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Wow, what a weekend.. it just kinda zoomed on by me and before i knew it, it was sunday night and i was dreading another week in these offices i’m at in Perth (last week, YAY!).

Saturday was a pretty nuts day, started the day by picking up Dad’s new PC from Steve @ HigherOrbit. Got him a nice new P4 3.0Ghz w/Em64T so he’s finally got a computer he (and i) can be proud of (previous box was a Celeron 366 🙁 ). Then i was supposed to spend saturday installing the rest of dad’s software.. but OH NO, my car’s battery decided to die.

Soo I had to track down the receipt with my mate who previously owned the car, then take the battery back to K-Mart, get a refund, goto auto shop, and buy a new battery. We did all of that, went to put that battery on and because my car now was custom battery terminals, they werent the same as what is usually on the 180sx, so back to the autoshop to swap it over we went. We got back home, started wiring up the battery and broke the ground cable.. so guess where we went? BACK TO THE AUTOSHOP! Finally got it all sorted, and it was 5pm!!

Then off to Southside to get the Drum N Bass thing going on.. Everything went real well here, nice turnout (around 30 ppl at max. time) and Uisce played a great set.

After Southside, headed into town to catch Teebee & Black Sun Empire and all i’m gonna say on this one is OHMYFUCKINGOD! excellent night, excellent tunes & Bad Robot must receieve a biggup again for the excellent stage presence and tune selection.

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So iiNet have once again had an iiBungle and some how managed to screw my dsl up. I’ve been getting Physical Line Errors since 6:30AM Wednesday (A day when telstra techs were doing work at my exchange) and now i must “wait patiently” while the problem is resolved by SOMEONE.

I’d like to take this moment to say a few things on ii, while being WA’s biggest ISP that doesn’t neccessarily make them the best. I signed up with ii just under a year ago because i’d been using them with Mum and Dad’s net account for many years with few problems that couldnt be easily resolved. However, since i got my own account i’ve had nothing but trouble.

Moving house resulted in a 3 week downtime of my DSL thanks to both Telstra & ii (ii were quicker, telstra piss-farted about). Now, after only having my net on for about 4 weeks at my new place, everythings gone to shambles. I only hope they can fix it soon so i can have my Internet back.

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I’ve been searching for days now for a decent icon set that covers everything i require (note: this isnt that much). I’ve checked out the open-office.org icon set, i’ve checked out the eclipse icon set, kde, gnome.. u name it i’ve checked it. Now im not seeing these icon sets dont cut it, because they do.. they’re quite good actually, but well.. I just cant bare to look at my application knowing it could look ten times better if only i could justify $150US to buy some of the awesome sets that are out there.

So anyway.. I think im going to attempt to make my own icons, i cant justify the $$$’s these people are asking for their icons, even if it is kind of a reasonable price, i just dont have that kind of money.

If anyone could point me in the direction of something i’ve missed in icon land it’d be appreciated. I’m deffinately feeling the sets from glyFX, a perth based company, but i dont wanna shell out for those packs.

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Came across something interesting today while setting look and feels in my Java Application in Windows.

Basically i was trying to set the JGoodies Look & Feels and noticed a few weird things happening. I have 2 JFrames in my application, one is the login screen, the other is the main app screen. After setting the look and feel correctly in the main class in my app, i then initialised the two JFrames and setDefaultLookAndFeelDecorated(true); Then upon launching the look and feel decorated the 2nd window (app), but not the first (main), so i switched the code around and initialised the main app frame first and the login second.. and now it was decorating the login screen but not the main app.

This is actually the first time i’ve seen this happen before, but it’s kind of also the first time I’ve played with another look and feel that’s not native to the computer the app is running on. Anyway, this little problem was resolved by performing a setDefaultLookAndFeelDecorated(true); on the JFrame class BEFORE intialising all my JFrames, now everything looks normal.

A bit of a weird one…

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Well it’s my birthday today, and the celebrations have already been. I have quite a sore head from the weekend, but it’s ok cos i’m slowly recovering.

Just gonna head out tonight with my parents for dinner and then come home and relax. Hopefully the weather will fine up, it’s been raining like all hell here this morning.

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You can webstart or download source.
Source requires JGoodies Forms.

Have changed some things again, and once again thanks to Romain for pointing me in the direction i needed to go.

The drawCurve function now works by using a general path to create the curve, rather than the way romain was previously using (basically..creating a cubic curve and then subtracting from the area created to get the bottom curve). What does this mean? it means i’ve turned the Rendering Hints back on to high quality, because the crappy 500mhz PII’s i’m targetting this small project for are finally able to handle it alot better.

This CurvesPanel is getting around 15% to 20% CPU Usage on my celeron 2Ghz.. most of the non-cheapass(read non-celeron) CPU’s seem to handle it quite well, starting around the same and dropping to 0%-5% pretty quickly (it did this on my P4 3.0E at home and the AMD Sempron 2400 at work) and on the 500Mhz PII’s here it’s pulling about 50% of the CPU.

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I moved house recently, and i’m finding it pretty boring. Whenever something in my computer breaks i goto google and theni remember, my dsl is being relocated *YAWN*. So anyway, while i wait for this to happen i’ve been playing lots of Empire Earth II because i can’t get online to play World of Warcraft.

Not too bad a game honestly, i’ve been spending about 3-4 hours a day playing it at least. My major problem is that it so far doesnt seem much different to the old Empire Earth. When will people stop bringing us just a rehash of their first game with bugger all changes as a sequel!?

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You can webstart or download source. (Updated Here)
Source requires JGoodies Forms.

I’ve been working for a few days on trying to get the CPU usage down on Romain Guy’s Follow The Curves Demo and i believe i’ve gotten it to a semi-acceptable level.

I’ve done this by implementing Dim’s gradient panel from the blogs comments, this buffers the rather complex gradient on the background, hence stopping it from redrawing every single time we paint he animation and it took quite a load off the CPU. Next i went about changing some of the rendering hints to some lower quality values and i honestly can’t see a differnece. I then started to do some minor code changes which envolved chagning all the floats to doubles (it seems to lightly increase performance) and also changing all divide by 2 references to right shift 1 and the multiply by 2 to left shift 1.

Now on starting it’s using about 46% of my work box’s CPU (Celeron 2ghz) and after running for about 5 seconds it hovers around the 8% / 13% mark and then after another 3 seconds it’s ranging from 0% / 3%. Quite significant improvements for a demo that was starting at bout 70% and hovering around 50% still after a long period of time.