end up with a surplus of Members of Congress, CEOs, and the rich, while all of the farmers died.

Found on Haddock.org. A video clip of a Emily stacking plastic cups. Take a look. The caption says it's actual speed, which is amazing as it's difficult sometimes to see her hands move. This is apparently a "sport" or physical education activity. There's lots of stuff on the site about the benefits participation brings. I'm not so sure about that but it looks like it might be fun to try. We've got lots of left over plastic cups in the cupboards at work, maybe I'll have a copyright infringing try with those tomorrow.

Just a reminder to myself to try Piccolo XML Parser for Java sometime.

Under the misleading title of Assessing the risks of open source. the METAGroup has a report on the use of Open Source Java code in commercial environments. Despite the title the actual article is fairly positive.

It includes the following quote: By 2006/07, the cycle of movement between open source and standards will be common, and 80 percent of organizations developing with Java will make some use of open-source products. I really surprised that it's not higher already. For instance if you use WebLogic or WebSphere you're already using code from Jakarta. In fact I think it would be pretty difficult these days to put together a Java project of any size without including some open source code. Some things money just can't buy anymore, for instance where would you go to get an XML parser if you had to pay for it? In this situation the alternative to open source is writing it yourself, and that's certainly not efficient, and is more error prone.

Some comments on O'Reilly Network: Another Take on Swing and Java's Success. I'm the "one of the reader comments" mentioned at the top of the article for my remarks at the bottom of O'Reilly Network: The Success of Java.

I agree that having a common GUI api for both desktop and web work is doable. After all Microsoft seems to have almost done it. However, I don't think that starting with Swing is necessarily the best idea, it's too complex.

In my opinion the first thing is to decide on the sort of app that's being targeted. Swing lets you build pretty much anything and has functionality, like the paint method, that would be very difficult to implement in a web setting. If the focus is tightened to just "business style" apps then the problem is more tractable. Maybe the system should be built from the other end, would it be possible to implement the struts api on the client?

With struts the biggest problem for client implementation is the use of HTML for the views. This would have to be changed. Here XUL could be useful for describing an abstract layout which would be used to autogenerate appropriate HTML and Swing layouts. Some sort of overriding scheme to allow replacement or enhancement of the generated UI would have to be provided, you can never always generate exactly what's wanted. Fortunately CSS should provide nearly all of the look and feel customization needed for HTML, and for Java suitable overrides of the generated code by subclasses could let the developer tune the appearance.

The ultimate would be to come up with a way to allow the client app to take advantage of the increased capabilities that reduced latency and so greater interactivity gives it. How can the two models of interaction, screen at a time vs field by field, be reconciled, or at least accomodated in a single framework.

I agree with Marc that GUI framework development requires the internal and external consistency that best comes from a strong focus. For most open source or free software projects this is most often best provided by a strong leader. Especially in projects where there is the perception that this is a chance to build a better mousetrap it's important to have some way to ensure that people are all working towards the same mousetrap.

Open letter from Richard Stallman in The Register. The Free Software movement really needs Stallman and the Open Source movement could do with listening to him more. The distinction between Free Software and Open Source is important to understand, as is the fact that the first arises from some principles and the second from some pragamatic decisions that provide a, hopefully, better development methodology.

The next release at work now has a code name, and it's Maxwell. In the email announcing this the CTO said the name was taken from Maxwell Smart. He's described in the previous link with the adjectives Annoying, Cheap, Clumsy, Demanding, Dumb, Hilarious, Loyal, and Trustworthy.

If the code name is going to be Maxwell I'd prefer it came from James Clerk Maxwell. Most famous for the Maxwell-Boltzmann kinetic theory of gasses and the Maxwell equations of the electromagnetic field. James Clerk Maxwell already has at least a radio telescope and a foundation named after him. I don't know of anything named after Maxwell Smart.

Perhaps a fictional character is safer. You may remember the problems Apple had when they code named a release Sagan.

On the O'Reilly Network weblogs site I found an interesting post by Simon St. Laurent pointing to a site he's created Monastic XML.org - An ascetic view of XML best practices. It's an interesting, brief, and illuminating look at XML and what it's best at. An attempt to emphasise what the important concepts are rather than how XML can be shoehorned into solving yet another problem it might not be suited for.

When I lived in London I used to enjoy taking the bus back home on a Saturday afternoon from Oxford Circus or Trafalgar Square to Clapham North or Brixton. As this article James Meek reflects on the end of the double-decker bus says it's really nice to sit at the front on the top deck and watch the world go by. Even if I took a book to read, as I always did, I always ended up looking out of the window. As you're much higher up than normal you get to see over walls and notice things you just can't from ground level.

On the other hand, to get to or from work I always took the tube. Originally Clapham North to Oxford Circus or Bank on the Northern line, and then the Central line to Chancery Lane. Later Brixton to Oxford Circus on the Victoria line and then to Chancery Lane. Much faster than the bus, when it arrived, but no where near as enjoyable. I also remember on the Northern Line having, on especially bad days, to first of all travel backwards to Balham to be able to get on at all.

