I once had a professor who stated that:

A text editor is something so very personal, that everyone should write their own.

Of course I’ve always found vim a perfectly good text editor, but for my Swing projects it’s hard to embed it, so I have indeed written my own text editor that allows a user to edit documents and add hyperlinks and media to them.

public class TextEditor extends javax.swing.JEditorPane {
...
}

To display all these things I use HTMLEditorKit, but I found that word wrap didn’t work as expected. Word wrap means that words that would normally cross the right margin, are placed entirely on the next line.

When the previous version of my TextEditor object first displayed the text, almost all of the words at the end of all the lines would break off just before the last character before the right edge of the editor pane. Only when the user placed the caret somewhere in the same paragraph and then pressed the Enter key, thereby splitting the paragraph in two, it would do the word wrapping properly, but only for that paragraph. So when typing in a text at first, word wrapping would work correctly, but reading a previously entered text was therefore very inconvenient.

To get word wrapping to work properly, I Googled around a lot, but subsequent searches didn’t reveal anything useful. Most sites stated that JEditorPane defaults to word wrap anyway, so I became only more puzzled. At some point I found myself attempting things like sub classing HTMLWriter, but I actually felt I was on the wrong track.

And I was. At some point, scrolling through my code, I found this bit:

HTMLDocument doc = (HTMLDocument)this.getDocument();
StyleSheet ss = doc.getStyleSheet();
ss.addRule("h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 { font-family: sans-serif }");
ss.addRule("h1 { font-size: 105% }");
ss.addRule("h2 { font-size: 103% }");
ss.addRule("h3 { font-size: 102% }");
ss.addRule("h4 { font-size: 101% }");
ss.addRule("h5 { font-size: 100% }");
ss.addRule("p { margin-top: 0 }");
ss.addRule("p { margin-bottom: 0 }");
ss.addRule("p { text-indent: 10px }");

And then it became clear: I shouldn’t try to solve this in Java, but in CSS.

I added this line:

ss.addRule("p { word-wrap:break-word }");

And now my text editor correctly displays my text. That was all! No Java code needed, trying to get JEditorPane to implement something it already did, only a single line of CSS. I was thinking in the wrong direction. As are, I get the feeling, many of the people whose questions on the various forums I looked at, that seemed to indicate they were having the same problem.

So I hope this can save somebody a few hours of their time.

It started like this:

Dear IceHunter,

You found a Kuiper Belt Object! (or several)

(…)

You are getting this email because the IceHunters database lists publishable name for you, and I want to give you a chance to make corrections if needed. The Minor Planets Center will only accept last names and first initials (which we’re taking from first names) with discoveries.

The e-mail continued with a list of 401 people who had made similar discoveries. In short: I have discovered an astronomical object and my name will be listed somewhere because of that.

I think that is awesome.

The e-mail was from Explore Zooniverse, the organisation behind IceHunters, a site which lets you look at pictures taken by telescopes, to look for so-called Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs), and mark them. KBOs are worlds of ice really far away, beyond the orbit of Pluto. The idea here is humans are far better than computers at identifying this kind of objects in these pictures. To minimize the chance of mistakes, they show every picture to lots of people, and when enough of them mark the same spot in the picture as a possible KBO, an expert looks at them for confirmation.

So a few months back I went through about 4500 of those pictures (it is really addictive) and though I marked 959 as possible KBOs, it now appears that either I identified a grand total of two KBOs correctly, or they only count the first so mnay people as discoverers. Anyway, the two KBOs I found are called IH294135 and IH294181. Both were  identified by 16 people, of which I was one.

Kuiper Belt Object IH294135

The above image is the photo in which IH294135 is marked. As you can see, I had to look for nice snowflake-like dots in a field with lots of background noise, stars (top right) and other things. I marked anything that looked like this, but apparently more things look like that.

Kuiper Belt Object IH294181

Here is the other one. This picture actually contains two confirmed KBOs. The top left is the one I discovered. I can’t believe I missed the other one.

I’m not sure what qualified me as a discoverer of these two, especially since I wasn’t the first to identify either of them. IH294135 was already identified twenty minutes before I did, and IH294181 about fifteen minutes earlier. In any case, I can be sure they won’t be named after me, so that’s not why they need my name. But still, I’m now a discoverer of two astronomical objects, which, again, I think is downright awesome.

(…) it does not mix very well with Sun.s swing user interface components. These components are called “lightweight” Lightweight components can be hidden by a Canvas3D even if they are supposed to be at the front.

