The latest Firefox requires newer GTK than what I've got on the computers I have access to these days. And the latest Opera is ahead of old Firefox, for sure. So I'm experimenting with Opera these days.
Quick review: I want incremental search. Putting downloads ("transfers" in Opera) in a tab out of the way rather than an annoying downloads window is great. I've used Download Statusbar on Firefox, and that works too, but it's nice to have a non-annoying way built in.
And an update to my original post: Just be careful about random incompatibilities. Some sites I need (or want) to use Opera, others old Firefox. Sort of annoying.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
jMonkeyEngine 2 and jME Physics 2
Turns out that jME 2 is under active development. Just no releases planned at the moment, so I pulled from svn (though I wouldn't do that with Spring for a production system). And I also pulled jME Physics 2 from svn (though it seems less active).
I had to toy around with things for a while, but I got it all happy in Eclipse and building jars with Ant (some hints, though I didn't follow instructions exactly). I also got the rag doll demo running in a separate project referencing the built jars (and native libs). Just 2 relatively readable files. Much simpler than the JBullet rag doll demo and number of classes I had to copy over there.
So, I think jME looks like a nice way to go, if I continue working on a simulated world environment. (And yes, I know about Player and Gazebo. I'll probably end up using that some, too, though perhaps for different purposes such as simulating more common robot systems.)
Some effort has gone in to supporting JBullet under jME Physics, but it's definitely not under active, public development. I haven't even looked to see if the project is from the same person as in the forum. Still, it could be a start if I care enough. The ODE wrapper seems to work for now, and LWJGL is native anyway.
I had to toy around with things for a while, but I got it all happy in Eclipse and building jars with Ant (some hints, though I didn't follow instructions exactly). I also got the rag doll demo running in a separate project referencing the built jars (and native libs). Just 2 relatively readable files. Much simpler than the JBullet rag doll demo and number of classes I had to copy over there.
So, I think jME looks like a nice way to go, if I continue working on a simulated world environment. (And yes, I know about Player and Gazebo. I'll probably end up using that some, too, though perhaps for different purposes such as simulating more common robot systems.)
Some effort has gone in to supporting JBullet under jME Physics, but it's definitely not under active, public development. I haven't even looked to see if the project is from the same person as in the forum. Still, it could be a start if I care enough. The ODE wrapper seems to work for now, and LWJGL is native anyway.
OSGi for Robot Middleware
Seems like "middleware" is the term in robotics for the platform that lets the different components (usually system processes) communicate with each other. I'd previously thought about whether OSGi might be a good fit for that.
I searched a bit and found a Tobias Wegner that seems to be doing something like that, but I haven't found any papers from him at Google Scholar. Maybe I should try contacting him sometime to see about the status of his thesis.
I searched a bit and found a Tobias Wegner that seems to be doing something like that, but I haven't found any papers from him at Google Scholar. Maybe I should try contacting him sometime to see about the status of his thesis.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Learning MATLAB
I'm out of industry and back in school these days, focusing on autonomous robots to speak generally. One of the things I knew to expect was MATLAB, and I'm learning it as I thought I'd need to. But I don't want to make it my tool of choice in the long run. I won't give a technical review here (and I don't know enough yet to give a full review), but I'm generally a pro-open kind of person. And MATLAB is definitely propriety.
But it sure pwns the competition in the research world. (Update: I mean this in terms of apparent market share, not in terms of technical merit which again I feel too ignorant to comment on.)
The main alternative is SciPy. JScience and many other options for Java seem either unmaintained or too complicated. Hmm.
But it sure pwns the competition in the research world. (Update: I mean this in terms of apparent market share, not in terms of technical merit which again I feel too ignorant to comment on.)
The main alternative is SciPy. JScience and many other options for Java seem either unmaintained or too complicated. Hmm.
Confirm Quit and Logging Off
It just occurred to me that the "Are you sure you want to quit/close/etc.?" features should be promoted to an OS (or desktop/platform) level concept. These things prevent log out, shut down, and so on. They can also cause other confusion when the system tries to guess if the software is behaving well.
Probably can't completely standardize the content of such quit confirmations, but some level of communication with the system about what's going on could make this user experience tons better.
Probably can't completely standardize the content of such quit confirmations, but some level of communication with the system about what's going on could make this user experience tons better.
Monday, September 8, 2008
Fan Language
By the way, I should have blogged a while back about the Fan programming language. I got relatively involved in conversation there. And I even got into the code just a bit.
My quickest summary: It's a better Java. As in, it tries to be a nice, clean, accessible language that encourages consistent style and good, readable code. But it's better than Java in that it clears out the cruft (starting with a clean slate, almost), and it's much nicer in the syntax arena. You don't have to slave away to get everyday things done like in Java. And it's still mostly statically typed.
That short review ignores a lot of the details. See the site for more. But as a summary, can you say all the same things about Groovy or Scala (alternative "better Javas")?
That said, I'm still not sure whether I'll be using it in the future. I think it's possible. For now, I think I still want Java's tool support and low-level speed. (Yes, I said "low-level speed" in reference to Java.)
My quickest summary: It's a better Java. As in, it tries to be a nice, clean, accessible language that encourages consistent style and good, readable code. But it's better than Java in that it clears out the cruft (starting with a clean slate, almost), and it's much nicer in the syntax arena. You don't have to slave away to get everyday things done like in Java. And it's still mostly statically typed.
That short review ignores a lot of the details. See the site for more. But as a summary, can you say all the same things about Groovy or Scala (alternative "better Javas")?
That said, I'm still not sure whether I'll be using it in the future. I think it's possible. For now, I think I still want Java's tool support and low-level speed. (Yes, I said "low-level speed" in reference to Java.)
Friday, September 5, 2008
3D Java Physics: JBullet
After having trouble finding much better than ODE wrappers for 3D physics in Java, someone pointed me this week to JBullet. Seems to work great from my experiments so far (just learning how to run the demos from a new Eclipse project at this point).
Pure Java is nice.
Side note, a project to convert x86 to JVM bytecode and automatically run DLL and ELF so files would be sweet. That would auto-port lots of native libraries to Java. Well, in some cases you might need semi-deep OS emulation.
Pure Java is nice.
Side note, a project to convert x86 to JVM bytecode and automatically run DLL and ELF so files would be sweet. That would auto-port lots of native libraries to Java. Well, in some cases you might need semi-deep OS emulation.
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