rmi

So i'm stuck a bit with a problem at work, we're using some crappy obsolete API that only works in 32-bit mode, but the rest of the application needs to run in 64-bit to fully utilise the hardware. Bit of a shit really - it's unclear if there is a 64-bit API available - I think there is - but I don't have access to the device and he who does is currently travelling ...

As a fall-back in-case there isn't another way I hacked up a quick system based on RMI - and I was surprised how easy it was considering I started from scratch. I think it helped that I already had a relatively simple API that abstracted different devices, so I just wrote a proxy object in a few dozen lines of code. And of course it helped that I've played with CORBA before and know how it all works.

The nice thing about RMI is it lets you send classes across the wire (with local processing behaviour as well), which meant I could implement some backend dependent code like getControls() in the GUI front-end process with only a few minor changes to use a more generic property interface.

No doubt it could be (much) more efficient, but I think it should suffice for this project. It's something i've been meaning to try for a while and if this experience is any guide it wont be the last either.

Yeah, i'm happy (as happy as i get anyway) to be hacking again after being stuck in maths for so long, although we had a phone meeting today and I've some more ideas to try so it's not over yet.

jjmpeg video creation

Been a bit quiet around here lately - actually it hasn't at all. Building going on next door means I haven't had a decent sleep in a couple of weeks and it's really wearing me down. Add to that I was stuck for a few weeks trying to grok some hairy maths for work and I just haven't had the inclination nor energy to pursue much other than eating, drinking, and some TV.

But back OT, I've started looking at moving my client's application to using jjmpeg - as I need 64-bit microsoft to work, and i'm also having some troubles with gc load with lots of transient objects.

Getting video frame reading going was trivial but I had to code up a fair bit of extra stuff to be able to create videos in proper containers which is the other requirement I have. I've checked in a first cut at that - although I need to do more testing particularly wrt GC performance.

I tried to come up with a helper class with a nice API to use it, and the following demonstrates it's use:

        AVFormatContext.registerAll();

        JJMediaWriter writer = new JJMediaWriter(filename);
        JJVideoStream vstream = writer.addVideoStream(width, height, fps, 400000);
        BufferedImage image = vstream.createImage();

        writer.open();

        Graphics2D gg = image.createGraphics();
        gg.setBackground(Color.black);
        gg.setColor(Color.white);
        for (int i = 0; i < fps * 5; i++) {
                gg.clearRect(0, 0, width, height);
                gg.drawString("Moving Text!", i, i);
                vstream.addFrame(image);
        }

        writer.close();

Well I can't imagine it being much simpler than that. This also (for the most part) avoids transient object creation, so should be (relatively) efficient.

Unfortunately things aren't so clean under the bonnet, but I guess what you don't see wont hurt you will it?

The full example is in VideoWriter.java

Bad typesetting, and evince sucks.

I've been reading a lot of papers of late, and any that aren't typeset using TeX are blatantly obvious and hard to read. Even very old papers are much easier to read than some of the modern ones - I wonder how they are being formatted. The microsoft word ones are really obvious - and utterly awful - but there are others which are pretty crap too. The mathematics is the obvious really low-point, but even the typefaces and layouts are pretty rank.

It is however quite a pleasure when I do come across a properly typeset manuscript in the familiar CMR typeface.

I am also utterly fed up with evince. It refuses to remember anything I ask it - from the location I save files to, to the size of the window, and the lack of global close is just annoying. I had a very wide two-page book I just played with at full two-monitor wide size ONE FUCKING TIME a few days ago, and Now every time I open EVERY document, evince opens at the same ginormous size. Fucking ticking me off big-time.

I even tried mupdf - which is just a bit bare-bones for my liking (although it renders much better), and discovered jmupdf along the way who's tiny demo test application is almost as 'featureful' as evince (not that that means much ...), so I might feel another project coming on ... apart from reading them, i'm staring to get a sizeable collection of papers and it's hard to keep track of them based-on-the-title-in-the-filename.