Blog.Project13.pl

It’s an increadibly tought time now at my Uni, lots and lots of exams, stuff to hand in etc… One of such things is this simple blender animation which I have created with my friend Tomek in order to pass Graphics class:

Yeah it’s simple, rough anc certainly not the next Katedra… ;-) But as a person that totaly sux at graphics I’m quite happy with it, take a look and let me know what you think.

Oh and some other animations by my classmates are avaiable on this youtube playlist, feel free to check it out -- some are really nice.

Tags: agh, animation, blender, render, study

I am currently working on a simple but still quite fun/interesting (as is any project with a new framework :-)) webapp using Google Web Toolkit (it’s basically Google’s JEE framework for creating RIA). The webapp is an online crossword generator. The goal is to provide crosswords online and allow users solving them online with a nice and intuitive GUI etc… It would be cool if I’d manage to create this as an “embed on any website” script, but I can’t guarantee this functionality.

I’m coding this project to get used to some of the basic JEE stuff, such as Hibernate for example (it is quite amazing and very elegant – especially HQL), and to have a good time while coding in Java…

The source is avaiable under the AGPLv3 on github: http://github.com/ktoso/gwt-crossword
At some places it is still a mess so please keep in mind that it’s still under initial development (and I’m having a tough time at the uni and can’t code gwt-crossword everyday :\), that aside, feel free to take a look on the source!

Tags: coding, free software, github, gpl, gwt, java, jee, open source, study, webdeveloper

Yeah! It’s time for another great JUG meeting. I’ll have to go quite far this time, as it’ll be in Poznań and that’s about 7h by train from Cracow… but at the very moment I saw who was going to be there, that is: Geertjan Wielenga (whose blog I’ve been reading for a long long time and also Romuen Strobl’s pal from the Netbeans team) and Tony Epple, I just knew I can’t miss such a 2-day crash course about NetBeans Platform. I’m mostly interested in EE stuff and didn’t really look all so much into SE apps (just the few while I was very fresh to Java) and this’ll be a great opportunity to see the NBP in action and explained by the pr0s!

It would seem that I’m not the only person who’s excited about this JUG Meeting as during only one day, already 42 out of 45 possible attendands got registered! I already got my Hotel booked and tommorow I’ll buy the train tickets. Oh, and one more great thing  this trip. My girlfriend will some with me so after I code some stuff we’ll check out Poznań – some people told ma that it’s a really nice city. :-)

More information can be found here: (in polish) http://www.jug.poznan.pl/2010/01/bezplatne-szkolenie-netbeans-platform/ or here: http://www.jug.poznan.pl/materialy-ze-spotkan/netbeans-platform-training-2010/ (in english)

—EDIT—

Sadly I wasn’t able to go to this meeting since there were no free places left for students from outside Poznan. I guess thats understandable since they are Poznań JUG, so they want to teach Poznań students more than Cracows students ;-) As sad as that has been for me, something even better came out of it! What? Well, just wait a month or two and I’ll let you know JavaGeeks!

Tags: coding, ide, java, JUG, meeting, netbeans, trip

Some may think that today is only special because of Christmas, for most people that’s right I guess. But 25.12.2009 is even more special to me this time as today is the 1024th day I’ve been together with my girlfriend – now that’s a fun “coincidence‘ (if you believe in such things ;-)

Merry X-Mas and a happy new Year(); //to you all :-)

Tags: fun

…is exactly what I’m currently trying to do. Thus, I’m out of Mediaframe, and got involved in a fascinating and very cool project. Under the lead of Dr Marek Długosz me and 2 of my friends will be tackling the topic of “MySQL Data Storage Engine Comprehension – with focus on Automatics use cases”. It’s really interesting since MySQL is so popular, yet very little people know about the dozens of 3rd party storage engines – some of them are really interesting, just to name a few:

• TokuDB http://tokutek.com/
• InfiniDB http://www.infinidb.org
• percona http://www.percona.com/docs/wiki/Percona-XtraDB:start
• MariaDB http://askmonty.org/wiki/index.php/Maria (Maria, PBXT, FederatedX)
• IBMDB2I http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/se-db2.html
• …ane some more…?
  

A simple comprehension will be the first thing we’ll do for this project… Later on we’ll do some simulated “real life” tests using JMeter. It’s possible that we’ll write some app based on this database later on – but that’s somehow far off at the moment. That said, I’m really happy to be involved in an interesting and open (it’s all open source & free software after all) topic.

Tomorrow I’m going to the university to setup our very own (awesome ;-)) HP ProLiant DL380 server. It has 6 hard drives, thus it should be very interesting to run HEAVY database LOAD tests – can’t wait. We’ll install CentOS 5.4 and think about it’s future then…

Tags: agh, centos, coding, database, gnu, integra, java, linux, open source, study

As any JEE interested developer I’ve heard lots of praise aimed at JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA. And then it became open source… Of course I tried it out right away and was shocked how brilliant it was. Some days ago version 9.0 was introduced – still with both an open source and an normal proprietary license. I really love how they offer their IDE for free to open source developers – they’d get the “full” version, whereas anyone can download a little slimmed down version: the “Community Edition”.

Some days ago while surfing their website I noticed that there is an “Classroom License”, that allows any student of an University to use IntelliJ’s full version – but only for the purpose of learning etc, no commercial stuff of course.

After some mailing here and there… Mgr. Szymon Bobek helped me out and got the license for us :-) Now I’m both really proud and happy to know that any student at AGH University of Science and Technology can use IDEA (if they want to), and that I was the little “spark” that started out this chain reaction that ended up being a small yet very pleasing “firework”… :-)

Well then…
Off to my exams and Java coding!