From Simon Schama a comment piece in the Guardian called The dead and the guilty.

United States Inc is currently being run by an oligarchy, conducting its affairs with a plutocratic effrontery which in comparison makes the age of the robber barons in the late 19th century seem a model of capitalist rectitude.

Of his books I'm afraid I've only read Citizens. Obviously very good but to get the most out of it I really needed to know more about the French Revolution when I started than I did. I think my knowledge of history is worse than that parodied in 1066 and all that. I know something about the period from 1873 (Franco Prussian War) to 1939 as that was the period I studied for my O levels. Outside of there my understanding is perhaps not as detailed as it ought to be.

Interesting report from the New York Times. Investigating 9/11: An Unimaginable Calamity, Still Largely Unexamined. This quote gives you the sense of it. One year later, the public knows less about the circumstances of 2,801 deaths at the foot of Manhattan in broad daylight than people in 1912 knew within weeks about the Titanic, which sank in the middle of an ocean in the dead of night. Why haven't we heard more? Perhaps we won't yet be able to find out more about the terrorists but surely we should try and understand why the firefighter's radios didn't work?

Following a suggestion from Troy Bridoux I've changed the tag line for XSLTXT so that hopefully:

• it's clearer what XSLTXT is
• it sounds less intimidating

It now reads XSLTXT - the XSLT compact form. Perhaps now more people will find the package, and find it useful.

Interesting article on the BEA developer's site discussing when to use JCA and when to use WebServices. A nice counterpoint to the WebServices everywhere and for everything bandwagon.

I wrote earlier about my opinion that xXx would be a better game than movie This report on the money made by 'Grand Theft Auto' contains the information that it made $350 million. In terms of domestic box office receipts (not exactly apples to apples but a useful sense of scale) this would apparently make it the seventh highest grossing film of all time, just ahead of "Forrest Gump" and behind "Jurassic Park". Of course it didn't cost anywhere near as much to make as either of those films so the actual profits were higher.

If you've got $5 million to invest you won't get much of a movie these days, but you could get one hell of a game. In fact if you're a VC (very unlikely if you're reading this) then perhaps a games studio would be a better bet than yet another maker of enterprise software packages.

An excellent extension to the well known Law of Software Envelopment. As amended by jwz this reads Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. This post uses a similar method to explain when development of emacs will stop.

If you enjoyed The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger I think you should read The Serpent's Coil by Farley Mowat. Written in 1961 about rescuing a badly listing Liberty ship during two hurricanes in 1948 it's fascinating. Compared to The Perfect Storm the bravery of the people involved and the danger they were in is understated.

It's also interesting because the events take place before satelite weather forcasting and reliable radios. A hurricane could "vanish" for several days as it crossed the Atlantic. Unless a ship ran into it and reported it's position the best the forcasters could do was make predictions about where it might be. It make you wonder about what it must have been like in the age of sail, with no radios and no long range forcasting.

Last year I made some simple performance measurements to see whether it was faster when scanning the characters in a string to use s.charAt(k) == 'x' or to first convert to an array of char and use c[k] == 'x'. Obviously this is in no way a general performance test, I just did it because I wanted to try and optimize some heavily run code.

Anyway, the results first. I used open office to plot the graph. The y axis shows the time in milliseconds to scan a string 50,000 times. It's the average of 50 runs. The x axis shows the length in characters of the string being scanned. The legend at the bottom shows the method used (toChar or charAt), the java version (131 or 140) and whether the -server or -hotspot (S or H) flag was supplied.

Using the -server flag made the biggest difference in the tests. For strings over 25 characters in length it provides the greatest speed. Apart from a strange bump for string lengths between 10 and 25 characters, which persists when I rerun the tests, the fastest technique is -server, using charAt, and running 131. On the other hand the slowest was -hotspot, using charAt, and running 131. Changing version to 140 improved things quite a bit.

With version 131, when using -hotspot, it used to be worth using charAt for short strings, under about 8 characters in length, and switching to toChar for longer strings. With version 140 that point has now moved out to around 75 characters. If you're using the -server flag, which most java code does, it's always faster to use charAt.

If you're interested in running the tests yourself the java code's here.

I've seen this before but thought I'd link to it. Borges' Encyclopedia. It really does make you think about classifications. Also, follow the link to the author's home page and take a look around. Lot's of interesting stuff, well, interesting if you like computing stories like I do :)

While trying to come up with possible "code names" for a new software release I found the following.

• An excellent overall resource for generating names of all sorts.
• Ftrain: Operation Wild Badger, which generates mock names for military operations. It includes a link to this interesting Washington Post article on how names for military operations are really chosen.
• Another sort of autogeneration is this generator of tag lines for "buddy" cop shows

Gamasutra has another article worth reading, "Keeping Up with the Sims". It's about the problems of managing the production of the enormous amount of content when producing expansion packs for the Sims. Eletronic Arts outsources the production of sprite art for the Sims to New Pencil. It's interesting to read how they deal with the production of a vast number of images that all have to fit in with the style of the Sims game.

An O'Reilly weblog entry talks about the great benefits of web services for application integration. I'm a bit more sceptical.

