I currently host my weblog on , which, for the time being at least, offers free blog hosting. Here are copies of my weblog entries. If you want to comment, go to the weblog comment--jroller.com is linked by each entry. If you want to subscribe to the RSS feed for my blog on jroller, here's the link.

• Rich Clients Look Like the Future (March 13, 2005): I've been thinking about rich clients apps (RCA) versus HTML client apps (HCA), and why I tend to like rich clients better. The RC app that most impressed me in the last few years was iTunes; for an HCA, it would probably be this German website to look for rooms for rent. The world has certainly shifted towards HCAs in a big way. It's not that people aren't writing RCAs, or that we don't use them all the time, but you'll find a lot more of your new work in HCAs these days than in RCAs. But I tend to prefer RCAs, so the question is, what's going on here?
• Unit-testing Performance (February 17, 2005): Perfomance regressions: I was wondering this morning if it might make sense to write unit tests to verify performance of specific operations. The basic idea is that we have a unit test that prepares the run and executes a certain operation; a wrapper test then executes this performance test a specific number of times. Timing is captured in milliseconds for total, average, min and max execution time.
• Easy 3D (February 16, 2005): Cool Swing/3D demo! Just checked out a Swing-based Java3D demo from Romain Guy's Weblog and it looks pretty cool. You see books as 3D images from Amazon, and see them rotate in real time to display the spline as well as the front cover. To run it, you'll need to have Java3D installed, from the Java 3D Website.
• Utility Servers in the JVM (February 15, 2005): Utilities Servers: I've been thinking more about Nailgun, the server which hosts small Java programs to be run from the command line. One question is, why can't (or don't we) use Java more often for common utility tasks? Think of all the command line utilities written as executable (binary) or script files. If we didn't have the startup time of using the JVM, would we be any better off using Java for these purposes?
• Modality (February 14, 2005): I was thinking about the MVC (Model-View-Architecture) design model while looking at an application with notifications. The application is mainly accessed through a complicated GUI client. Notifications are triggered by data-bound conditions, and on a notification, one either has colors on the screen change, or a popup window opened. But that's about it. There is no way to configure a notification other than through the dialog, and no other outputs of a notification other than coloring or a popup dialog. What interests me is how one can design for multi-modal input and output, and what advantages this offers.
• Nailgun is Cool (February 13, 2005): I've been checking out Marty Lamb's Nailgun project, which is a Java server running classes, executed by a small command-line client in C, using a custom communication protocol. The C client, of course, starts up immediately, and the cost of starting the JVM is taken up when the Nailgun server is first launched. This means that classes you execute (called "Nails") through Nailgun run much faster than if launched directly as they would from the java command-line.
• Writing with Ease (January 15, 2005): What I really want is just to write these pages without worrying about markup, and to have full control when I finally present it. As is pretty clear by now from all I've talked about it, the pages you're reading here are written and stored as XML, before being converted to the XHTML you are probably reading. I've already written about the advantages, and the reasons why I did this, but the downside is the amount of typing I've forced myself into by using XML.
• Fun with XSL (January 13, 2005): I started to work on this website again couple of weeks ago. I've already written about the basic approach I took a year ago to write the content in XML, and generate working XHTML with XSL. All of that was working, but there were problems, namely that I was terrified of changing the XSL once it was working. I mean, there were other issues, such as the inability to nest topics (Home->Writing->Blogs), but the larger issue was that I couldn't easily change the XSL without breaking something.
• (Ken) Moore's Law (January 6, 2005): My friend Ken Moore, a programmer like myself (but with much longer experience) writes to me periodically about his ongoing frustrations with programming. He's currently a Java programmer, but has also worked with COBOL (I think), C and C++, Perl, etc., as well as some 4GLs. He's been around, if you know what I mean. What he often writes about is the frustration not just of learning one new API, but working with several new ones in a project. I have to say I agree with him, which is what I want to write about today.
• Dynamic Languages in the JVM (January 5, 2005): I've been interested to see the different languages built on top of the JVM. If you do a web search for "jvm languages", you'll find a whole slew of them listed, some of which are still in active maintenance. One newish one, Groovy, has been submitted as a standard dynamic language for Java. But I think the current approaches to executing these from within a Java program are too clumsy.
• A Tragic Commons: Memory (April 19, 2004): I was working with NetBeans the other day, debugging some of my own code. I had been running the debugger repeatedly, tracing through the code over and again. NetBeans gradually slowed down, and stepping through lines of code became downright painful. I finally stopped and restarted it.