Thursday, July 7, 2011

Keyboard music

Coding for long time can leave you stressed.

So why not heal yourself as you code with some soothing music? This program plays random notes when you type a key. The idea is to create soothing music for coders or anyone who spends time typing in front of pc(instead of the boring keyboard noise).

Guitar and piano notes are included in the bundle, but user can add their own notes as mentioned in steps to run(wiki link below).

Also planning to include auto suggest with it sometime (so you dont have to type a long sentence or word again).

Its partly implemented, but disabled in code at the moment.

 

There is lot more work to be done, like better notes etc. (I am no music expert). The basic idea is built and can be improved easily.

If you wish to contribute for develoopment, please let me know. The project will always be open sourced.

 

For details please follow wiki notes here

The project is open sourced here

 

Disclaimer:1.  The code captures keystrokes provided by JNativeHook.jar and it should not be used for malicious intent. I will be in no way held responsible for any misuse.

               2. The code built so far is basic and not yet fully tested. There is a possibility of notes played loud,etc. Please beware of this.

 



Gods Debris By Scott Adams

For a change have been reading a novel called Gods Debris by Scott Adams(creator of Dilbert comics). 

It has no plot as such but an exchange of ideas/ a perspective about god/ belief system/universe/ etc. 

In short it expands your imagination .

Though some concepts are abstract and made up, I enjoyed Gods debris and have started with his next book The Religion war (futuristic novel about Christianity and Islam) .

 Update: read The religion war. Quite nice! I am a fan of Scott Adams (his blog)

Gods Debris ebook is free here

The Religion War ebook can be found here

 

 



Friday, July 1, 2011

When Windows+Eclipse+Firefox slow down

All big garbage collected programs have a problem on MS Windows where, if you iconify them, the OS drastically reduces the working set size, making its VM pages available to other processes. When you restore the program, then the first time it tries to do a garbage collect (which could be several times a second) it can suffer a long pause while it brings in almost its entire virtual memory footprint in order to chase references. I've seen it take as long as 200 seconds to do this, during which time the program is unusable.

Workaround : use windows key + D or show desktop buttton instead of minimize.
More details

For eclipse performance imporvement, update shortcut as below:
"C:\Program Files\eclipse\eclipse.exe" -vm c:\j2sdk1.4.2\jre\bin\javaw.exe -vmargs -Xms64m -Xmx384m -XX:CompileThreshold=5 -XX:+UseParallelGC
The flags are discussed on the following website: http://www.burnthacker.com/archives/000049.html.