Obviously, I had been planning on embedding hugely impressive 3D animations into a NetBeans Platform Application, and I was not going to be disappointed, so I fired up NetBeans and did it anyway. Here’s how.

Preconditions: The j3dcore JAR files are downloaded and unpacked. You can find them here. I never trust generic Linux installers, because I have no idea what distro those people had in mind when creating them. So I chose one from the zip binaries and ignored the installers. Select the appropriate one for your machine. Unpack the zip file. There’s a second zip file inside. Unpack it too. Put the JAR files and the .so file somewhere where you want to keep them.

There appears to exist a NetBeans plugin for java-3d, but my NetBeans (7.0.1) didn’t find it, and at least one user comment indicates massive issues, so I didn’t bother with it.

1. Create a new Application: File -> New Project. In the Wizard, under Choose Project, select NetBeans Modules -> NetBeans Platform Application and click Next. Enter the name of the application. I called it Test3D. Click Finish.
2. The j3dcore JAR files have to be wrapped into a Module. Expand the Test3D project node, right click Modules and select Add New. Use j3dcore as your project name and click Next.  Use net.java.j3dcore as the Module’s code name base.
3. Right click the j3dcore module node and choose Properties. Under Libraries, click the Wrapped JARs tab and click Add JAR. Navigate to the j3dcore JAR files, select them all (hold shift or ctrl) and click OK.
4. You now have a library wrapper module, but you lack the shared object file that will allow them to use you graphics adapter. In Test3D, expand the Important Files node. Open the Project Properties file, and add the following line:run.args.extra=-J-Djava.library.path=<the path to the location of your .so file>

   Do not include the name of the file itself. Be sure to add this to the Project Properties file of your main project, Test3D, and not the wrapper module. It has its own Project Properties file.

5. Add a new module that creates and displays your 3D scene. Right click Modules under Test3D and click Add New. Enter a name. I chose Universe. Enter your code name base and click Finish.
6. Add a new TopComponent. Right click the Universe node and click New -> Other. In the New File wizard, select Module Development -> Window. Select Editor as Window Placement and select Open on Application Start. Click Next. Enter UniverseTopComponent after Class Name Prefix and click Finish.
7. Open UniverseTopComponent. In the Design View, add a JPanel that fully covers the TopComponent. Right click it, select Change Variable Name and enter myUniverse. Right click it again, choose Set Layout -> Border Layout.
8. Switch to the Source Editor, and change the constructor into this:

public UniverseTopComponent() {initComponents();
setName(NbBundle.getMessage(UniverseTopComponent.class,
"CTL_UniverseTopComponent"));
setToolTipText(NbBundle.getMessage(UniverseTopComponent.class,
"HINT_UniverseTopComponent"));

GraphicsConfiguration config = SimpleUniverse.getPreferredConfiguration();
Canvas3D canvas = new Canvas3D(config);
myUniverse.add(canvas, BorderLayout.CENTER);

BranchGroup group = new BranchGroup();

Sphere sphere = new Sphere(0.2f);
group.addChild(sphere);

Color3f lightColor = new Color3f(1.8f, 0.1f, 0.1f);
BoundingSphere bounds =
new BoundingSphere(new Point3d(0.0, 0.0, 0.0), 100.0);

Vector3f lightDirection = new Vector3f(4.0f, -7.0f, -12.0f);
DirectionalLight light = new DirectionalLight(lightColor, lightDirection);
light.setInfluencingBounds(bounds);
group.addChild(light);

SimpleUniverse universe = new SimpleUniverse(canvas);
universe.getViewingPlatform().setNominalViewingTransform();
universe.addBranchGraph(group);

}

9. Right click the editor window and select Fix Imports from the popup menu. Then build and run the project. Your output should look like this:

Test3D with Universe Window

Conclusion: it is possible to embed a Java 3D scene into a NetBeans Platform Application.

The notebook came with Microsoft Windows 7 installed, but obviously I want to use it with my favourite Linux distro, Arch. Still, since I had paid good money for the Windows installation and you never know when it comes in handy, I decided to make it a dual boot machine.

Installing Linux on a notebook nowadays is not as hard as it used to be. After putting Arch on an Asus U36JC, most of it works out of the box, that means, without it needing any work at all beyond installing Arch and KDE. This includes:

• FN-keys F1 through F12
• Media keys (FN with cursor keys)
• USB 2 and USB 3 ports
• VGA out (see below)
• HDMI out (see below)
• SD card slot (accepts SD-HC cards too)
• Wired and wireless network (using networkmanager)

Some of these still need some configuring, but the way to do that is a matter of taste. For instance: I configured the multi media keys in qmmp, my favourite music player, but you might use something else. So what follows is a description of those parts of the installation and configuration that needed some thinking before they worked. I explain what choices were made and how I came to them, and link to pages on the Arch wiki with step-by-step guides on how to implement them.

