tkh’s blog

Internet connection

I’ve been having intermittent Internet connection problem since last Thursday. At first I thought it was a temporary one, but I still have the problem. So I called the tech support. The tech support guy did a routine diagnostic procedure, and told me that my modem is bad and scheduled a technician visit on Saturday. Since I’ve been renting a cable modem from Comcast, finally the cost for renting a modem will pay off. Sometimes my modem works, but sometimes I have to use a dial-up connection with my very old Sportstar 33.6kbps modem to get to the Internet. It’s so slow, but at least I can read email and see some websites. It’s so inconvenient to not have a broadband connection.

X.org in debian sid

Finally X.org packages have been uploaded to sid. I tried to upgrade them with aptitude, but I couldn’t resolve all the dependency issues. So I manually upgraded with apt-get. I had to keep libmesa-glu, xbase-clients, and xutils from upgrading because many necessary packages would otherwise be removed. Except for that, the upgrade was easy since I already had xorg.conf. There is still no package for the compositing mangaer (xcompmgr), but that’s OK because it’s too unstable when you run OpenGL apps.

New Sound Card

I received my new sound card Audigy 2 ZS today. I needed a new sound card because the microphone input of my old Ensoniq Audio PCI (es1370) has been broken. The only thing I specifically has chosen this card is that it’s the only model using the Emu10k based chip. The biggest advantage of this chip is that it has the hardware mixer, enabling the playback of multiple audio sequences. Under Linux, this means that /dev/dsp (or whatever pcm playback devices for ALSA) is not locked at all. After installing Audigy, I played a couple of mp3 files for testing. The sound is much crispier, and the resolution is much better. I’m very happy with Audigy2 and it’s definitely worth spending money.

BTW, for windows users, the main advantage to having this card is its EAX 4.0 HD support for 7.1 channel 3D audio with hardware acceleration, but it’s not supported under Linux. So who cares.

JOGL

Asked by my advisor, I ported a set of OpenGL programs written in C to Java using JOGL. JOGL is a successor to GL4Java and developed by Sun, so it would be the standard API for OpenGL Java binding.

It had taken some time until I figured certain rules for using JOGL. First, I can call OpenGL functions only within the GLEventListener methods. The other thing that was not clear is the use of directly allocated ByteBuffer objects to pass arrays to OpenGL functions. Except for these, I had no problem writing Java code. The programs run mostly fine, except for the noticeable delay in frame updates during GC. These delays are acceptable since the programs are just examples.

The last time I wrote a fair amount of code in Java was back in 2000 using JDK 1.2, so I noticed many features has been added since then. I have been an advocate of anti-Java in favor of C++, but I think now I can count Java on the list of languages for writing graphics applications.