Category: Random observations

I’m about to leave for Caloundra. Have to pick Nigel up from work on the way. Today I attended a brainstorming session at DSTC where we talked about what we’ve been doing and what we’re going to do. Mildly interesting. It looks like we might have the basis for a new research group.

When I got home I fiddled around with my query matching test MIDlet. I now have it running on the emulator for my Siemens M55. That emulator runs on my brother’s PC, and for some reason it is a *lot* slower than the emulators I have running under the J2ME Wireless Toolkit on my Linux machine. As far as I can tell, the emulator does not emulate the actual performance of the phone. Therefore my app should be running much faster than it is. Anyway, at least it’s all working now!

Well I finally got my expression evaluator thingy running under the KVM. The class preverifier on my system kept segfaulting, so I asked my friend Doug Simon what to do. He sent me another version of the preverifier and everything is working sweetly. In standard Java, verification is done at runtime by the VM. But because of resource constraints on small devices, verification is done offline prior to execution time. The preverifier sticks some extra info into a classfile which the KVM uses to do a simplified verification. The extra info that is inserted into the class by the preverifier is transparent to ordinary VMs. So thanks Doug!

I’ve finished coding the expression matcher. It’s working nicely under J2SE. But when I try to run it in the KVM (the VM for J2ME) I keep getting verification errors. A java/lang/VerifyError is thrown if there is some kind of internal inconsistency in the byte codes or if there is a security problem. I’ve recompiled everything a number of times, making sure to compile to release 1.1 of the VM and specifying -bootclasspath so that J2ME versions of the standard Java classes used. But I still can’t get the thing to work. The VerifyError only seems to happen for largish classes. I can write a simple “Hello, world” application for the KVM and it will run without complaining. I’m sure a solution will present itself shortly.

It seems RA has way too much time on his hands, because he’s gone and RSSified my blog on his own. For those readers interested in an RSS version of this blog, you can access it here. I still plan to update my blog in the near future, and part of that update will include an RSS feed. In the meantime, please use the feed Rhys has kindly provided.

I’m just back from my Spanish exam. I scored 100% on the oral exam, and hopefully I went OK on the written part. Not bad considering I managed a grand total of 30 minutes study during the last two weeks.

My computer is currently lying on its side with its cover off, and it has been like this for the last week. During that time it hasn’t been making weird vibrating noises at all… until just now. I think it might have something to do with the ambient temperature and perhaps even more to do with the humidity level. The air feels quite sticky at the moment. It’s been raining on and off all day, and there is a bit of cloud cover. I should probably just get off my butt and buy another fan for the VIA chip.

I scream for ice-cream, with some tasty Cadbury chocolate topping and chopped nuts. A cuppa would do nicely too.

It’s late, I know. I stayed up watching Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and then the documentary that followed it about the making of the Indiana Jones series. Then I decided to finish off the expression scanner for Superstring. I’ve tested it, and it seems to be working well. Now I need to code a parser for the expression language. Ideally all this should be small enough to fit on a mobile phone or some other equally resource poor device. It’ll be cool once I’ve got a prototype of my protocol running on my phone! I’ve bought a data cable that connects my new mobile phone to the computer so that I can copy files to and from the phone. There are some example Java applications that come with the Siemens Mobility Toolkit and M55 emulator. I can take a look at those for examples on how to turn an application into a Midlet (a Midlet is like an applet except for mobile devices). If I get sick of playing Wappo and Extreme Games (they are the games that are preinstalled on the M55) I can copy over some of the example software that came with the M55 emulator. I’ve already copied over some midi files to use as ring tones. :) Speaking of ring tones, I think a neat demo of Superstring will be to advertise ring tones and Java games, and to let users send queries from their phones to locate these resources from other users. It’d be better if my phone was equipped with something other than GPRS, because then I could demo the ants based protocol as it was truly intended: queries to other devices in close proximity. With GPRS I can demo the phone as a client in a much wider-area network. But as I mentioned in an earlier post, the clients and services utilise the same protocol regardless of the kind of network they’re in. So in fact, the demo will be just as useful over GRPS as over Bluetooth or IrDA. Excellent (said in an evil Mr Burns kind of way).

I just saw The Matrix Revolutions. I have no idea what happened in that movie. Maybe I just wasn’t switched on, but there are so many things I didn’t understand it would be impossible to list them all here. Seeing as though the movie was only just released, I won’t give away too much. Basically I was hoping that some of the questions that were asked in The Matrix Reloaded would be answered in this movie. They weren’t. I’m not even going to write any more right now. The first Matrix film was magic. The next two had a lot to live up to, and in my opinion failed to bring anything new to the table, save perhaps for some stunning CG. Definitely go see it, but only if you’ve seen the previous two. If you haven’t it will make no sense whatsoever, not that it makes much sense at all.

Damn! I should have gotten this phone instead of my M55. I bet it doesn’t do GPRS and run Java though. :)

I had a long and tiring day today. In the study session at Ipswich today we went through last year’s exam. I stood in front of the whiteboard for four hours straight. My head hurts.

Makybe Diva gets up to win the Melbourne Cup. Zagalia finished fifth after leading into the straight. Not a bad effort from barrier 24!