Task 1: Installation from USB

The notebook doesn’t have an optical drive, so I had to install Arch from a USB drive. Normally this shouldn’t be that hard. Still, after I had created a bootable USB disk with the Arch ISO image, it eluded me for a while how to actually boot the machine from it. The BIOS settings menu, entered by holding F2 during boot, has a option called Boot Option Priorities. However, before I actually inserted the USB drive, it only listed the hard drive as an option. And even then the machine kept booting Windows, ignoring the priority settings I had made.

I read in the eManual PDF that holding ESC while booting would allow me to select the boot device to boot from. That worked.

Task 2: Installing a base Arch system

Early in the Arch installation process, the hard drive must be partioned and mounted. Originally the hard drive had three partitions: 1 MB with unused space, 28 MB for Windows recovery purposes, 200 GB for Windows and the rest was formatted as VFAT and labeled DATA.

Since that last partition wasn’t actually used by Windows, I decided to use its space for Arch. I remove the DATA partition and created a primary boot partition of 100 MB and three logical partitions, 25 GB for root, 4 MB for swap and the rest, 244 GB, for home.

Installing grub on /dev/sda presented no problems. The Windows menu entry in /boot/grub/menu.lst looks like this:

# (2) Windows
title Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader +1

hd0,1 is the second partition on drive 0, or sda2, which is the partition Windows is installed on. The makeactive directive that is in the file’s example has to be removed or commented out for Windows 7.

Task 3: Graphics environment

After booting into Arch I found that the wired network had been correctly configured. I created a user account for myself and set up ssh and yaourt. I use yaourt because I find it very convenient to access binary and source packages using just one command.

The notebook has an Nvidia graphics adapter, but it is configured in a hybrid configuration with a much less power hungry Intel graphics chip. Nvidia appears to have no plans supporting this on Linux, so simply installing the Nvidia driver didn’t work. Instead, I needed the Intel drivers and Bumblebee.

After installing that I installed KDE, Gimp, LibreOffice, Xine, Qmmp and a few more of my favourite applications.

My Asus U36JC notebook running KDE4.

Task 4: Suspend

Suspend-to-RAM, letting the notebook fall asleep quickly and making it wake up quickly again, is very useful for conserving battery power. Unfortunately, it didn’t really work out of the box. Instead of suspending, the notebook froze, showing a non blinking cursor at the top left. I tried various approaches but the solution escaped me for days.

I found an Ubuntu site that offered a solution that made sense, but didn’t appear to work. In the end, I found a line in my dmesg output warning me about the mei kernel module. It appeared that if I unloaded it and implemented the Ubuntu solution, suspend-to-RAM worked. Summarising:

1. Ditch the mei module by blacklisting it. According to my dmesg output it it not safe to use. This thread seems to confirm that.
2. Put a file called 20_custom-ehci_hcd inside /etc/pm/sleep.d/. To do that, follow the instructions here.

After I had sorted that out, I needed only two more things for suspend-to-disk:

1. Add resume=/dev/sdaX to the kernel line of the first option in /boot/grub/menu.lst, where X stands for the partition number of your swap drive, 6 in my case. Instructions are here.
2. Add the resume hook to the HOOKS variable in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf. Instructions are here.

Task 5: Ondemand governor

The next thing to look into was CPU speed governing. Despite the fact that KDE is supposed to have the CPU always on ‘ondemand’, I noticed that the CPU was constantly on full speed, so I installed cpufrequtils. It appeared that after booting into KDE the CPU was indeed always in performance mode. To remedy this, I configured cpufreq as a daemon to always default to ondemand, by following these instructions.

Task 6: Fixing the camera orientation

The notebook has a camera sitting at the top of the screen panel, centred just above the screen. It works out of the box, but it appears Asus has installed the camera upside down. Why they would do that is beyond me. v4l-utils Is supposed to be able to handle this problem, but at least with this notebook it doesn’t appear to work. I have sent an email to Gegror Jasny, who is maintaining v4l, a library that can fix this. He emailed me back with a versions 8.6 and 9.0 (testing) of the project, which included data I had sent him. It worked perfectly, so as soon as he makes a release and the Arch package is updated, this will be fixed.

It all depends on what you’re using the camera for. If you’re using Kopete, you can go to Settings -> Video -> Options and select vertical as well as horizontal mirroring to turn the image 180 degrees.