While WebServices certainly make the technical part of integration easier I'd question whether that was ever the major difficulty. In my experience it's always far harder, and involves more difficult to obtain resources, to understand the meaning of the data being exchanged than it is to actually exchange it.

Standard schemas etc. for the web services xml will help but will still require each participant to understand the standard schema and map their own internal data to the it. In fact, this now introduces two mappings with the possiblity for error and misunderstanding where there would previously only be one.

It seems that developers always like to try to solve the "easy" technical problems, i.e. how to map an object into xml, rather than attempt the more difficult and fuzzy semantic ones, i.e. how do I know that we both agree on what "production lead time" really means. We can reinvent CORBA, or EDI, as web services, but, while doing so will help keep us all employed, if we don't tackle the semantics there won't be any substantive change.

An article from an O'Reilly columnist talking about The Death of EJB As We Know It? Personally I don't think things are that bad.

The principles for building distributed systems, for transaction handling, etc. have been understood for longer than EJB has been around. And they've been difficult for longer than EJB has been around. Some things are just conceptually hard, and it's not possible to make them easy. On the other hand the fact that something that is conceptually hard does not also require that it is difficult to implement. Choosing the correct transaction boundaries for your transactions so as to get the best performance with the fewest deadlocks bearing in mind the business requirements for consistency is difficult. But it shouldn't require procedural code to implement, you should be able to declare what you want. J2EE get's this right. The deployment descriptors make a lot of this stuff declarative, but you still need to know what you're doing, and you probably always will.

I think in many places we're all still programming at too low a level though. I shouldn't have to use procedural code to define the persistent fields for an object, or set up the mapping to and from a persistent data store. I know that there are IDEs out there that do this visually. OptimalJ from Compuware is one of these. You define the model, the patterns to use, etc. and the code is generated for you. My issue with these systems is the vendor lock in and the cost of the tools. I might as well use .NET if I'm going to be tied to one vendor.

I'd like a more open system. Something along the lines of multiple layers of domain specific languages, each generating a more detailed description of the system in the next more detailed language, perhaps in combination with other descriptions of other aspects, till you get to executable code. At each level it would be possible to override the generated code giving you the opportunity to customize at the appropriate level of abstraction. The "compilers" converting the system expressed in one language to a more detailed expression in the next language would also be modifiable, perhaps through templating. I prefer this to the idea of adding annotations to the simple model to express the more complex concepts as I'd like to keep the levels of abstraction separated as far as possible.

Of course ideas are cheap compared to implementations, and as this idea doesn't have an implementation it's not worth a lot at the moment. Also, it rambles too much. Need to tidy up and try to express better what the idea is.

I followed these excellent instructions for Moveable Type syndication and it looks like the RSS 1.0 feed for itymbi is working. Of course when I went to check on Syndic8.com it seems that the 0.91 version was already being syndicated. Hopefully this will all be worked out in time and I'll end up with just one entry.

Now for some java coding to see if I can read RSS 1.0 format data.

So, in search of silly summer entertainment I saw xXx today. Wow, big explosions, objectification of women, dramatic stunts, what's not to like about it? Anyway, as I was watching I thought; this would be much more fun as a video game than as a movie. It's not as if you could imagine any real person performing any of those stunts. The movie doesn't rely on any characterization or emotional feeling, or acting. It doesn't draw you in and make you care about anyone in it. Kate Archer in No One Lives Forever is as involving a character as Xander Cage. Sure the graphics are better in movies than in current games but that's just a technology issue and time will take care of it.

xXx is set out as a series of missions that Xander Cage has to carry out. You never follow the actions of any other characters, which would introduce complications for making a game. A nice varity of sneaking, shooting, blowing things up, and driving various things around. Some bits would work well as cutscenes. Others would work better with the player controlling the action. In fact being able to "control" Mr. Cage would be more fun and involving than just watching what he does, knowing full well he's going to come out of it ok. In a game your character "dies" if you don't make the right moves, if you turn left instead of right down the passage, if you don't see the hiding place, if you miss a shot, or steer your car off a cliff. In xXx you know Xander's going to survive, and foil the evil plot.

I think we've reached the point where a good game is better than the average summer blockbuster. The graphics are getting there, the story line's about the same, and the involvement in a game is greater than in a standard guns/stunts/girls movie. In terms of money, already in 1999 in the UK the total amount of money pulled in by video games was 60% more than the total box office takings. A more reliable set of statistics comes from the Economist, and that shows video games sales just behind box office receipts.

xXx cost $50 million. Game development figures are harder to find than movie numbers, but a sanity check can be taken from the fact that the US Army is looking to spend $7 millon on developing an FPS, and an RPG. So, conservatively, $10 million would get you a top of the line video game. That's one fifth the cost of xXx, in fact Vin Diesel alone cost $10 million.

These days an idea that works as either a game or a summer blockbuster would be more fun, and make more money, implemented as a game. Why spend $10 million on Vin Diesel when you could get a whole game for that? If you've got a good blockbuster idea perhaps pitch it to Bungie or Blizzard rather than Warner Brothers.