Tags: agh, coding, fun, ide, intellij

This time I’ll post some actual code. A client wanted me to write an “image slider”. You’ve probably seen lot’s of them online – and a whole lot of them is in flash – why? There is no need to involve flash in such a trivial task, and jQuery is more than up to the job :-) I used jQuery with the wslide plugin, it’s simple and quite neat. But it does not slide on it’s own. But thanks to it’s simplicity I was able add the functionality I needed in just a few lines of clean code. I used the timer plugin to “click” on the slider at some interval and voila – the birth of an automatic jquery image slider. Anyways, here’s thecode:

Tags: coding, free, guide, javascript, jquery, open source, web, web dev, webdeveloper, webmaster

Yup, following my recent trend to spend all the money from birthdays and other occasions where I get my hands on some cash on books/meetings/training, for Christmas I ordered two great (and more or less up to date (it’s about 2.5 and not 1.x as the books that I already have)) books about Java.

SCJP Sun Certified Programmer for Java 6 Exam 310-065 a so called must have when preparing for the SCJP Exam, which I’ll be taking in 2010 I hope.

And Spring Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (Books for Professionals by Professionals) which  should give me a decent boost when starting out with Spring development – as that’s exactly what I’m right now begining to do.

When I get and read them I’ll share my thoughts on how good (or not) they are… :-)

Tags: books, coding, java, review, scjp, spring

Today another Java User Group Meeting (more info) was held… This time at my university (AGH – University of Science and Technology). :-)

I wasn’t there from the beginning as I had some work to do, but I managed to get there after the “pizza-pause” and listen to:

• Miroslav Kopecky, talking about Matlab in Java (in English).

It was quite interesting to see how MatLab can be used in Java apps to make complex calculations really simple (well… let matlab do the for you basically). I like the idea of exporting plots from matlab directly to JavaScript, thus allowing nice WebApps with heavy math behind them (stock analysis etc.). That said, matlab is closed source as you propably know, and this makes it kinda sucky to develop J2SE apps based on it, as the enduser has to buy matlab anyways to use you program. A solution mentioned is getting 1 matlab license, put it on a server ane make your aplication a webapp – I agree that this is propably the best solution to avoid this “license hell” but it’s sad that there is no other license for endusers of procucts that use matlab as their math engine… Next up was:

• Łukasz Czerpak with the topic: “Swingowa aplikacja rozproszona dystrybuowana poprzez Java Web Start” (technologie: EJB3/JPA, Java Web Start, OpenEJB+Tomcat+Hibernate, Swing Application Framework). (whoa, that’s long)

He talked about his real live experience with an (banking) app that they “ported” to WebStart using GlassFish and then Tomcat+OpenEJB. A nice fact that I learned from this presentation was about how easy glassfish is. …and slow and big… JARs that a user needs to download from JavaWebStart are about 41MB, that’s a lot – since the app talked about was like 300KB. Tomcat on the otherhand is both quicker and smaller – there’s a little more to configure though – but I guess thats a small price to pay. Sadly he didn’t have time to say anything about Griffon which I’m a little interested in lately. It was quite interesting though… :-)

All in all, I liked it and will attend the next meeting in January – hope to be there from the start and not only halfway through as today. ;-)

PS: There was a sad ending for this day for me though. As I really didn’t want to miss even more of this meeting, and so I parked my car where it’s not allowed in order to save some time. When I came back to my car after the meeting my car’s wheel was “locked” (by the police) and got a ticket for wrong parking… So the free JavaCamp didn’t end up being so free for me… ;-)

Tags: agh, java, jee, JUG, spring, study, swing

A week ago a friend of mine told me about an interesting idea by FDM (Fabryka Dźwięku z Muz – pl. ‘Factory of Sounds from Muses’ (it’s kinda hard to translate)). FDM is a small music label, supporting new and fresh artists (indie, could be a good word here I guess). As such, it’s not at all “mainstream” (polish mainstream would be… stachursky 2009 or……. doda?), in other words “soulless”. But, mainstream sells well, and indie does not, and that’s nothing new, but for FDM it was a really painful experience, thus they started an action called “Muzyka bez Ceny” (pl. “Music without a price”).

Here’s how it works. The price of the CD is 0PLN. The shipping costs are 4PLN. They ship it by cheapest mail avaiable, that is around 2PLN, so basically do they earn just shabby 2PLN for one CD sold? Now that’s not working business model is it? The trick here is, that the customer pays 4 + X PLN, where X is an amount of money he thinks the CD is worth. I really LOVE the idea, and also the band New Century Classics which I found through FDM. So i bought their CD for about 20PLN (around 5$), as i thought the CD would be low value, maybe even home-burned… I got the CD yesterday and… I was shocked, It’s so well released that I can only compare it to Hotel by Moby or Minutes to Midnight by Linkin Park. It’s a neat stiff paper and stylish box. I would have never thought that a small indie company would release someones first album with this much style etc. (Photos attached below). Now i feel that i should have paid even more for this CD, the value is really there, as is the sound – it’s got soul and feeling.

All that said… FDM does not support Creative Commons etc, which is really sad, yet their move “pay as much as you want” is a great thing and really motivates to support bands. I really love the fact of getting a REAL CD and not only a download link when i PAY for something.

And now back to reality… I am aware that there are not a whole lot of people, who happily pay for stuff thay can get for free such as paying for stuff on Creative Commons or GPL. In this, I guess, I represent a minority that is really happy to pay bands such as Celestial Aeon Project, Steven Dunston or even the polish Accomplice Affair for their amazing (and free as in freedom) music. I’d be even more happy donating to them if there was a possibility to get their CDs, such as was the case with FDMs. That said, I will continue to suppoer Free/Libre Artists and hope more and more of them to understand that real fans, are willing to pay for content (and there are lot’s of case studies profing that!) , if only it makes sense.

Tags: drm, free, freedom, fun, music