Sunday, July 26, 2009

OpenJDK's Swing, Sun JVM, Extreme Open Source

Just a while ago, I tried to use the apt-get to install Maven2 into my LinuxMint 6 machine to try out the hype with Java devs on Maven and I was given a surprise when it installed OpenJDK 6 too. I found out about the installed OpenJDK 6 when I tried to launch my Makagiga app and the Swing looks.... ok.... honestly... it's badly rendered !!!

So now what I am saying is that Swing in OpenJDK sucks ! It's not up to scratch... it's not even good at all. I would prefer Sun Java JVM since it's free too but those who are extremist in the Open Source thing... (I am a supporter of open source too but not to the extremes of conducting strikes and stuff....) and I would suggest Sun to just give up on trying to make it's JVM a secret but to open up the entire Sun JVM. What good or profit would Sun get from keeping it's JVM codes a secret ?

To dispose other rivals trying to make better VMs ? Look at Ruby ! There are many Ruby VMs and the competitions are very productive and healthy and look at Sun ... refusing Apache Harmony some test kit for it's VMs or give a lousy or bad kit ? Who knows... But up till now, Sun have always ill treated Apache Harmony and ironically Sun supposedly is a contributor in Apache projects !!!

Hey Sun, time for a wake up call ... Don't think you are high and almighty like Microsoft because you made and own most of Java's share. It's time you stop following Microsoft, completely provide proper and unbias test kits for free and ease of availability and downloads, completely open up without delay the codes to the Sun JVM (anyway you are into open source OpenJDK so what's wrong with just completely opening your official VM ?).

I really hope there's an international enforcement on Open Source where all codes created are open source in nature and there isn't propriotery codes anymore. This such law if exist would force all developers to open up their codes and share it.

I know FOSS would love this international law to force all codes to be open source, but there are powers behind the scene manipulating governments like puppets to ensure that such law would never be voted for as an international or local law.

For now, just open source the stupid Sun JVM. Why make an open source JVM when you could just open up your Sun JVM and change it's license to GNU GPL ? It would save the need for some weird badly made OpenJDK !

Saturday, July 18, 2009

Getting Things Gnome !

I just stumbled upon this software for the Gnome Desktop called Getting Things Gnome !. It's a task organizer. I installed it on my Linux Mint 6 Universal.

You can get it at: http://gtg.fritalk.com/

I used this initially just a while ago and this stuff is good. I got my Linux mintMenu to start up this baby when I login so I can look through my task/to do list. This baby organizes things well too and you can add sub task here and there and it allows you some choices how you dispay the tasks and sub-tasks.

I would be testing and using this and see how it works.

That's all for now.

Convert MKV to iPod MP4

Recently, I decided to use my backup Win Vista Home Basic's iTunes to load anime I have into my iPod. Most anime are served out in MKV H264 format and I used KigoConverter to convert MKV to Custom MP4 (iPod uses this). What I noticed is that by doing so, the scipts containing the english translations are omitted and I am left to listen and watch the animes on my iPod without any translations and this can be hard on those who have no idea about Japanese language.

I noticed that AVI videos when converted to MP4 have their translations retained and you can watch them properly.... hmmm... I am wondering why did the translations scripts not be added to the custom MP4. Does anyone have any answers ?

Thursday, July 9, 2009

How to sell your stuff well and be famous

I was reading a blog by Bruce Schneier on some Homomorphic Encryption breakthrough that IBM claimed. Read: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/homomorphic_enc.html .

As it is, all you need to do to fool the general public is to present some 'geeky' stuff with terms, create some weird ,unproven or statistics that would not occur in one's lifetime and a very good PR machine and you can fool the general public. Most people don't care about the tech details and when they hear the hype about some new bogus security, they literally buy into it. When more than enough people have bought into the illusion, even the efforts of experts trying to caution people would fall on deaf ears and the public would generally love to label and denounce these experts.

This is how you can use the blinded public and make them believe you. The only time these bogus stuff really fall apart is when it takes such a big hit that some important stuff falls apart, this is when the blinded public would awake to the reality of their 'dream'.

So, you can fool the public but you cannot fool them forever until something drastic takes place.

