oreillynet

The O'Reilly network is pretty useful for any developer. Today, two articles of interest address understanding the user and developing an image annotation tool in java.

- posted by David @ 10:16 AM

Javadoc Documentation

I have put up some javadoc for viper on the web site. It is generated with an ant script, but I still have to publish it by hand. Hopefully it, along with a steadily improving spec, will help Charles and I fix the remaining bugs blocking 4.0's release. I've also gone through the bug list at sourceforge and relabeled a few bugs and RFEs as post-4.0 that were previously marked as 4.0 blockers.

I'll be presenting a ViPER-GT demo with Charles at the next Monday morning meeting. Hopefully, everything will be working smoothly before then. There remain many features that I wish to add. Hopefully, the semi-open development and improved design and implementation notes will help other developers add their missing pieces to the system. I'm already working on an example plug-in, for doing quick mark up of documents for logo detection. As of now, I'm adding that to the Scripting ViPER document, but it should probably be in its own place.

- posted by David @ 10:56 AM

ImageMagick Resizing

I find ImageMagick much easier to use than most graphical batch image processing utilities. I suppose it is just the programmer in me. It is a strong argument for learning shell scripting. For example, to resize an image to have a width of 50 pixels, you say convert -geometry x50 x.ppm x.jpg. To convert a whole directory, you'd have to use some basic shell scripting commands, for and basename:

#!/bin/sh
for imname in *.ppm
do
   convert -geometry x50 ${imname} `basename ${imname} .ppm`.jpg
done

- posted by David @ 12:35 PM

Alpha 6

I've since found a few annoyances in Alpha 6, so it was probably a good idea to call it a6 and not b1. In addition, I have started going through and rewriting my event fire loops. If any users out there notice any regressions, bug me about it, as I don't know of any. Perhaps it is time to start looking for only the heinous.

- posted by David @ 12:13 PM

Writing fireEventXXX Methods

I've been doing it wrong. The appropriate way to manage a list of listeners is to use something like EventListenerList, although it seems that an AWTEventMulticaster is more appropriate in some situations. Finally, when events are fired, it is often good to have some sort of locking mechanism, as in AbstractDocument's writeLock method.

- posted by David @ 2:58 PM