Or using mplayer:

# mplayer tv:// -tv driver=v4l2 -flip

Obviously, all this costs CPU power. Using mplayer in full screen mode you can even see yourself blink. And to think that this is only needed because the Asus people installed the camera the wrong way. :rolleyes:

Task 7: Synaptics touchpad

I don’t have very special requirements for a touchpad, but I’d like to be able to drag stuff by double tapping and then dragging with only one finger and vertical scrolling by dragging a finger along the right edge. This didn’t work out of the box. Still, doing that is so easy that I only added it here for completion. First, I installed the driver:

# yaourt -S xf86-input-synaptics

Then I added a single line to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-synaptics.conf:

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "touchpad catchall"
        Driver "synaptics"
        MatchIsTouchpad "on"
        MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
        Option "TapButton1" "1"
        Option "TapButton2" "3"
        Option "TapButton3" "2"
        Option "VertEdgeScroll" "on"
EndSection

Task 8: Hard drive spin down

One of the more annoying habits of the notebook is that the default hard drive power saving setting is too aggressive. The hard drive keeps spinning down all the time, so that lots of times the notebook appears frozen for a second or two when the hard drive is needed. Also, some low level processes use the hard drive periodically, resulting in audible clicking sounds every few seconds.

To avoid this, I installed laptop mode tools and added it to my /etc/rc.conf:

# yaourt -S laptop-mode-tools
# sudo vim /etc/rc.conf

DAEMONS=(hwclock syslog-ng dbus !hal laptop-mode avahi-daemon networkmanager sshd sensors @crond @bumblebee @cups @alsa @cpufreq @mysqld)

Then I changed the default spin down value in /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf to 128. This is a good value between never spinning down at all and spinning down too often.

# sudo vim /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf

#
# Power management for HD (hdparm -B values)
#
BATT_HD_POWERMGMT=128
LM_AC_HD_POWERMGMT=254
NOLM_AC_HD_POWERMGMT=254

One thing that accesses my hard drive a lot is ext4′s journalling program. To prevent it from doing that, I added commit=600 to my /etc/fstab entries for /home and /:

UUID=...       /       ext4    defaults,noatime,commit=600     0       1
UUID=...       /home   ext4    defaults,noatime,commit=600     0       1

The noatime attribute specifies that the last access time of every file is not recorded. This significantly speeds up hard drive performance.

A note on the HDMI and VGA ports

When the computer is booted while connected to a second monitor or TV, via either the VGA or HDMI ports, the screen’s contents will be duplicated on that screen. The second screen’s resolution appears to be leading. KDE’s control centre however will allow the user to configure this behaviour. Go to Hardware->Screen and monitor->Multiple Monitors. I am not sure if and how this works in other environments.

After updating to KDE 4.7.3 last weekend, I noticed that even when I connected the HDMI port to my TV after the notebook had already booted, a pop up came up that told me that a second monitor had been detected. It then took me to the KDE control centre section mentioned above. I didn’t find any reference to this in the KDE 4.7.3 release notes, so this could also work with previous releases.

VGA is not supposed to be hot pluggable, so I’m not going to look into that.

Concluding remarks

It took a few days of searching and trying out various solutions to get suspend-to-RAM to work, the hybrid graphics setup is not ideal, and the camera is upside-down. But most of the notebook works out of the box. FN-keys, networking, and also the camera.

Whatever notebook you’re going to put Linux on, there will probably always be a few drawbacks. Notebooks get smaller, faster, cool better and need less power every year, so I imagine that manufacturers will need more and more hacks to make all that work. When you’re using the proprietary OS that came pre-installed, you’ll probably never notice these things but if you want all the advantages of Linux, you will have to deal with them.

The Asus U36JC is in my opinion a pretty decent notebook to use with Linux, or at least with Arch. It is fast, light, subtle in appearance and with a few minor tweaks can be turned into a very powerful mobile Linux platform.

Updates:

1. Oct 20, 2011: Initial publication.
2. Oct 21, 2011: Added Task 7.
3. Oct 29, 2011: Added Task 8.
4. Nov 17, 2011: Added a note on the HDMI and VGA ports.
5. Feb 3, 2012: Updated the entry about v4l entry in task 6.

Outlook being a little jealous.

