Author: Matthias Gall

"Null Toleranz bei innerer Sicherheit"

Wer den Fernsehtipp wahrgenommen hat, dem wird folgende Passage aufgefallen sein, die namespace jetzt bei YouTube entdeckt hat und die ich ohne weiteren Kommentar hier einfüge. (Update: namespace hat’s eigentlich von der CCC Mailingliste und Niko hat’s auch schon entdeckt und kommentiert.)

Seam is going to be big

Months ago, I started a little sparetime “Web 2.0” project together with two coworkers. My main interest was to enhance my JEE knowledge and to get to know a new framework. I was unsure whether to go for Struts Shale or JBoss Seam and decided for the latter. Today, I’m confident I took the right choice. JBoss and Exadel joined forces and open-sourced Exadels RichFaces library under LGPL. If you don’t know what RichFaces is, have a look at the live demo and you may understand my excitement. Since Seam is meant as a competition to .NET, this is another important step for the guys around Hibernate and Seam founder Gavin King. Really looking forward to playing with it tomorrow.

Samsung SyncMaster 204B

I promised I would open a new category Hardware, so here it is… To the left, you see the upper right corner of my Samsung SyncMaster 204B. When I started my computer this evening, I recognized this strange color effect. Yesterday I just told Julius that I never had any problems with this TFT and he bought one today, and I was thinking about buying a second one, too. And now this! The bad thing is that this TFT has a pixel fault class II. Now I was wondering what would happen if I would get an alternate device with a pixel fault? I would find this much more annoying. This little color bug is merely invisible when you’re sitting right in front of the TFT, it only gets more obvious if you look from the perspective I took the photo from. So what? :-/

Setting up SVN and Trac

I’m using Subversion and Trac for several projects and I always thought that I should write down my workflow to set it up. This time, I did, and I’m sharing it with you. It’s probably not the best way, but it works for me. I will not cover the prerequesites here, like installing Apache 2 with DAV and SVN support or installing Subversion and Trac. The subversion server is on a Linux box while the client is a Windows XP machine with TortoiseSVN as the SVN front-end.

Adapter Pattern applied

When you’re applying an Adapter Pattern, you’re generally grappling with classes and method signatures. I just had to deal with packages and package visibility in Java where I found the Adapter Pattern to be an interesting solution. I was accessing a class A in a package com.example from the outside (an RMI call). The method I called had to return an instance of a class B in a subpackage, say com.example.sub, which in turn had to access a class C in package com.example. The trouble with class C was that it had only package-visible methods so that I could not call them from class B which was in a subpackage. Exposing C’s method to the public wasn’t desireable at all, so changing the visibility wasn’t a choice. I wrote an adapter class in package com.example which had publicly visible methods but a package-visible constructor. Now I was able to instantiate class B in class A and provide an instance of my adapter class which in turn received a reference to class C and then delegated …

Pathfinding I

Tim-Oliver bothered me today with a question about A* pathfinding. It has been some time since I wrote our A* implementation in DVW, so I had to dig into this topic again. I used this tutorial and wrote some code. Note that this is just a straightforward implementation of the pseudo code presented in this article. I wouldn’t write productive code that way. Anyway, this might come handy for someone, so I’ll present it here. Next time, I will replace the open list with a binary heap. Click here to see the source:

Farewell adidts.sys BSOD

I promise, if this isn’t my very last posting on hardware and hardware driver issues (todays topic), I will add an own category. But since I finally found a solution for my last PC problem, namely BSODs caused by adidts.sys, I feel the urge to blog about that. adidts.sys is the SoundMAX high definition audio driver for the onboard audio which came with my ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard. The driver version available on the ASUS homepage, where I went frequently to check for an update, is still V5.10.1.4530 dated 2006/07/10, but now I learned that there are actually two newer versions available on the ASUS FTP site. I tried 1988b_32bit_510014560.zip and it worked like a charm. I just updated the driver from the hardware control panel instead of using the setup.exe, and finally, my last woe was gone. Update: Although this fixed my BSOD troubles, I recognized that I did not have a stereo mixer available to record the output of my sound card. I tweaked around a bit to handle this, too. Let me …