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

HTML 5 VIdeo

Since no one could agree on what video format should HTML 5's video tag support, why not allow it to support all the common ones like (mp4,avi,ogg...) and then to specify the type it is using like ? Or maybe why not force all html5 compliant browsers to support all the common video format using the ffmpeg codec libraries...etc.

This question about supporting video format is all about politics and saving one's own skin and making money rather than about the users. If you can put your own video format to be supported, you would be the standard and everyone follows you. Patent rules , copyrights ...etc... all the ugly side of human selfish nature emerges so seamlessly that it makes anyone feel revolting.

Or maybe why not just drop the support for html 5's video tag forever because there would always be disagreement for these stuff.

What I recommend to support is just to totally drop the idea of a video tag and wait until everyone can agree on or some open source patent and royalty free and good quality video format can be created...then can we think about adding the video tag.

On a second thought, why don't W3C or some ISO choose a standard video format or even create one if there isn't and create video converters ? This is a long way around a problem but nevertheless , it would allow the html 5's video tag to be used and the converters allow users to convert this 'new' video format to any other video format they like?

Saturday, July 4, 2009

Fundamentals of Computing: Insecure

I was contemplating on the futile efforts of DRMs and encoding to try to hide secrets. I would consider these technologies rather a failure in terms of security. You try to protect music or video using DRMs and not far in future, a hacker or a community of hackers or some companies create ways to circumvent or even 'destroy' your techniques. Same for encoding, you just try to replace words with weird characters. The real good deal is not encoding to hide secrets but to use solid proven encryption to really secure secrets.

The insecurity of DRMs are that data can be manipulated or should I say, insecurity in everything because you can manipulate all data as computers aren't really built for secure computing which if that happened, alot of apps cannot work. Since you can manipulate any data via programming ...etc... you could simply manipulate DRM data and encoding data too. The computing powers for a mere laptop these days are at least a Core 2 Duo so the computing powers these days are really powerful and you can do lots of stuff.

I think it's useless to encode stuff or use DRMs. If you want to really protect stuff, use solid encryption technology on a secure chipset or hardware. This is the best you could do.

Human corruption

I got this feed from Ars technica while reading using my Google reader...

Are "deleted" photos really gone from Facebook? Not always

companion photo for Are "deleted" photos really gone from Facebook? Not always

In an age where your boss, coworkers, parents, and even (*gasp*) grandparents are finally joining social networks, we are all more aware than ever that we had better keep things relatively clean. And if you were someone who joined MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, or a number of other sites years ago, you may have more cleaning up to do than usual—after all, back then, you were probably young(er) and dumb(er), posting silly pics of your drunken escapades or questionable updates regarding your unusual interest in English cucumbers.

If you delete questionable images of yourself, you may be in the clear—or you may not, depending on the social network. As it turns out, some social networks delete your images right away while others hold onto them even after claiming they've been deleted. This was the discovery made by researchers at Cambridge University last month when they found that images deleted from social media sites are often left on the server, ripe for anyone to embed elsewhere or link up.

We put this finding to the test and found that some of the most popular sites on the Internet do, in fact, keep images on their servers after you delete them. On May 21, 2009, we deleted photos from four of the networks most used by the Ars staff and readership and monitored them for six weeks. The four networks we checked were Flickr, Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook.

Click here to read the rest of this article
Wow... Facebook , MySpace ....etc... are such 'dishonest' sites. Imagine you posted some ahem... pictures and you regretted it and want to delete it, the pictures aren't deleted from the hosting servers but just marked as 'not there' or something similar... it would be easy to look through their server caches or whatever ways available and still find the pictures. These social sites are simply a breach in security because they don't follow by the rules of human morality but by the rules of making money , getting more people to join them ....etc.

And there I thought I have had enough of reading news where companies play dirty...here's another feed from Slashdot this time...

Microsoft Changing Users' Default Search Engine

BabyDuckHat writes "Cnet's Dennis O'Reilly caught 'Windows Search Helper' trying to change his default Firefox search from Google to Bing. This isn't the first time the software company has been caught quietly changing user's preferences to benefit its own products."

I hope human society would not just improve technologically but also improve morally and spiritually thus striking a balance and evolving further. if you noticed, the more technologically advance, the more morally corrupted (in many cases). Let's hope it isn't true though.