Click it to see it the way it was intended. I had to scale the image to make it fit this page, but it is in Dutch anyway. Here’s what it says:

“Cannot start Microsoft Outlook. MAPI32.DLL is damaged or is of a wrong version. This might be because you have installed other software for e-mail communication. Install Outlook again.” (emphasis mine)

MAPI32.DLL is part of the Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI), which is a Windows API  that allows applications to handle e-mail and other message-based communication protocols. That fact that it is a Dynamically Linked Library (DLL) means that it is like a Shared Object (.so-) file in Unix: a library to be used by several programs, not just Outlook, I’d think.

I remember back in the late nineties when my friends and I entertained conspiracy theory notions about Internet Explorer (3?) trying to damage Netscape Navigator installations on the same computer. How it did this we didn’t think of and we obviously never found any proof. Occam’s razor would suggest that Netscape was unstable by itself.

Still, in the screen shot above you can see that I have Mozilla Thunderbird installed as well. So could the dialogue box be telling the truth? Is Outlook giving me the cold shoulder because I am cheating on it with Thunderbird? In any case, a sentence like that in an error message raises more questions that it answers.

Boinc credits for 2011W35

From their website:

Docking@Home is a project which uses Internet-connected computers to perform scientific calculations that aid in the creation of new and improved medicines. The project aims to help cure diseases such as Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV).

Next milestone will be around November 9th next year,  when I will reach 500.000 points.

Crystallizing proteins isn’t very easy though. They used mainly solutions of salt and other solvents, but the whole thing was basically a trial and error process. They had plates with wells lined up in rows, each with a slightly different solution. Robots would periodically take lots of pictures of them, so that the scientists could see which ones made progress. Seeing a crystal form was usually reason for cake.

We had an algorithm that could recognize interesting artefacts, but scoring these images is typically something that the human brain does a much better job of than computers. You don’t even need to be a trained scientist.  I did some of them too. A short instruction was enough to be able to tell what’s what.

I had to think about this when I stumbled upon the New Horizons Ice Hunters web site. New Horizons is a probe on its way to Pluto. When it gets there in 2015 it will return awesome pictures back to us, just like the Cassini probe is doing now at Saturn. But it won’t stay there (obviously – it doesn’t have the means to slow down). After Pluto it will continue toward the Kuiper Belt, an asteroid belt outside Neptune’s orbit, filled with icy objects called Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs).

The problem is, these KBOs have to be identified first. And like recognizing the crystals, that is something that humans are better at than computers. Ice Hunters lets the visitor identify these distant worlds of ice, thus helping out the scientists. It’s really fun (and addictive) to do, and not that hard. In 38 images I found 19 of them, and I just got started.

There is a tutorial video and some text on where the images come from. You are presented with small square images, on which you can click to indicate where the KBOs are. There are lots and lots of images to be scored, so there is a lot of work to do. Every image is scored by a few people, so don’t be afraid to make mistakes. And before you can start, you need to sign up, so that they can attach your name to your results.

I find that pretty cool.

Since the Swing Application Framework (SAF) has been deprecated and developing NetBeans Platform Applications (NPA) is the new and better way to do these things, I’ve bought a good book on the subject, and am quite satisfied with the way Java desktop applications are to be developed these days.

However, under Linux, Swing applications default to the ugly Metal widget set:

Metal widget set. Click to zoom.

On the command line and using SAF it is in fact pretty easy to make Swing use the GTK widgets. This way Java applications get a native look and feel under Linux. With NPA however, there is no right place to insert a few lines of code to do this at startup.

To make NetBeans itself use the GTK widgets, I always start the IDE like this:

# netbeans --laf com.sun.java.swing.plaf.gtk.GTKLookAndFeel

Since NetBeans is itself an NPA,  I figured the trick would be to specify this option somewhere in the application’s configuration. I googled around a bit and found the answer here. The trick is to add a single line to the project.properties file, which can be found inside the Important Files folder within the NPA project. That line is:

run.args.extra=--laf com.sun.java.swing.plaf.gtk.GTKLookAndFeel

And now, under KDE4, my application looks like this:

GTK widget set. Click to zoom.

Not exactly a KDE4 look-and-feel, but I have lots of applications (Gimp, GQView,  LibreOffice) that use GTK so it still looks native on my desktop, and GTK is a lot prettier than Metal.

Now why it is a good idea to write desktop applications instead of web applications, especially in Java, is something that Geertjan Wielenga talks about on his blog. Well worth the read.

The “success kit” included a lifetime membership card for

(…) an elite group of Oracle Certified Professionals (…)

And I had hoped for a coffee pack

But still. Excellent.

Obviously, this is utter nonsense. I am clearly a Robot: law-abiding, dedicated and logical as well as stubborn, intractable and cold. But apparently I was born in the wrong year for that.

That proves it. Astrology is bull.